St. Clair Bourne, 1983, 45 min.
Duncan Campbell, 2008, 37 min.
Bernadette and The Black and the Green are screening in the cinema on Thursday 3/17 at 7:30PM for a suggested donation of $15 as part of Ár Lorg Saoirse: A Radical Irish Cinema
Bernadette
Bernadette presents an unraveling, open-ended story of the female Irish dissident and political activist, Bernadette Devlin.
Devlin visited the United States on several occasions, drawing frequent parallels between the struggles faced by Irish Catholics and Black Americans. On her first trip in 1969, she visited Operation Bootstrap in Watts. When offered the key to New York City in 1970, she had it given instead to a Harlem representative of the Black Panther Party, “as a gesture of solidarity with the black liberation and revolutionary socialist movements in America.” In February 1971, she visited Angela Davis in prison. Devlin assailed the indignity of Irish Americans who accepted and perpetuated the conditions of white supremacy (the following quote is from a 1979 TV appearance in Boston):
“If the Irish American community became too involved in our struggle against oppression, it might raise some questions as to the contradictions within their own body politic in America…There is nothing sadder to people struggling against oppression in Ireland [than]...to look towards Boston city and see our people being used to oppress the Black people of this city…The whole inspiration of our civil rights movement ten years ago came from the Black movement of America”
The Black and the Green
In 1983, St. Clair Bourne produced and directed one of his most rarely seen films, The Black and the Green, chronicling a fact-finding trip to Belfast made by five American civil rights activists, who found that many Catholics in Northern Ireland had been influenced by the civil rights movement in the U.S. As The Washington Post reported at the time: "In the Belfast ghetto, the delegation members are strangers in a familiar land of crushed tenements, graffiti-stained walls and heavily armed law officers". St Clair Bourne told The Post that "the film ends up seeming pro-Irish Republican Army in the same sense that a film about Selma in the 60s might have ended up seeming pro-black, but then I’m a filmmaker from the 60s. I try to be humanistically political."
