Review: Count Me Out: Selected Writings of Filmmaker Bob Quinn

Mick Jordan dives into the chapters of Count Me Out: Selected Writings of Filmmaker Bob Quinn.

Bob Quinn has been a major figure in the Irish film industry since long before there ever was an Irish film industry. He made Poitín — the first-ever film in the Irish language — way back in 1978. He followed this with Atlantean, a documentary series about the origins of the people of Ireland, and he founded the company Cinegael. But he is also a very engaging and articulate writer, as can be seen from this collection of his work. Edited by his son, the writer and musician Toner Quinn, the book is made up of essays, letters, and articles from the 1960s to the present day.

Such a compilation might be expected to be a bit erratic or random, but it is assembled here into a cohesive whole. The pieces are not necessarily presented in order of their writing but more in order of the events they describe. A letter from 1969 might be followed by an article from 2011 about the same thing, but this time with a different perspective. In fact, because all these pieces were written as completed one-off entities in their own right, there is a certain amount of repetition, but this adds to the experience hugely. It truly draws you into the book, feeling like you are having a conversation with Bob Quinn himself.

In the 1960s, Quinn was a producer at RTÉ, working on, among other things, early broadcasts of The Late Late Show. He became increasingly disillusioned by what he saw as the commercialisation of the channel. He opposed the growing presence of advertising on a public service broadcaster. He eventually resigned in 1969, and this collection opens with A Letter to RTÉ, written at the time to explain why. In it, he decries RTÉ as ‘The Factory’, which had moved away from its role as a cultural and educational body ‘and has grown into a large organisation’. He continues: ‘Organisations are not run by people. They are run by the systems which people invent to avoid the business of thinking.’ All in the name of efficiency. He goes on to say that the organisation has become so set in its ways it cannot change them and will eventually decay into a bloated corpse fed on by parasites. And he was writing this in 1969!

When he left RTÉ, he also left Dublin and moved to Conamara, where he soon became immersed in the culture there — the true Gaeltacht culture. He tells a story of being in a pub when the news in Irish came on the television. The barman, a native speaker, asked him what they were saying. The problem was that television Irish was ‘learned’ Irish rather than the living language to be found in the Gaeltacht. So, in 1987, a group of Irish-language activists (including Bob Quinn) set up a pirate television station in Conamara. In his introduction to this collection, Toner Quinn says, ‘One of my teenage memories is travelling at night through South Conamara with Bob, checking every pub’s television for the signal from the Irish-language pirate television station.’

In 1995, he was back in Montrose, appointed to the RTÉ Authority by the Minister for Arts, Culture and the Gaeltacht, Michael D. Higgins. He immediately set out to reform the station, campaigning against advertising targeted at children during Christmas. In fact, he suspended his membership from the authority every Christmas in protest at this practice. He writes that his ultimate goal was still the same — ‘The battlefield of child-targeted commercials was the front I had tactically — but with a certain amount of passion — chosen on which to combat the excesses of global consumerism and its pernicious influence on good broadcasting.’ The advertising continued, however, and he quit the authority in July 1999.

There is a lot more to this collection (and to Bob Quinn) than railing against RTÉ. There are some fascinating pieces on his filmmaking. There is an entire article, written for Film Ireland no less, about the making of Budawanny in 1987 and then its expansion to The Bishop’s Story in 1994. Budawanny was made as a black-and-white silent film with Donal McCann in the lead role as an idealistic young priest who falls in love. Quinn was able to make the film on a low budget because the cast and crew worked for very little payment. This proved what he had always known: ‘Irish film artists get their greatest satisfaction from working on Irish films.’ He also believes that funding of £50,000 from the Film Board came because they realised they had no films in production in 1986 and a silent film was better than none at all. The making of The Bishop’s Story came about because of the Bishop Eamonn Casey scandal in 1992. This was the impetus to revise the film and to add the modern framing sequences he had originally wanted to use for Budawanny but was unable to do at the time.

This is a book to be read as one continuous whole or one to be frequently dipped into — or both. Every chapter is an engrossing piece in its own right, covering a variety of topics, from an article about ‘Waiting for Gaddafi’ to a moving tribute to Donal McCann following his death in 1999. There is even a witty response to a negative review for his film Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoire, explaining where (and at great length — why) the critic had missed the point. It is a book of stories and of facts and opinions, and it is always entertaining and always informative.