Abstract

This article maps Irish cinema through Fernando Solanas' grid of 'first', 'second' and 'third' cinemas. In this way, it can be argued that Irish cinema is an 'arriere-garde' cinema that inhabits a contradictory space between the local and the global. Thus indigenous cinema seeking to address contemporary Ireland coexists with a 'first' cinema that continues to reinscribe the myth of romantic rural Ireland, also sold as commodity kitsch.