The OU Film and Video Studies Department is welcoming a special
guest lecturer to campus this week.

Visiting professor Martin McLoone from the University of Ulster
in Northern Ireland will be speaking to students this week on Irish
cinema.

McLoone will be giving a free lecture tonight at 6 p.m. on the
cinema of modern Ireland and Northern Ireland. He will be showing a
series of clips from Irish films that are largely unavailable in
the United States. The lecture will be in 206 Dale Hall and is free
and open to the public.

Some of the topics that will be covered during the talk will be
Celtic Tiger cinema, which examines the Irish economy of the
nineties, and Northern Irish films which presents the religious
conflict between Protestants and Catholics in the region, according
to FVS professor Gary Rhodes.

Rhodes is responsible for bringing McLoone to the campus as part
of Rhodes’ course, Irish Cinema.

“OU is one of the few universities that offers a course in
Irish cinema,” Rhodes said.

“It’s a subject that most people are not that aware
of,” said Ryan Baker, an FVS senior who is taking
Rhode’s Irish Cinema course. “Ireland doesn’t
have a mainstream film industry like the U.S.”

McLoone is the author of the book, “Irish Film: The
Emergence of a Contemporary Cinema,” which is considered the
authoritative text on the subject and is used as the textbook for
OU’s Irish Cinema course.

“Hopefully those who attend the lecture will see how
Ireland has struggled to create a national identity through
cinema,” Baker said. “We don’t have that problem
in that we don’t have to strive an identity with each new
film.”

“Look at Europe and Italy and France. They have all
struggled to create an identity and now have styles that are their
own, like Italian Realism and French New Wave,” Baker
said.

“If you look at Ireland, it’s remarkable that they
are trying to create this national identity in the midst of such
political troubles [between Ireland and Northern Ireland],”
Baker said.

The films McLoone will speak over are not as familiar as the
film most students would think of.

“Most OU students will know about
‘Trainspotting’ and the films of Danny Boyle,”
Baker said. “[McLoone’s lecture] will show ones that
most people are not familiar with.”

In addition to his lecture tonight, Professor McLoone will also
be talking with the Introduction to Film for Majors class and
Rhodes’ Media Theory course. He will also be speaking with
classes at the University of Central Oklahoma.

McLoone’s visit is part of a long line of visitors the FVS
department has coming to campus.
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