It’s a subject that’s virtually taboo to moviemakers. Studios believe audiences wouldn’t want to watch a story about such a grim historical period. But even though the events took place long ago, they remain a matter of vital concern to people throughout the world. Many books are written about the subject. Activists lobby for it to be taught in schools. Eventually, filmmakers find studio resistance beginning to diminish. One powerful filmmaker develops a project, resolving not to soften the horrors of the situation while still keeping it bearable for a mass audience to watch. He doesn’t give up because he feels a deep personal connection to the subject, which evokes the experiences of members of his own family. But for a number of years he hesitates, wondering whether he’s ready to tell the story and how many people will come to see it. Finally, despite all the obstacles, the movie is made. It goes on to become a worldwide phenomenon, moving audiences of every ethnic group and inspiring a new level of interest in the history it represents.
No doubt you’ve guessed by now that I’m referring to Schindler’s List, Steven Spielberg’s great 1992 film about the Nazi Holocaust, based on the nonfiction novel by Thomas Keneally. But I’ve also been referring — somewhat hopefully — to a film that has not yet been made, the first major motion picture about the Irish Famine. It’s strange that no feature filmmaker has yet managed to tackle a subject of such epic proportions, one described by The Saturday Review in 1875 as “an inexhaustible mine of stirring incident.” With the increasing willingness in recent years to confront the painful facts of the Famine, such as in last year’s 150th-anniversary commemoration in the Republic of Ireland of “Black 47,” there now seems a strong possibility that the informal taboo against depicting those events on film will be broken.
The Great Famine of 1845-’51, also referred to as an Gorta Mór (The Great Hunger) or The Irish Holocaust, caused the deaths of more than a million people and drove two million to emigrate. The only catastrophe of comparable dimensions in the nineteenth century was the United States’ virtual extermination of its Native American population. This century has seen many millions killed in genocide by the Turks in Armenia, Stalin’s regime in Russia, Hitler’s Third Reich, and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, among others. Terrible famines continue to occur in Africa and elsewhere. But while the earthshattering events of the Nazi Holocaust now are widely understood, with only a few anti-Semitic ideologues still attempting to minimize or deny what happened to Europe’s Jewish population, the Irish Famine is a subject on which many otherwise well-meaning people remain woefully ill-informed. Most Americans with whom I’ve discussed the Famine vaguely apprehend it as an unfortunate natural blight, an Act of God, without realizing the complicity of the British colonial government in prolonging its devasting effects.
Like the Nazi Holocaust, the Famine was so traumatic for survivors and their descendants that people on both sides of the Atlantic have had a hard time dealing with it emotionally. This reticence is compounded by difficulty in finding valid ways to “speak of the unspeakable,” as George Steiner characterized representations of the Holocaust. Some also object to the use of the word “Holocaust” to describe the Famine, contending that it detracts from the importance of the Shoah. The successful drive to put the Famine on the New York state public school curriculum, inspired by similar campaigns to teach the Shoah, encountered some opposition, but a similar drive has been underway in California. The fact that there is less of a world consensus on the political causes of the Famine than on the events of World War II has been a roadblock for filmmakers, although one that is lessening now as a result of the move toward peace in Northern Ireland. It’s impossible to underestimate the importance of British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s admission last year that “Those who governed in London at the time failed their people through standing by while a crop failure turned into a massive human tragedy. We must not forget such a dreadful event.”
Books of popular scholarship such as The Great Irish Famine, edited by Cathal Póirtóir (1995), and Irish Hunger: Personal Reflections on the Legacy of the Famine, edited by California State Senator Tom Hayden (1997), have been reexamining the meaning of the Famine from a wide range of historical and cultural perspectives. There have been some powerful television documentaries, notably When Ireland Starved (1992), produced by Radio Telefis Eireann, which also helped publish The Great Irish Famine. Famine literature, which began in 1846 with William Carleton’s novel The Black Prophet, keeps burgeoning. Seamus Heaney and Patrick Kavanagh have contributed memorable poems about the Famine, Tom Murphy’s 1968 play Famine is performed frequently, and the last issue of Irish America printed excerpts from a newly recovered Famine diary by County Down farmer James Harshaw. Sinéad O’Connor’s haunting song “Famine” has helped raise the consciousness of younger audiences, while sparking controversy for its blunt indictment of British indifference to Irish suffering. The phenomenally popular stage show “Riverdance” also deals in part with the dislocation caused by the Famine.
Why, then, has there never been a major film about the Famine?
The best-known novel on the subject, Liam O’Flaherty’s Famine (1937), perhaps came the closest to being filmed. O’Flaherty dedicated the book to John Ford, the Irish-American director who had filmed his novel The Informer in 1935. A cousin of O’Flaherty and the son of Irish immigrants born in County Galway shortly after the Famine, Ford tried unsuccessfully to promote a film version of Famine in the late 1930s and again in the early ’50s. But Famine clearly influenced his 1940 film of The Grapes of Wrath, from the novel by John Steinbeck, whose maternal grandfather was a Famine immigrant. Ford said the story of the Okie migration from the Depression-era Dust Bowl to California “appealed to me — being about simple people — and the story was similar to the Famine in Ireland, when they threw the people off the land and left them wandering on the roads to starve. That may have had something to do with it — part of my Irish tradition.”
There has been renewed attention to the filmic potential of O’Flaherty’s novel, a bleakly moving work about the struggle of a single Irish family to survive in the face of starvation, disease, and emigration to America. But the Famine project that now may have the best chance of reaching the screen is Ballymoran, an epic saga being developed by the Irish-American Hollywood producer Frank Price. A former studio executive for Universal and Columbia who produced the 1994 film version of Maeve Binchy’s novel Circle of Friends in Ireland, Price runs his own independent company, Price Entertainment, and is a board member of the American Ireland Fund. He has been working on Ballymoran for the past three years with screenwriter Mary Pat Kelly, a documentary filmmaker, novelist, and journalist who has contributed to Irish America.
Seeing the 1971 film version of Fiddler on the Roof, the heartrending musical about a Jewish family forced to leave their Russian homeland, gave Price the idea of making a comparable film about the Irish emigration to the United States. Studying the genealogy of his family — his mother was a Moran from County Mayo — convinced him to base the film on their history rather than on any existing literary source. Taking its title from its fictional locale in Mayo, Ballymoran will be “a romance set against the tragedy of the Famine,” seen through the eyes of the Morans and the Doyles, another branch of his family who emigrated to Pennsylvania.
Despite the recent wave of films dealing with Irish history and culture, Price knows that Ballymoran will not be the easiest project to sell to a studio, so he is waiting to pitch it until the script is honed to his satisfaction. Not only will it be expensive to recremate the Famine period, but the subject matter presents inherent difficulties for filming. The causes of the Famine perhaps are more difficult to dramatize than the causes of the Holocaust, and showing people dying slowly of starvation is not as obviously cinematic as showing people being rounded up and killed by Nazis. But the biggest challenge Ballymoran faces is the same one that faced Spielberg.
“It’s a heavy, grim subject,” Price acknowledges. “I think it’s a very important story to tell, but finding the way to tell it is the key. You can take a heavy, grim subject and if you tell the right story — the [American] Civil War was a grim subject, and they did Gone With the Wind. Titanic — a grim story. I think the key is that you care about the people who are involved in the epic matter that’s going on.”
Unfortunately, the commercial failure of Neil Jordan’s ambitious Irish historical film Michael Collins in 1995 has made it harder to launch a serious film project on Irish history. “I decided to wait a bit with Ballymoran,” Price says, “because even though I think it’s a very different project, there’s sometimes a herd mentality in the business and that would be the general dustbin they put `em all in together.
“The story of Michael Collins is fascinating, but it had very limited prospects as a commercial picture, unlike what I think we could do with our Famine project. I do believe the story of the Irish Famine should be told from the American Irish point of view, because that story of the forced emigration, what had to happen and why, is of course the story of most of the American Irish.”
The ongoing peace process in North Ireland has had a salutary effect on filmmakers, allowing a more complex and nuanced portrayal of Irish political subject matter than was possible just six years ago, when Paramount’s Patriot Games indulged in blatant demonization of the Irish. Evolving British attitudes, as reflected in Blair’s Famine apology, should make it easier to tell the truth about the Great Hunger on screen without provoking a firestorm of controversy.
“That, frankly, is another reason I’ve decided to wait,” Price says. “I don’t think anybody wanted to add fuel to the flames. Treating the role of the British evenhandedly, you know, they don’t come off very well. It was a man-made famine, made worse by the fact that for 700 or 800 years the Irish basically were serfs on their own land. I think if you make a good film, people are openminded. Gandhi did very good business for Columbia when we distributed that, and that certainly didn’t make the British look terrific.”
Much like Spielberg, who managed to find some hopeful notes of humanity even while telling a story of genocide, Price believes that the Famine contains enough elements of triumph to counterbalance the story’s tragic impact: “The bad news is what everybody went through, and the good news is a million and a half got out of there and somehow made it here, and there are now forty-four million Irish in America. It’ s a terrible way for something positive to have happened, but something positive of course came out of it.”
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in the November/December 1998 issue of Irish America. ⬥
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