By Sarah Arnold and Kasandra O’Connell
Film-maker Flora Kerrigan, born in Cork in 1940, attended Crawford Art College before becoming an active member of the Cork Cine Club in the late 1950s and 1960s. Over eight years, she crafted remarkable animation and live-action shorts on 8mm film, earning international accolades and an airing on RTÉ. The surreal playfulness of her animations belies the painstaking meticulousness of their production, while her live-action films, featuring friends and family, are absurd, comedic, haunting and, most strikingly, explore female sexuality and desire. Many of her live-action films are located on the recognisable streets of Cork city. Speaking to the Cork Examiner in 1961, Kerrigan explained that ‘it takes almost 2,000 cut-outs for a two-minute cartoon … it’s work that requires infinite patience but it is very satisfying and less expensive than ordinary filmmaking’.
Kerrigan’s film-making life appears to have ended when she moved to London in the late 1960s. However, she pursued a creative life, taking photographs and becoming involved in activism through the Women’s Liberation Movement. She also wrote poetry under the pseudonym Eamer O’Keefe, with some of her earlier themes and her interest in graphics and typography carried through from her film-making.
Kerrigan’s work was recently rediscovered through a collaboration between the IFI Irish Film Archive and Maynooth University. Flora looked after her films, minding them carefully in Cork and London and bringing them home when she returned to Ireland some years ago to the care of her family. Her films came to our attention during our collaboration on the Women in Focus research project. The films are now preserved in the IFI Irish Film Archive.
We have presented this collection with a new musical accompaniment by renowned avant-garde free-improvisational pianist Paul G. Smyth and double bass virtuoso John Edwards.
Restored with support from ACE—Association des Cinémathèques Européennes and the EU Creative Europe MEDIA programme.
THE SEVENTH DAY
1961 / 4 mins 30 secs
The Seventh Day is a stop-motion animation depicting the dawn of time and the gradual evolution of the concept of time through images of hourglasses, clock faces and other time-based mechanisms. Eventually, time becomes so omnipotent that humans become enslaved to its demands, acting as time-based mechanisms themselves, harassed and harried across the screen by time’s fussy technology.
COLD FEET
1960s / 4 mins 17 secs
‘A footprint cartoon, in three parts, about a girl who got cold feet!!!’ (Flora Kerrigan). The highs and lows of navigating romantic ventures are joyfully explored through a three-part play of stop-motion cut-outs.
DREAM MAKER
1960s / 4 mins 29 secs
Dream Maker explores the relationship between two young women in a tender play of furtive glances, sensual interactions and hesitations. It’s a striking piece, and one of the few known Irish amateur films by a woman that offers such an intimate and dream-like portrayal of female characters.
Sarah Arnold is Head of Media Studies at Maynooth University; Kasandra O’Connell is Head of the IFI Irish Film Archive.