Opinion: Despite Flora Kerrigan's youth at the time of her filmmaking, her work demonstrates someone ahead of her time and at the forefront of a transformative period in Irish society
By Sarah Arnold, Maynooth University and Kasandra O'Connell, IFI
Flora Kerrigan is a figure painfully absent from current Irish film historiography, despite her relative success during her filmmaking years. Kerrigan, a Cork-based filmmaker active in the Cork Cine Club during the late 1950s and early 1960s, garnered much press and critical attention in the 1960s, and one can easily find mention of her in various regional and national newspapers like the Irish Examiner and the Evening Echo, as well as in key amateur filmmaking magazine Amateur Cine World.
Her films Moonshine and Cold Feet were broadcast on RTÉ in 1965, where Gay Byrne introduced Kerrigan's films on the television programme World of Film. Kerrigan herself entered her films into many international amateur film festivals, like the Brussels International Film Festival, and the letters and medals she received for these entries are now carefully preserved in the archive collection at the Irish Film Institute.
Kerrigan also exhibited her films regularly as part of the Cork Cine Club. A self-designed programme for one of these film exhibitions has comical taglines accompanying each film title, evidencing a playfulness and tongue-in-cheek framing of her films, despite their serious overtones.
Kerrigan worked across live action and animation amateur filmmaking and many of these films will be available on the IFI Archive Player, including a selection of her mesmerising cut-out animations about topics like the space race, the experience of death, and delusional characters, according to Kerrigan’s own film summaries. It is with thanks to the Kerrigan family and the IFI Irish Film Archive that these films will now available to all and preserved, digitised and made publicly accessible, so that they can be appreciated for their unique qualities.
It is hugely important for Irish film and animation history that Kerrigan’s work is acknowledged, watched and studied. Despite Kerrigan’s youth at the time of her filmmaking, these films demonstrate someone ahead of her time and at the forefront of a transformative period in Irish society. Her films tackle social conventions, attend to existential crises, and evidence a highly experimental flair. She is, in every sense of the phrase, a creative provocateur. Those who worked with her speak about her as a catalyst for, and creative nucleus of, Cork filmmaking at the time. Her live action films show huge ambition, with their varied locations, range of actors, extensive use of prop, and highly intricate narratives. Her cut out animations, according to Kerrigan herself, required around 2,000 cut-outs per two minutes of film, and took a huge amount of time and patience to produce. Often called 'cartoons’ by Kerrigan herself and in the press, these are not at all aimed at children, with their dark and macabre wit.
Despite the extensive evidence of Kerrigan’s filmmaking in various press and magazines, it was only in 2022 that her work came to the attention of researchers working with the Irish Film Archive and UK colleagues on women’s amateur filmmaking. Film historian Keith Johnston, by checking every issue of Amateur Cine World for reference to women filmmakers, found the name Flora Kerrigan located across a few of its issues, and passed this information to the Irish team. This one gesture resulted in the location of a box of well-preserved film reels belonging to the filmmaker and kept safe by Kerrigan’s family.
With the researchers still unsure what kind of films Kerrigan made, nor the quality of them, they digitised one roll of film with Super 8 Films Ireland, based in Galway, and quickly realised that these were deeply interesting and hugely important to Irish media history. Over the course of the next year, the family worked with the IFI Irish Film Archive on donating the films so that they can be preserved and, where possible, restored. Along with the films that form part of the IFI Archive Player collection, Flora Kerrigan: Dream Maker, there are some damaged films that require careful handling and painstaking restoration.
This work is ongoing at the archive and generously supported by the Research Ireland New Foundations grant. The archive is also cataloguing the collection and exhibiting at various events where Kerrigan’s work can be acknowledged and celebrated. Interviews with those who worked with Kerrigan on her films are ongoing and will help shed more light on Kerrigan and this period of filmmaking in Cork. Serendipitously, Irish artist Laura Fitzgerald, who knew Kerrigan briefly several years ago, learned about the rediscovery of her films and created her own project, The Gecker Ones, as a homage to Kerrigan. These collective efforts of family, friends, researchers and archivists are a testament to Flora Kerrigan’s inventive and visionary films.
In advance of World Day for Audiovisual Heritage on October 27, the Irish Film Institute has launched a fascinating and historically significant collection of Kerrigan's films.
This research was funded through the Research Ireland New Foundations Funding Grant Number NF/2024/11760
Dr Sarah Arnold is Head of the Department of Media Studies and Associate Professor at Maynooth University. Kasandra O'Connell is Head of the Irish Film Archive of the Irish Film Institute.
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The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ
