WE DON'T EVEN HAVE ANY METTEURS-EN-SCENE!

The main criticism of Irish cinema on this blog is there are almost no directors here with their own style or voice. Lenny Abrahamson, Ivan Kavanagh, Neil Jordan and er that's it! Even worse is the absence of the metteurs-en-scene. What's that? Well back in the 1950s the French critics ignored most French cinema. About 90% of it was not considered good enough for their attention. Some of the other 10% got made by auteurs like Bresson and Becker. The rest of the 10% were from forgotten directors like Delannoy and Autant-Lara. These were the metteur-en-scene guys. Script-based, technical, award-winning, prestige, respectable, studio-made, well-reviewed, popular, and technicallly impressive. Usually in the heritage or mystery genres. This is the kind of cinema the Irish Film Board set out to make back in the 1990s. But it's now mostly gone. Our directors aren't even good enough to be considered a metteur-en-scene! A collapse in budgets, directors now writing their own scripts, smaller crews, failure in the commerical market, and too many bleedin' horror films! Something went wrong a decade back in Irish cinema. Most of our stuff is getting made by directors with no voice or even worse - with no tradition of quality. Stuff done on the cheap that tries to be impressive but looks sh-t!