Output details

Irish Lights film

Irish Lights (2009) is a16mm film digitally transferred, with stereo soundtrack, voice-over, specially commissioned musical score, and location sound. It was written, directed, filmed and edited by Daniel Jewesbury. It is an experimental exploration of ideas of sameness and difference, self and other; it is also an attempt to think these concepts differently through film, and to think film differently, to find a mode of filmmaking through which to undertake rigorous philosophical enquiry. It continues earlier experiments into filmic narrative and film form, to arrive at new ways of considering nationality and community in the context of the European project.

The film explores certain questions within philosophy (concerning thinking for, and of, the ‘other’ as raised in works by Levinas, Ricoeur, Derrida and Rancière). Rather than merely restating or illustrating these concepts, it attempts to define a position of its own regarding knowability and otherness. It employs an idea of total form (partly derived from ideas in Lukács’ 'Ästhetik' [1963] and Jameson’s 'Marxism and Form' [1972]) in which the grammar of film (narrative, space and time) and its mechanics and technics (scriptwriting, shot planning, direction, editing and sound design) are considered in the round. Each stage or process becomes a further opportunity for reflexivity, a means by which to interrogate prior theses and demonstrate an expanded ‘mode of understanding’. The very particular combination of spoken word, visual-image-in-time and musical soundtrack aims to create a whole in which each of these elements becomes transformed by each other. Thus the film adopts a ‘twin track’, seeking to innovate the form through which its findings can be discerned and elaborated.

This film, commissioned by Project Arts Centre, Dublin, and shown at Belfast Exposed Gallery and in the Gothenburg Film Festival, is now in the Collection of the Arts Council of Northern Ireland.