WERE WE ACTUALLY on a train yesterday, travelling from Geneva to Zurich. Was this even possible?
Just a year ago, we were restricted to pacing and re-pacing the familiar few blocks around where we live in Dublin’s north inner city, kicking a football or pucking a sliotar in the greens of Grangegorman and the Phoenix Park to pass another long afternoon after homeschooling.
Back then, across the eternity of the past 12 months, the idea of a family jaunt across Europe, watching blinding white Alps rumble down into the crystalline lakes of Switzerland was an absurd pipe dream.
The winter of 2021 was a time of stasis and introspection, a time for dawdling along, examining tiny details of our immediate surroundings, as if for the first time.
Not entirely coincidentally, I started making my documentary film North Circular in early January of 2021, so instead of feeling imprisoned by lockdown, it felt like a useful imposition of focus on the world nearby.
The sudden lack of momentum was conducive to spending time examining the particulars of streets, back alleys and buildings around the North Circular Road.
The film is a documentary journey along the North Circular Road in Dublin’s north inner city as it curves from the Phoenix Park in the West to Dublin Bay in the East, all of which lay within the newly magical 5km radius.
As you go on this journey, characters manifest themselves, whose contemporary lives in some way echo the narratives of the past – so in parts a history film, told without archive, in black and white. Many of these characters are musicians, whose music also helps to tell their stories and the story of the road.
100 years ago, James Joyce’s Ulysses was published, and this year, as I was making the documentary, I was part of a Ulysses reading group, managing a page or two each day (OK, some days) and vaguely egging each other on in a Telegram group.
It took me a long time to make a connection between what I was doing with my film and what we were reading in the group – primarily because I was operating at a level that was infinitely less accomplished than James Joyce’s, but also because I was a little reluctant to be part of the Joyce conversations – which are usually either arid academic discourses, or a chirpy Edwardian costume parties.
Either way, the Joyce industry is generally concerned with “then” rather than “now” and though there was a lot of history in my film, the “now” was what appealed to me,
But the links kept surfacing.
Joyce, as most people know, was a huge fan of cinema and set up the Volta, Ireland’s first cinema in the north inner city. He was also a music lover and an excellent singer, and my film was a musical, weaving the lives of folk musicians and traditional songs into the narrative web of the documentary as it went. The first song in the film is about Charles Stewart Parnell, one of Joyce’s childhood heroes and so it went on.
There was also the matter of the structure we had settled on. Rather than a three-act film or a classic cinema narrative, we opted for a number of chapters, each with their own protagonist, antagonist, place and theme. A structure not a million miles from the schemas Joyce employed in Ulysses.
We also treaded some of the exact same streets as the characters in Ulysses: the Georgian tenements of Dorset Street, the canal banks of Ballybough, the pubs of Stoneybatter and the sulphuric dark alleys of Monto.
But like Joyce, we were happiest on the street itself, watching people rolling along, on errands unknown, or just killing time at street corners, waiting for something to happen.
There was also a parallel idea of reference and cross-reference, a web of connections that was never explicit but always there, just about. Most of the time in documentary making you are trying to make things clear and obvious but in this film we were happy to leave as much under the surface as we could, drawing small cross-links between elements of the film, spinning a complicated web as opposed to building with solid narrative blocks.
At times I worried that the film was disappearing into a Dublin 1 rabbit-hole, that would only make sense to my immediate neighbours. But turning back once again to Joyce, he expressed the philosophy of what North Circular is trying to achieve perfectly when he said of his own work, “in the particular is contained the universal”.
What he meant, and what we also believe, is that the details of one grimy street corner can contain multitudes. That a glimpse of a weathered face or a tattered bird is enough to tell many stories. That you can experience the entire history of a nation by taking a walk along a single city street.
The train was pulling towards Zurich, Joyce’s final resting place when my phone pinged with tremendous news. North Circular had won the Special Mention Award at the Dublin International Film Festival. A jury of an Irishwoman, an Englishman and a Spaniard had singled the film out for praise saying it was “the perfect fusion of images, voices and music of NCR: a legendary artery of Dublin’s body and a real almanac of what Ireland’s history is made of: barracks, prisons, cemeteries, hospitals & asylums but music too.”
The film was obviously resonating beyond its immediate surroundings.
As the train emptied us into the darkening grey of twilight Zurich we were faced with a choice. Go forth into the gloom to search for Joyce’s grave at Fluntern Cemetery, or celebrate the good news? In the end, in true Joycean style, we went for wienerschnitzel and Swiss wine in a restaurant I could barely afford. It’s what he would’ve wanted.
North Circular will have its premiere tonight at the Virgin Media Dublin Film Festival at the IFI at 6.30pm. To find out more, visit Diff.ie.
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