COILIN AND PLATONIDA
dir. James Scott, 1976
85 mins. UK, Ireland, Germany.
Silent w/ English & German Intertitles.

SATURDAY MARCH 18TH, 5PM WITH Q&A
WEDNESDAY MARCH 22ND, 7:30PM
WEDNESDAY MARCH 29TH, 7:30PM

James Scott is one of the most inventive artists to embark on Irish cinema. Born and raised in England in 1941 by artist parents, his father being the legendary Northern Irish painter, William Scott. His initial (and still active and fecund) practice of painting quickly widened to pursue a deep interest in cinema and filmmaking. Drawing on the world of visual art, as well as film influences ranging from Godard, the New American Cinema and Italian wunderkinds Bernardo Bertolucci and Marco Bellocchio, he spent the 60s making several acclaimed short art documentaries and experimental narratives. The 70s brought him into the world of radically left-wing, collaborative filmmaking as a member of the militant and deconstructive Berwick Street Film Collective. He also left Britain and the contemporary, present tense worlds of pop art, swinging London and the world of night cleaners and their unionisation to travel Ireland and into a fable.

His second solo feature, COILIN AND PLATONIDA (1976), originally aired on the German TV station ZDF and following other screenings was praised by the likes of Jonathan Rosenbaum (who placed it in his top ten of 1976) and Stephen Dwoskin. It takes as its material a Nikolai Leskov short story, transplanting its peculiar melodrama of a young man called Coilin (Coilin O Finneadha), ill-treated and luckless since childhood who eventually makes a makeshift community along with his cousin Platonida (Frankie Allen), from Russia to the west of Ireland and beautiful blasted heaths of Connemara. This is but one radical choice in a film flooded with them, for Scott casts local non-actors and after shooting in Super 8, ‘refilmed’ in 16mm using multiple projectors. It’s also a silent film, opting not for dialogue or narration as its primary voice but intertitles, a fluid piano accompaniment and brief but striking bursts of the Gaelic folk lament Úna Bhán. All of these elements create an aura of antiquity, melodrama and palpable uncertainty to a film that often looks and moves like vapour, where absences and moments of ambiguity smart and resonate more than clear, recognizable images. It amounts to a unique rendition of how myth can move and grow, from land to land, generation to generation, medium to medium, with its powerful combination of specificity, allusiveness and mystery.