Historical transitions in Ireland on screen

This chapter uses a chronological framework to explore a number of transitions in the development of cinema in Ireland, giving particular attention to the period from the mid-1990s to the present. By connecting the idea of 'transition' to the term 'borrowing', the chapter uses the latter to explore how the evolution of indigenous film-making was often suspended between established historical precedents and moments of definitive transition. In this, it proposes an affirmative reading of how Irish film-makers carved out an important niche in the interstices between more traditional and contemporary cultural, political, industrial, and aesthetic practices: on the one hand by acknowledging existing templates, and on the other by creatively exploring certain elasticity within the same structures. This ingenuity is evident across a formal play with genres, the creative use of literary sources, an address to earlier representations of Ireland on screen, and (more recently) through technological developments in distribution.