If you didn’t laugh in Belfast in the 1970s, you’d cry. Gates around the city centre clanged shut every night. Tourists feared to tread. It was rubbish, but it was ours.
We didn’t only live there; we also saw it on TV and in movies. Film-makers were fascinated by us, by our intractable little war, our film-noir city. Just as you thought of yourself as a normal teenager, buying records and saving for a new jacket, you’d see a news programme with bodies of Belfast people in open coffins, and blackness would descend. You’d hear stories of the Shankill Butchers who, a few streets away, killed 23 people with Old Testament ire, and your city felt like The Exorcist.
We were fascinated to see how Hollywood showed our home patch, just as Iranians, more recently, were keen to see Argo. A Prayer for the Dying exploited our war for its thriller ends so much that its star, Mickey Rourke, who plays an IRA man, distanced himself from it. In The Devil’s Own, Brad Pitt is the IRA man. Again, Northern Ireland dutifully provides backdrop and cinematic jeopardy. Again, the stars criticised the result. And, worst of all, the voyeuristic and obscene Resurrection Man slobbered all over the Shankill Butchers atrocities.
In such films, our city had gone widescreen, and turned into a thriller in which everything is fast-cut and against the clock. Maybe we got a kick from watching this stuff, in part because it was so tin-eared. It didn’t know how absurd it was. Yes we were scared in Belfast in the 70s – half the women I knew were on Valium – but we weren’t Hollywood-scared, or cathartic-scared. We were just scared scared.
Unlike other working-class cities, at least we were getting a bit of attention. We were bigger than life on the movie screen but, if truth be told, Hollywood’s thrillers and love-across-the-barricades movies hurt. Sometimes well intentioned, they were like being bullied at school: you were the centre of attention, but in a bad way.
Luckily, there were good films, too, and if you were a movie buff you clocked them even more. Like a riposte to Hollywood’s spineless separation between war backdrop and movie-star foreground, Cal wove together history and people. John Lynch and Helen Mirren were in love, but also in war and in doubt. Belfast-born film-maker Terry George cast Helen Mirren in Some Mother’s Son, which dug deep into the hunger strikes. Some felt it pulled its punches, but many of us wept. Mirren’s character’s dilemma was on the scale of Antigone’s. In films like it, and Pat Murphy and John Davis’s Maeve, a bracing and brainy piece about a young woman returning home to Belfast, women were the way into the story.
Teenagers gave energy and black humour to the TV movie You, Me and Marley, written by Graham Reid. They hung around our streets and stole cars. They were Catholics, but whatever principles the IRA claimed to have passed them by. They had no ideals, these rebels without a cause, but knew how to talk and laugh. You, Me and Marley was a story not from the headlines, but below them, and far better for it.
We started to realise that the hard man wasn’t the only lens through which to look at Belfast. Maybe he was the worst lens? Certainly, when Neil Jordan’s Angel came along, Stephen Rea’s saxophonist Danny was a revelation. He sees his fellow band members, and a mute girl, gunned down by racketeers. Rejecting fast edits and thumping sound, Jordan created a hazy world of neon pink, woozy and muffled, as if seen through the eyes of the murdered girl. For me, as a teenage movie lover, it was transformative. It captured the sensory feel of Northern Ireland in the 1980s – languorous, then panicked. Hollywood thrillers don’t do torpid. In Angel, our world wasn’t only a problem, it was a place. It wasn’t only using Northern Ireland for generic ends; it was making art out of it. Often great art is made out of anger, but once adrenaline was removed from the portrayals of Belfast on screen, a world opened up.
What were the films in that world? Flash back to 1947 and James Mason in Odd Man Out. His character is, like so many that would come after him, a fighter for nationalism, but the mood is that of Angel. We’re not in the thick of war, but its fog. Mason is wounded and limping, which slows the film. It snows, which hushes the film. Mason’s in hiding and often alone, which makes Carol Reed’s movie inward, a Via Dolorosa. Part of it was set in the Crown Bar, where my dad often drank, so when I saw it as a teenager I was there, on screen, in a dejected dream Belfast.
I saw it on TV, because there were few cinemas in those days, which is where we also saw Alan Clarke’s Elephant. It was such a modernist shock that we didn’t know how to deal with it. A series of Steadicam shots following killers, it seemed like a compilation of scenes from other movies, stripped of their sound, story and cheap attempts at suspense. Instead we saw the numbness of the walking shooter. We hated that it didn’t try to capture our humanity or humour, or show that there was blood on the state’s hands too. Our war was now a void. Our emptiness was in Elephant. Though it was about hard men, Elephant didn’t fall into moral lock-step with them by attempting to excite. It was a filmic detox.
When conflicts end, the spring that has long been compressed jumps upwards. Films about us and our recent war have continued to be made. Some are a blow upon a bruise. Others coax us backwards to see what, at the time, we were too compressed to see. Good Vibrations, set in the famous Belfast record shop that remained open throughout the Troubles, took us back to being teenagers, buying music, wanting to be cool by getting into Joy Division and Echo and the Bunnymen. It showed the bits of our imaginations that refused to be colonised.
When we heard that ’71 was about a British soldier trying to survive in Catholic Belfast during the fighting, we rolled our eyes. The story sounded so naive. Yes, he was in personal jeopardy, but he was a fighter for the state that had intervened asymmetrically. But the film avoided the pothole. Its night-time atmosphere and scenes of childhood even had touches, for the movie fans, of Charles Laughton’s Night of the Hunter. We were in Angel-land again.
And Hunger? What to say about Steve McQueen, Enda Walsh and Michael Fassbender’s Hunger, yet another film about the hunger strikes? Had it a few political false notes? Some thought so. After seeing it, Hollywood’s hard-men films seemed weaker still. They had neither looked, nor listened, nor thought. If some of the best films about Belfast and Northern Ireland understood our numbness and solitude, that we were visible in the wrong way, that imagery can make a trauma recur and loop, Hunger did something else. It looked and listened. It showed us bleeding knuckles with snow falling, bodies as battered as those in Dutch pietà paintings. It had no words for ages, and then a torrent, as if they had been corralled.
You could say that Hunger, Angel, You, Me and Marley, Maeve, Odd Man Out and Elephant were art, “only” art. But they saw us as bodies, walkers, musicians, women, teenagers, lookers and laughers. They applied no old template. “We do not tell stories for revenge,” wrote the great Senegalese film-maker and author Ousmane Sembène, “but to find our place in the world”. The best movies and TV about Belfast did that for us.
• I Am Belfast is released in the UK on 8 April. Mark Cousins will take part in Q&As after selected screenings
