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One man’s fight to preserve Ireland’s history
By Martin Doyle
 John
Boorman described filmmaking as “the process of turning money into
light and then back into money again”.
But no Irish filmmaker has shed more light for less money on Ireland’s
history than George Morrison.
Picture any iconic newsreel image of the Easter Rising or the War of Independence
and the likelihood is that it has survived only thanks to this one man’s
heroic historical salvage operation.
Morrison, a vibrant 85-year-old, recently released his latest documentary,
Dublin Day, a homage to Joyce’s Ulysses, but he is best-known for
two ground-breaking films which chronicled Ireland’s struggle for
independence, Mise Éire (1959) and Saoirse? (1961).
Fascinated by film from an early age, Morrison discovered there was a
wealth of early 20th century Irish newsreel footage in collections across
Europe but much of it was perishable and all was at risk of being discarded.
He catalogued the material before successfully lobbying the then Taoiseach
Éamon de Valera to fund the National Library to obtain copies of
it.
Conscious that the funding was inadequate to preserve all the endangered
material, Morrison says: “I was seized with the idea of selling
to Gael Linn the idea of making first of all 15-minute films.
“This I managed to escalate to a 30-minute film, then an hour, then
an hour-and-a-half.
“So successful was it that I had no difficulty persuading them to
do a sequel.”
Having traced 400,000ft of film in 28 collections across Europe, “a
literal reclaiming of Ireland’s history”, Morrison distilled
more than 70 hours of footage, painstakingly restored from the original
nitrate stock and created a narrative in a montage format influenced by
Eisenstein.
Thus was born Mise Éire, a pioneering work of Irish film, an anti-imperialist
polemic whose release in 1960 was a national event, its premiere attended
by many of the veterans who featured in the film.
Film historian Kevin Rockett described it as “in effect the official
history of the struggle for independence”.
In fact, the Department for External Affairs commissioned Morrison to
make another film based on Mise Éire to distribute overseas to
mark the 50th anniversary of the Easter Rising.
Mise Éire was the first feature-length Irish language film, the
first to stretch silent film footage, to slow it down to normal speed
and the first Irish film to be scored for a full orchestra, a remarkable
collaboration between Morrison and Seán Ó Riada.
“Sean was splendid,” says Morrison. “As soon as I heard
Hercules Dux Ferrariae I realised that of all the Irish composers Seán
Ó Riada was the man. I had to show him the films which I thought
of as most important musically — Miss Julie, Alf Sjöberg’s
film of Strindberg’s play which has marvellous music by Dag Wiren
— and Night Mail by John Grierson, with music by Benjamin Britten
and verse commentary by WH Auden.
“Seán Ó Riada was so bright that he instantly latched
on.”
While Mise Éire was a triumph, its narrative arc of rebellion,
retribution and ultimate promise of freedom providing an uplifting ending,
Saoirse? was less successful with the public, doubtless because it has
a tragic climax with the opening salvoes of the Civil War.
“Saoirse? ends up in civil war, the greatest possible social disaster,”
Morrison says.
“This is reflected in the music.
“A certain amount of lyricism I allowed for in the music of Mise
Éire but I asked Seán Ó Riada to write for me destructive,
disintegrative music for Saoirse? and he fulfilled this absolutely.
“The harpsichord particularly, which he played so well himself,
has got a splintering, disintegrative quality.”
Having spent a decade scouring Europe to source the rare and decaying
newsreel footage, it is not surprising that Morrison refused when his
producer asked him not to include footage of the shelling of the Four
Courts in Saoirse?
The use of British guns by Free State troops to dislodge Republicans holed-up
there is still emotive, not least because the resulting fire destroyed
much of the national archive.
Back in 1961, when Civil War wounds were much rawer, Morrison says he
was summoned by Donall Ó Móráin, Gael Linn chairman,
who sought to put pressure on him to omit this episode.
“You must remember that Ó Móráin’s family
background is a Free State one,” says Morrison. “My own family
on both sides was Republican.”
Of course, there are two sides to every story.
The destruction of archive can also be attributed to an anti-Treaty landmine
and Ó Móráin would later be sacked as head of the
RTÉ Authority for sanctioning an interview with IRA chief of staff
Sean MacStiofain, hardly the act of a censor.
But there is a striking parallel between Morrison’s determination
to record the destruction of the national archives and his determination
to preserve the film which recorded it.
The original film stock, of course, being made of nitrate, was itself
combustible.
In the end the shelling stayed in but Gael Linn pulled the plug on a planned
third film which would have covered from the Civil War up to 1940.
“Gael Linn took fright when they realised it would come up near
to the present day and they chickened out,” Morrison says.
Instead, he would address the Civil War in Rebellion in 1964 for Robert
Kee and in his documentary on de Valera, which he made in the 1960s but
was locked away in an RTÉ safe until de Valera died.
“Engraved on my heart,” the Irishman says, who had to keep
re-editing the film the longer de Valera lived, “will be not Calais
as with Mary Stuart but ‘each part must be 18”, 13’’
[the running time of each Dev film reel].”
Morrison, naturally, has been accused of bias, but at least it was by
both sides.
“There are always accusations of imbalance in Ireland,” he
says.
“When Mise Éire and Saoirse? were made I had to go ex-directory
because there were so many accusations of imbalance, curiously enough
they seemed to occur late at night from 10.30 onwards (when the pubs shut).”
Balance was difficult to achieve, as most of the footage was shot from
a Free State perspective.
“Desmond FitzGerald, who was an excellent media man, made sure that
the coverage from the Free State side was superior, in fact it is very
difficult to assemble material from the Republican side,
so I had to resort to still photographs.”
Contemporary newspaper headlines, which Morrison used as a narrative device
so as not to alienate non-Irish speakers, were also so virulently anti-Republican
that he had to resort to making up his own.
Morrison also used the headline device to create dramatic tension.
He said: “This is a very important point, I have always crept up
on my events from behind.
“The backward-looking perspective essentially deadens material.
I used the material as something taking place at the moment, something
alive, not recollected.”
Morrison was elected to Aosdana in 2005, along with John T Davis, another
distinguished documentary film-maker but one many years his junior.
Did the honour feel a bit belated?
“Not at all, I’m very glad to say I’m still making films.
I was very honoured indeed.
“It enabled me to be in receipt of a small stipend which has made
a lot of difference.”
Morrison lives modestly in Shankill, south Dublin, not far from Neil Jordan
in Killiney and Jim Sheridan in Dalkey but a world away from what a Hollywood
career could afford.
“That is because, I hate to say it, but I am an artist.”
He despairs of an Irish film tradition which he feels is too wordy, bedevilled
and overshadowed by the literary tradition.
The only Irish film he professes to admire is Margo Harkin’s Hush-A-Bye
Baby.
“Jim Sheridan is very popular, it says it all. I have a very good
forgettery, I forget the names of films that don’t interest me with
remarkable rapidity.”
In fact, for a man of 85, who suffered a stroke in 2005, Morrison is remarkably
sharp, correcting me on details from his films, constructing sentences
of an old-fashioned elegance.
“The stroke left me with an almost total inability to speak but
I could say one word and that was ‘yes’ and I learned that
the affirmative is not an answer to every question that life flings at
one.
“It nonetheless gave me the deepest sympathy with the condition
of the young lady who couldn’t say no.”
A cause for which Morrison campaigned long and hard was the creation of
an Irish national film archive, which was launched at the Irish Film Institute
in 1992.
But he regrets that the footage that he preserved for the National Library
was later donated to RTÉ, which he feels is not a secure enough
setting.
“I can’t see why they can’t pass it to where it really
belongs in the national film archive.”
Morrison fell under the spell of film in 1937 when his parents gave him
his own silent film projector.
A profile from The Irish Times in 1960 describes him “cranking away
in lonely fascination at the silent classics of German macabre film”.
It was a primitive, hand-wound model which meant he could rewind it.
“That’s how I learnt editing, how a film was put together.
I was particularly fond of Lang’s Metropolis.”
He was born in 1922 in Tramore, Co. Waterford, within earshot of gunshots
as Free State troops were besieging the old coastguard station occupied
by Republicans.
His mother was an actress at the Gate Theatre and his father overcame
polio to become a neurological anaesthetist.
If he got his artistic temperament from his mother, he got his implacable
determination from his father.
His father made him study medicine at Trinity but after reading every
book on film in the library and joining the drama society, he abandoned
his studies to make his first film, Dracula, in 1942.
“I starved myself to buy film stock on the black market,”
he recalls. “I went bald within weeks through malnutrition.”
Happily, in later life, he would make up for this by marrying Theodora
FitzGibbon, the late Irish Times cookery editor, providing the photographs
for 11 of her cookery books and he and his second wife Janet still like
to dine well.
He went on to be assistant director on two films directed by Hilton Edwards,
From Time To Time, which he also scripted and Hamlet Of Elsinore with
Orson Welles.
“He was a thoroughgoing personality and such people have always
appealed to me. I can’t abide wishy-washy personalities.”
But Edwards was the greater influence.
“Hilton’s unsurpassable atmospheric lighting influenced me
from when I was five years old when I was allowed to stay up for rehearsals
of Peer Gynt because I was deemed to be too young to be a troll. He turned
me on to what lighting could do.”
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