A Bird Flight from Iceland to Ireland: Transculturality and Intermediality in Pat Collins’ Biopic "Song of Granite"

• Main Author: Sampagnay, Louise
• Other Authors: Equipe de recherche sur les littératures, les imaginaires et les sociétés (ERLIS), Université de Caen Normandie (UNICAEN), Normandie Université (NU)-Normandie Université (NU)
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: HAL CCSD 2020
• Subjects: Intertextuality; Transcultural studies; Iceland > And the art; Irish Music; Irish Language; Irish Mythology; Irish cinema; Irish studies; musiq; litt; Iceland
• Online Access: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-03086751/file/Sampagnay%202020%20In%20Passage%20Song%20of%20Granite.pdf; https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-03086751

International audience This article explores the double hybridity of media and cultural sources in Pat Collins' biopic Song of Granite (2017). This Irish-language film focuses on the life of famous sean-nós singer Seosamh Ó hÉanaí (Joe Heaney), whose instinct throughout his life, from Connemara to Scotland and New York, was to be always on the move – not unlike a migratory bird. I presuppose that both hypermediality and transculturality within the film demonstrate bird-like qualities themselves: musicality and mobility. A first-time viewer may expect a quintessentially Irish film: yet one is confronted, from the outset to the end sequence, with an intense hybridity – from literature or poetry up to film script, and often through music simultaneously. Firstly, I focus on the various types of intertexts on the screen, which are mostly deployed through many "direct" (yet still mediated) quotes from Irish legends and songs, shaping a problematic intermediality between music and literature at first, which is enhanced by the obsessive motif of the bird throughout the film, especially thanks to the meditation on Buile Shuibhne. Afterwards, I highlight the ins and outs of a foreign intertext which unfolds through a non-conventional and innovative form of hypertextuality with Icelandic novelist Halldór Laxness. Eventually, I point out to what extent the intertwinement of intermedial and transcultural phenomena through the bird motif bespeaks the intricacies of diegetic enunciation on all narrative levels in the film.