Virtually unseen and banned for many years in Ireland following its entry into the 1968 Cannes Film Festival, Peter Lennon’s controversial documentary about the state of the Irish republic in the late 1960s, Rocky Road to Dublin, argued lucidly and surreptitiously for the extinction of the country’s outmoded state of affairs.
Interviewing ordinary people, patriotic sportsmen and politicians, as well as priests and school children in order to glean a picture of his country, journalist and documentarian Peter Lennon let his interviewees unwittingly reveal the depths of their small-minded prejudice. In turn he painted a portrait of a country that was censorious and repressed, and produced a film of great controversy when after just one screening in Dublin it was immediately pulled and entered a prolonged period of absence from both Irish cinemas and television.
A brilliantly energetic, punchy and daring piece of documentary filmmaking (shot by Godard’s regular cinematographer Raoul Coutard), it challenged the cronyist political establishment which so infuriated the younger generation in 1960’s Ireland and shattered a country’s complacent view of itself as a liberated country.
This screening is part of the May ’68: Film and the Revolution season at Watershed.
In partnership with/
May ’68: Film and the Revolution
1968 was a time of tremendous social and political upheaval. From the Prague spring to the Paris riots, from the Tet Offensive in the Vietnam war to the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy in America, the year saw momentous global events whose repercussions still resonate to this day.
In the UK student protests flared up on campuses across the country with rising tensions in the wake of Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech whilst the opposition to the Vietnam war led to protests and riots outside the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square in London. Add into the mix the hangover from the previous year’s ‘summer of love’ and you had a heady cocktail of radicalism, opposition to the establishment, the mainstream and convention.
This spirit of radicalism impacted on culture in general and the film world in particular, no more so than in France where May ’68 became a flashpoint for revolution across all parts of society. Famously, the Cannes Film Festival that month was brought to a halt mid-flow by the likes of François Truffaut and Jean Luc Godard, who forced the festival organisers and audiences to choose between the reality outside the cinema or the fiction on the screen. The young film radicals won and closed down Cannes.
In this season, Watershed, in partnership with Bristol Festival of Ideas, will be presenting a snapshot of those times: Gillo Pontecorvo’s ground breaking Battle of Algiers, which presented to French audiences the impact of their colonial rule; Jean Luc Godard’s Weekend, an apocalyptic vision of capitalism and lacerating assault on the bourgeoisie; Peter Lennon’s controversial reflection on Ireland’s independence, The Rocky Road to Dublin, which premiered at the infamous ’68 Cannes; and Lindsay Anderson’s If…, a very British class revolution set in an English boarding school.
