National Cinema in Ireland

This article maps Irish cinema through Fernando Solanas' grid of 'first', 'second' and 'third' cinemas. In this way, it can be argued that Irish cinema is an 'arriere-garde' cinema that inhabits a contradictory space between the local and the global. Thus indigenous cinema seeking to address contemporary Ireland coexists with a 'first' cinema that continues to reinscribe the myth of romantic rural Ireland, also sold as commodity kitsch.