Notes
« Le début en étant souvent fixé à la manifestation de Derry le 5 octobre 1968, pendant laquelle les policiers de la Royal Ulster Constabulary chargèrent les militants non-violents de la Northern Civil Rights Association en direct devant les caméras de la télévision », Sylvie Mikowski, L’Irlande du Nord : politique, théâtre, fiction, histoire. Sources-Revue d’études anglophones, automne 2000, n°9, 7.
Il s’agit notamment des femmes activistes de l’IRA, prisonnières républicaines engagées également dans les grèves de la faim. Toutefois, leur mouvement fut moins connu que celui des hommes. “The history of prison conflict in the course of the Troubles demonstrates the extent to which organised and pre-emptive violence and disturbances were integrated into strategic phases of the prison campaign. However, the use of organised and directive violence by women prisoners was much more tenuous because of the relatively small numbers of prisoners involved and their strategically peripheral position in both the prison system and the Republican cross-prison structures”, Mary Corcoran, “‘We had to be Stronger’ : the Political Imprisonment of Women in Northern Ireland, 1972-1999”, in Louise Ryan & Margaret Ward, Irish Women and Nationalism, Dublin : Irish Academic Press, 2004, 119.
Wesley Hutchinson, La question irlandaise, Paris : Ellipses, 2001, 162.
« Les termes de ‘catholiques’ et ‘protestants’ […] pourraient laisser croire que le conflit nord-irlandais est essentiellement un conflit religieux : en fait, il s’agit d’une terminologie courante, qui distingue essentiellement deux groupes ethniques, c’est-à-dire au sein desquels les membres sont liés par une histoire, une culture, dont la religion est un élément essentiel mais pas exclusif. Le sectarisme, couramment évoqué en Irlande du Nord, perd alors sa signification exclusive d’intolérance religieuse : il s’agit plutôt d’une intolérance à l’encontre d’un groupe opposé ethnique mais désigné en termes religieux », Valérie Peyronel, Les relations communautaires en Irlande du Nord : une nouvelle dynamique, Paris : Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2003, 11.
Agnès Maillot, IRA. Les républicains irlandais, Caen : Presses Universitaires de Caen, 2001, 60.
« Le mode de scrutin choisi leur [aux unionistes] assura une majorité tant au niveau gouvernemental que local. La représentation proportionnelle fut abolie dans les années vingt pour être remplacée par le suffrage majoritaire. Etant donné que les protestants jouissaient d’une majorité de fait dans les six comtés (ils représentaient deux tiers de la population contre un tiers de catholiques), aucune opposition ne fut en mesure de défier leur pouvoir. Les unionistes purent ainsi contrôler les institutions. Au niveau local, le vote censitaire, qui accordait le droit de vote en fonction des titres de propriété, avantageait les protestants, qui étaient mieux en mesure de remplir ces conditions et qui furent donc surreprésentés par rapport aux catholiques », Agnès Maillot, Ibid.
Il existe aussi un court-métrage intitulé After’ 68 (1993) de Stephen Burke, couvrant la période des années 1960 jusqu’à l’événement de Bloody Sunday en 1972, qui campe une femme dans le personnage principal, incarnant le rôle d’une mère catholique à Derry. On retient aussi le film de Tom Collins, Bogwoman (1997), qui traite d’une période antérieure aux Troubles, celle des années 1950. Pour ce qui est des autres films réalisés pendant les Troubles, on note Hennessy de Don Sharp (1975), The Long Good Friday de John Mc Kenzie (1979), A Prayer for the Dying de Mike Hodges (1987) et Hidden Agenda de Ken Loach (1990). Ces films ne traitent pas précisément la situation politique en Irlande du Nord puisque, d’une part, ils explorent ses répercussions en Angleterre, et d’autre part, ils véhiculent l’image de l’IRA à travers des individus isolés de la société ou encore des groupes non identifiés, invisibles à l’écran. Ces films contribuent à noircir le conflit politique nord-irlandais, présenté comme incompréhensible et renforcent les représentations stéréotypées relatives à cette situation. Seule l’idéologie républicaine est représentée, ce qui engendre une vision relativement simpliste et caricaturale, voire manichéenne, du conflit. Angel de Neil Jordan (1982) et Cal de Pat O’Connor (1983), réalisés par des cinéastes irlandais, explorent la violence politique exclusivement en Ulster, et par conséquent donnent une autre dimension au conflit. Même s’il est impossible de distinguer clairement les identités paramilitaires dans Angel, elles sont néanmoins suggérées, et le film n’est pas dépourvu d’implications politiques puisqu’il finit par dénoncer implicitement la collusion entre la RUC et les paramilitaires loyalistes. Cal rejette clairement la violence paramilitaire en Irlande du Nord et illustre la violence sectaire dont la communauté catholique est montrée comme la principale victime ; le film distingue toutefois les loyalistes du reste des protestants.
Titanic Town montre l’héroïne dans le rôle d’une mère catholique qui devient un médiateur de paix, engagée contre la violence politique qui menace sa famille au quotidien. Silent Grace explore le personnage d’une femme militante activiste de l’IRA, et prisonnière politique dans la prison d’Armagh.
Le personnage secondaire de Jude dans The Crying Game présente une femme terroriste membre de l’IRA. Dans Some Mother’s Son le personnage principal est celui de la mère d’un prisonnier républicain, Kathleen Quigley, le seul personnage féminin parmi ces films, qui, de sa propre initiative, agit et négocie auprès des hommes d’État afin de trouver une solution à la situation des détenus républicains. The Boxer relate la situation des femmes de prisonniers républicains, à travers le personnage de Maggie, et démontre les conditions de vie opprimantes de ces femmes, prisonnières des règles internes à la communauté catholique et républicaine. Enfin, An Everlasting Piece place Bronagh en second plan ; elle est néanmoins l’initiatrice de l’heureux dénouement du scénario et elle instaure clairement une démarche qui lutte contre le sectarisme en Irlande du Nord.
“Mother Ireland still lives, still shapes the political perceptions of those involved in the Northern Ireland conflict”, Belinda Loftus, Mirrors, William III and Mother Ireland, Dundrum : Picture Press, 1990, 77.
“If you look at the images of Mother Ireland used by nationalists in Northern Ireland today, it is clear that she does mean everything. Not only can these images be found in a whole variety of media ranging from murals to internee crafts, banners, cartoons and cards sent at Christmas and Easter […] They can also be seen embracing numerous identities. Mother Ireland may be a militant freedom fighter, bearing the tricolour flag of the Irish Republic […], or a buxom Maid of Erin accompanied by harp, wolfhound, and shamrock […] or a glamourous Celtic goddess […], or a weeping figure, chained or leaning on her harp […], or the Virgin, watching over the death of her imprisoned son”, Belinda Loftus, Ibid., 44.
“Women who opted for revolutionary roles have always been in the minority. Indeed, the history of Irish women in struggle has largely remained the history of ‘exceptional women’, often revolutionary women”, Sharon Pickering, Women, Policing and Resistance in Northern Ireland, Belfast : Beyond the Pale, 2002, 5.
“While, historically, women’s struggles against the prevailing order, both within Ireland and the United Kingdom, have repeatedly brought women into intimate and sometimes violent contact with policing, such struggle has mostly gone unnoticed in mainstream theorising. Women’s resistance in Northern Ireland is not new: rather it has lacked a recorded history”, Sharon Pickering, Ibid., 2.
Pat Murphy est elle-même issue de la communauté catholique nord-irlandaise.
“The BFI production Board […] was prepared to receive applications from Northern Ireland and helped to fund […] Pat Murphy’s feminist mediation upon the ‘Troubles’, Maeve, shot partly in Belfast”, John Hill, Cinema and Northern Ireland ; Film, Culture and Politics, London : BFI, 2006, 170.
“[…] despite the higher sums of money available within Northern Ireland to fund film production, the kind of culturally challenging ‘indigenous’ films (such as Maeve, Acceptable Levels, Hush-a-Bye Baby) supported by the BFI Production Board and Channel 4 in the 1980s have all but disappeared”, John Hill, Ibid., 189.
“Maeve represents an important achievement”, Luke Gibbons, Transformations in Irish Culture, Cork : Cork University Press, 1996, 117.
“Maeve, partly shot in Belfast, involved a searching interrogation of the patriarchal assumptions of Republican politics and the place of the women within nationalist struggle”, John Hill, op. cit., 237.
“Feminism came late to Ireland, only starting to have any impact in the early 1970s. Not until the end of that decade did working-class women in Northern Ireland begin to see it as relevant to their lives”, Belinda Loftus, op. cit., 76.
“At that stage, I saw myself as an artist who worked alone. I hadn’t […] defined the way I was working as feminist. I thought the way I was working was a politically determined alternative way”, Pat Murphy, The Irish Feminist Review, Women’s Community Press, Interview : Film and Feminism, 1984, 74.
“While still at College, I wanted to make more work about the North of Ireland […] I had a strong feeling that fiction or fictionalized work was the only way, at that stage, that one could deal with the North because of the kind of documentaries that had been made. So I wrote ‘Maeve’ which was funded quite quickly by the British Film Institute. I thought because of its content that it would take a long time to get funded but it didn’t. That had to do with the make-up of the production board at that time”, Pat Murphy, Ibid.
“Everybody out of the car !”
“Mummy never said a word.”
“Get out of the car or I’ll blow your head off !”
“You’re only out of your nappies !”
“Maeve’s exile is both physical and political, in that she feels alienated not only from the threatening British military presence on the streets, but also from the ideological climate of her own community which revolves around a traditional, male-dominated republicanism”, Luke Gibbons, op. cit., 117.
“The past is a way of acting on the present.”
- Maeve : Do you think that every person that moves from a small place to big cities denies their heritage or something ?
– Liam : But why did you come here ?
– Maeve : Because I wanted to be part of this, this centre of energy. London is made up of people of different cultures and that’s why it’s possible for me to be here.
– Liam : Do you feel more at home here ?
– Maeve : People here can grow up here without being imprisoned by their history. They’ve disconnected themselves from their countries’ neuroses.
– Liam : Maybe they have but we’re still suffering from a colonial aftermath […] Jesus ! You’ve got some funny ideas of some senses of energy.
– Liam : The past is a way of reading the present.
– Maeve : The way you want to remember excludes me. There’s just no space for me.
“What you’re proposing is no story at all.”
Roland Barthes, Mythologies, Paris : Éditions du Seuil, 1957, 193.
« Cette parole est un message. Elle peut donc être bien autre chose qu’orale ; elle peut être formée d’écritures ou de représentations : le discours écrit, mais aussi la photographie, le cinéma, le reportage, le sport, les spectacles, la publicité, tout cela peut servir à la parole mythique », Roland Barthes, Ibid., 194.
Ibid., 210.
Ibid., 224.
Ibid., 231.
« C’est […] la ‘pentarchie’ [c’est-à-dire les cinq royaumes provinciaux, l’Ulster, le Connacht, le Leinster et les deux moitiés du Munster] sous sa forme initiale qui constitue la toile de fond de la saga irlandaise Táin Bό Cúailnge (La Razzia des vaches de Cooley), la pièce-maîtresse du Cycle ulstérien. Cette histoire, consignée par les moines au VIIIe siècle, avait existé à l’état oral au moins depuis le VIe siècle, les événements auxquels elle se réfère étant plus au moins contemporains du Christ. Le récit, qui raconte l’invasion de l’Ulster par Medb, reine de Connacht, fait constamment référence au fait que l’Ulster à travers son incarnation légendaire Cúchulainn, est seul contre une coalition des ‘quatre grandes provinces de l’Irlande’. L’Histoire du cochon de Mac Dathό, un des contes du Cycle ulstérien, affirme que le conflit entre le Connacht et l’Ulster remonterait à 300 ans avant Jésus Christ ! Ainsi, la littérature nous laisse entrevoir ce qui semble être les deux traits dominants de l’organisation politique de l’Irlande préhistorique, à savoir une division de l’île en cinq parties et une rivalité nord-sud », Wesley Hutchinson, op.cit., 16.
“The earliest symbolic females associated with Ireland were the figures which represented the triple aspects of the central goddess of Celtic mythology. These figures were notable for their combination of apparently opposed characteristics. Thus the three figures representing the warlike aspects of the goddess, Morrigan, Badba and Macha were equally renowned for their ferocity and their sexual capacity, as Maeve, the semi-real, semi-goddess figure who led her armies against the men of Ulster in the saga of the Táin Bό Cúailnge (The Cattle Raid of Cooley), and who claimed that ‘never was she without one man in the shadow of the other’”, Belinda Loftus, op. cit., 48.
“You don’t have to get married.”
“The confusion is in this place. Women’s sexuality is so abused that it’s almost an act of liberation to turn into a sex object.”
“The militancy and sexual appetite of these females were as much ritual as real. For they were at once protectresses of the land, and personifications of it, who conferred sovereignty on its kings by mating with them”, Belinda Loftus, op. cit., 48.
– Maeve : When women put themselves behind male politics the result has not been a recognition of our rights, but a moderation of our aims. When you’re denied power or when it’s continually corrupted, the only form of protest you have is through your body. Our struggle is for autonomy, for the control of our bodies.
– Liam : You can’t claim that as a form of protest. What about the blanket men ? Their only form of protest is through their bodies.
– Maeve : Well, instead of claiming it back, couldn’t you see a similarity ?
- Liam : No, I couldn’t. It amazes me that you could even think like that ! Those are men who are ready to give up their lives for their country.
“Women’s public political activity is often not for their rights as individual women, but as part of a class and a community who suffer collectively. Moreover, feminists have increasingly argued that it is not just an issue of class and gender, but of multiple relations of domination based on race, ethnicity, nationality and sexuality, all interacting dialectically with class and gender relations”, Sharon Pickering, op. cit., 9.
Roland Barthes, op. cit., 194.
Wesley Hutchinson, op. cit., 10.
“Maeve is a film that rescues the mythological Queen Maeve from her ideological distortion in the revivalist version of Irish history and restores her, ‘demythologized’ as it were, to the contemporary context of war-torn Ulster”, Richard Kearney, Navigations, Dublin : The Lilliput Press, 2006, 292.
Standish O’Grady, History of Ireland : The Heroic Period. Vol. 1, London : Sampson Law, Searl Marston & Rivington/Dublin : E. Pansonby, 1878.
“The mere presence of a woman posed a threat to this ascetic, male universe, so when in the most famous of all sagas, the Táin Bό Cúailnge, Ulster is invaded by Maeve, the warrior queen of Connacht, we find O’Grady’s narrative powers stretched to their very limits”, Luke Gibbons, op.cit., 118.
On observe que cette représentation de la femme est assez répandue dans la littérature victorienne à l’époque et n’est pas propre à Standish O’Grady.
“The treatment of Medb [i.e. Maeve] was perhaps most at variance with the source materials. O’Grady tried to make her seem more ‘feminine’, to endow her with some of the personality traits traditionally associated with the ‘weaker sex’, and at times the proud amazon of the sources seems more like the delicate fainting heroines of the nineteenth-century novel”, Philip L. Marcus, Standish O’Grady, Lewisburg : Bucknell University Press, 1970, 35.
“I didn’t make the rules or create this structure. All I can do is withdraw from it.”
“One of the most striking features of Maeve is the manner in which problems connected with art and politics, feminism and history, are explored not simply at the level of ‘content’ but are also reworked in terms of formal strategies, the structure of the film itself constituting a commentary on the events it portrays”, Luke Gibbons, op. cit., 122.
“The father tells stories both as a way of controlling his situation and distancing himself from it. His ‘privileged’ position is derived from his investment with the role of ‘storyteller’ and is a reference to the Irish oral tradition”, Pat Murphy, Claire Johnston, Interview with Pat Murphy, Screen, Vol. 22, n°4, 1981, 64.
“In a way, his stories are interferences to her. They interpret the landscape for her and deny and prevent her experiencing it for herself”, Pat Murphy, Ibid.
“One of the central concerns in Maeve is the way in which representations or narrative forms in Irish culture do not simply describe but are often bound up with the realities they purport to represent”, Luke Gibbons, op. cit., 118.
“Maeve and Liam’s three abstract dialogues are, like Martin’s stories, punctuations in the realistic narrative. They don’t undermine Martin’s stories as much as juxtapose a discursive reality, a dialectic between them, with his non-discursive one, in that he is speaking to no one”, Pat Murphy, Ibid.
– Liam : Look, I understand what you’re saying but what you’re proposing sounds like some kind of women’s nationalism. You behave as if your struggle is separate. You think you’re part of a different culture ! A nation within a nation !
– Maeve : Nationalism is a reaction to attack ! To imperialism, we are all like a nation within a nation. Men’s relationship to women is just like England’s relationship to Ireland. You are in possession of us. You occupy us like an army.
Cette organisation de femmes nationalistes et républicaines fut fondée à Dublin en avril 1914 en tant qu’organisation auxiliaire des Volontaires Irlandais. Bien qu’indépendante, cette organisation était subordonnée à celle des Volontaires.
“between those women who demanded equality of status […] and women who were content to perform unquestioningly whatever services were demanded of them”, Margaret Ward, Unmanageable Revolutionaries : Women and Irish Nationalism, London : Pluto Press, 1989, 248.
“Relations with their feminist contemporaries were often acrimonious because, while both agreed that women were at a disadvantage within society, the nationalists maintained that to place the needs of women before those of ‘the nation’ (which was little more than an idealised abstraction, devoid of any social content) would be divisive, and from this perspective they criticised feminism for its implicit lack of commitment to the nationalist cause”, Margaret Ward, Ibid.
– Liam : Look ! What you’re doing is reactionary. You are splintering us or you’re bringing us down. You become one more faction to contend with. Women ! You’re like anarchists ! When you come down to it, you don’t want to win ! You maintain yourself into a fate so you can feel the world superior. You don’t want to win, but by defining your struggle as separate you weaken us.
– Maeve : Win what ? What is there to win ? When this war is over, will I be free ? Will I be able to do what I want ? Can I have children even when I want ? An abortion if I need one ?
– Liam : Your revolution is obviously not mine !
– Maeve : And your national liberation won’t work when you exclude half of us. I belong to a class that is oppressed whatever happens !
“Being a woman is a nationality I carry along with me. The time when women were spectators is long gone. You’re all closer to the women here because they’re fighting for freedom like you.”
Cela suggère que ce personnage, solitaire, est loyaliste.
“Within Maeve’s culture, nationalism is the status quo, which she sees as denying her identity as a woman. She leaves in order to recreate her life outside the demands of her heritage”, Pat Murphy, Ibid., 65.
“For Mary Mc Mahon, young single West Belfast councillor for the traditionally republican and socialist, but non-sectarian Workers Party: ‘Mother Ireland, as traditionally invoked, has been created by men for their own solace. […] The women in Northern Ireland who despite the horrors of incessant sectarian slaughter have developed women’s refuges, rape centres, who have fought class struggles despite the armed patriarchies and mullahs; the women who have in small and largely unnoticed gatherings worked to break down sectarian division and build common cause on bread and butter issues. These are my Mother Ireland images’”, Belinda Loftus, op. cit., 76.
“the militant and outspoken individuals never won out […] Their emotional and ideological identification with nationalism, which always overrode all other considerations, was a crucial factor in preventing them from ever developing a strategy which could have encompassed a broader definition of liberation – one which would have released them from the constraints that ultimately dissipated their radical potential”, Margaret Ward, op. cit., 248.
Marc Ferro, Cinéma et Histoire, Paris : Gallimard, 1993, 75.
Marc Ferro, Ibid.
Marc Ferro, Ibid.
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