Music o’ the Wind: Song of Granite

Roger Ebert’s observation that biopics make every life come out the same is still crushingly relevant decades after he made it. In an identity-oriented cultural landscape, notions of authenticity ought to bear considerably more purchase than they used to. As consumerism and its fixation on the surface appearances of the immediate present continues to distort our notion of authenticity, questions of the form that artworks take may help us dial down some of the noise and address the lingering questions that have plagued this form of Cinema as Individual Portraiture. For this, filmmakers adopt humbler and more ambiguous methods of making the past come alive – eschewing linear storytelling and conventional plotting - perhaps because doing so can allow one person’s story to transcend national borders and limited notions of identity that focus on ethnicity, race, gender or sexuality and the same stories about overcoming the longer odds facing certain types of individuals. To achieve a cinematic biography that channels this transcendence or universality, may require a sense of open-ended poetry and granular focus, rather than the highlight reels and flashy character transformations conventional biopics give us.

Filmmakers steer away from this mentality, said Irish director Pat Collins in an interview with Sight & Sound in 2017, “because they feel there’s a bigger world out there and because they want to make a film that’s more marketable in the United States.” The way in which Collins’ 2017 film, Song of Granite ignores that impulse is what makes the film resonate so deeply. He’s not thinking about it at all. The subject of the film is Joe Heaney, who sang folk songs in a style called sean-nós. A conventional biopic would have focused on the man. Song of Granite is about the singing. It feels as if it’s about singing universally. Because of this decidedly un-Hollywood focus on the work and its milieu rather than the person, Collins achieves, with remarkably austere richness, a film that is not about the Joe Heaney in all of us or what Joe Heaney symbolized for Ireland, but about this Joe Heaney and about Irishness itself.

If this never comes across as divisive and obnoxious in the way that I feel crass, misbegotten displays of national pride often can, it’s perhaps due to the specificity of this subject and how Collins views it. Song of Granite is devoid of genre elements or any standard ingredients for crossover appeal. But specificity, rather than broadness, is what makes it universal. Collins sites Patrick Kavanaugh’s line about it taking a lifetime to know one field. And if a feature-length motion picture can’t be said to accurately encapsulate or sum up a person’s whole life, Collins’ deep immersion in the world of Heaney offers a glimpse of this particular kind of possessed life that’s undeniably satisfying. We go for depth where breadth comes up short.

We glimpse Heaney as if through a kaleidoscope, at various stages in an unpredictable life (narratively, think Moonlight for a partial reference point). First as a child, singing to himself as he lays in bed and then watching his father sing sean-nós in Connemara pubs during the 1930’s. Songs at these intimate functions are followed - contextualized in a way - with stories told by an elder village figure and we get a sense of the rich oral tradition for which the region is renowned. A Connacht brogue is an unmistakable and beautiful accent to hear but sean-nós singing was a talent few people had, and songs were not widely sung in the old language outside the rocky rural communities like the one where Heaney grew up. But Gaelic song seems to be present in every aspect of young Heaney’s life - school, home, play and church. Collins depicts it as a fact of existence, as much a part of the fabric of nature as all those breathtaking hills and valleys.

Sean-nós is sung unaccompanied in Gaelic. The way the notes sort of trail and trickle up and down in half-steps gives the songs a vaguely Middle Eastern or Mediterranean flavor, but the songs and the people who could sing them are as deeply connected to traditional Irish culture as the region they come from. Seasoned sean-nós singers knew literally hundreds of songs by heart – people’s heads were not stuffed with media garbage back then – and in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, these songs and their singers traveled to the US and the UK and reached wider audiences. The scenes with Joe as a wide-eyed boy seeing, touching and hearing the world around him establish the film’s policy. They’re not nostalgic memories. They feel like immediate sense-lessons that would inform the soul of a would-be poet.

We jump forward (or return) to scenes of Heaney as an adult performing in small houses and firelit taverns for a dozen or so people and to crowds on stages abroad. Documentary footage of Heaney working in coal mines is intercut with the story. Before we’re too quick to fall in love with the staggering beauty of the imagery, Collins reminds us of the existence of the real Heaney in his least romantic moments. A blurring of the line between fiction and nonfiction complicates anything we might have to say about a film like this, which for me, adds to its awesome staying power. What Heaney does seems intimate and personal, which might be why Heaney’s later staged performances with the use of a microphone don’t feel right for such a performer, And yet the gravity of Heaney’s singing is framed by Collins masterstroke decision not to provide subtitles for the lyrics. We lose any insights into this culture that subtitled lyrics may provide. But what is gained by this decision is far more lasting and moving. By not reading along with the singer, we’re able to really listen to the performance of the music. We feel the arc of the song as it lilts or elegizes, and the sense of a story being told within the tones as they change.

This is one way in which the specificity of the film’s focus makes it counterintuitively more, rather than less approachable. The film is not handicapped at all. The music scenes are led by their raw power, their otherness transmitted directly and potently without the need to understand even a word. This method also effectively takes some of the focus off Heaney, allowing us to see these communities more objectively and simply. Heaney’s story cannot be related, Collins shows us, without exploring the society and culture that helped guide and shape it. In Song of Granite, Place - in the sense of both community and terrain - is privileged every bit as much as Event.

This is almost a landscape film first, and a portrait second. The monochrome black and white cinematography by Richard Kendrick adds the power of old photographs, evokes memory without reliance on nostalgia, and creates a palpable sense of atmosphere. Long takes, classical framing, exteriors and street scenes like Hopper paintings, the music of nature sharing the soundtrack with the dialogue and songs. Other shots place human subjects within vast, almost mythic-looking valley landscapes. Children and elderly adults alike adorn fords and streams, sitting and pondering away into the distance, backgrounded by clouds crashing into mountain tops. It’s potent and breathtaking in a way that’s perhaps not possible with color.

These are locations that speak of the vastness of the singer’s soul. Heaney and his peers sing when they’re together, or when they’re alone, when they’re on the move down the road, or at a tavern, or standing in the hearth of their homesteads, or just sitting in a field smoking – enjoying a parenthetical break in their day. A conventional biopic would stress what the men and their wives are singing, who the songs are for and what happens to them as a result. The singing would be one more element hung on the clothesline of a narrative, and a good example of how adherence to plot conventions hampers storytelling. This film is about why they sing and what it means to sing. Like cinema, song is another form language can take, and the movie does not privilege it or Heaney over the setting and the culture that bore them.

In the late 1960’s, Heaney moved to New York and the contrast between his new American life, meek and confined within a concrete metropolis, and his prior Irish life of spontaneity, community and leisure is related to us without hitting us over the head. A recorded interview with Heaney, who’d just performed at the Newport Folk Festival in 1966, is played over late scenes with Heaney working as a doorman and living an unspectacular life in a small garden apartment. We’re saddened a bit by the removal of the man from the bucolic lifestyle that inspired him, but this is not depicted as tragic or defeating. It’s simply the direction in which his life went. The reflective older Heaney in his 60’s talks about what it is to tell a story within his songs – the act of watching a person but also playing that person. His memory was said to have retained a repertoire of over 500 songs, and having at last been discovered in the American Folk Music Revival of the 1960’s, he could finally speak to newcomers and younger generations about his art.

Critiquing the performances of Colm Seoighe, Michael O’Chonfhlaola or Macdara Ó Fátharta as Heaney at different ages of his life seems like a moot exercise when one considers how well these actors work in harmony (like the actors in Moonlight) to create a character that blends into the landscapes and textures of a film that’s as much about them as about him. Three performances creating the notes of a chord. It’s another element of a film that’s confidently unshow-ffy, so uninterested in the swagger of a bombastic lead character transformation and the greatest hits setpieces that usually accompany it. Movies about artists and musicians are among the hardest kinds of portraits to get right.

What is this one doing differently that makes it so resonant? Stepping back, listening, observing, balancing portraiture with landscape. In other words, nothing new or revolutionary, even with a decidedly elusive figure as the main subject. Two books have been written about Heaney and a documentary was filmed about him and even with this film, still very little is known about him. So Song of Granite uses the man as a vessel to explore everything around him and why it’s all equally worthy of consideration. He is the departing train, not its destination. It doesn’t matter that we don’t actually come to know Heaney. It’s what we come to know through him that matters.  

Perhaps my grouchy annoyance every year with the way St. Patrick’s Day is regarded in much of the United States makes this a reactionary piece, written out of a sense of spite for the loud, destructive, shallow and sometimes, insulting ways people “celebrate” this particular holiday. So the opportunity to point people (being part Irish myself) towards a genuine figure from this heritage, depicted with an emphasis on authenticity, is a bit of a troll’s move on my part. Ideally, this conflicted impulse in me would be offset by the hope that it will be enriching and affirming to discover, not just for Irish people, but for everyone, as a universally applicable theme of channeling existence, history, language, culture and feeling into art. An affirmation that could make us all feel like singing.