Abstract

An Cailín Ciúin (The Quiet Girl) (Colm Bairead, 2022) has reopened the debate about the place of the
Irish language in Irish society, and in the arts. Post-independence, the partial and contested re-
establishment of the Irish language has put it at the centre of highly charged debates about Irish
identity and politics. These debates have existed alongside other major societal changes in Ireland,
including the decline of the Catholic church and of socially conservative values, and the shift from an
agricultural to a service-based economy. Yet the limited existing critical work on the film discusses it
only in the framework of the success or failure of the state’s language policy. Neither the politics of
the film – an intimate family drama in 1980s Ireland – nor of the decision to shoot in Irish have been
deeply examined.

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of ‘minority’, and its expression in the fields of minor
literature and minor cinema, rejects the reification of an oppressed identity that often comes with
an explicitly political adoption of a minorised language. Yet in An Cailín Ciúin Irish exists in perpetual
relationship with English. Set in both the Gaeltacht (Irish-speaking communities) and in English-
speaking Ireland, the characters navigate the affective, institutional, commercial, political and
interpersonal factors determining their interchanging use of both languages. The use of Irish
emerges within Ireland’s linguistic space, coterminous with other sites of open contestation of
different frameworks of control and power both within the family and within the state. In this paper
I ask whether An Cailin Ciuin is a work of minor cinema in Deleuzian terms, and whether it can point
towards an emancipatory politics of huge contemporary relevance in Ireland.

Bibliography

Gilles Deleuze, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco, Essays Critical and Clinical, Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1997.

Gilles Deleuze, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, London:
Continuum, 2005.

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Capitalism and Schizophrenia: A Thousand Plateaus, London:
Continuum, 2004.

Derek O’Connor, ‘Celtic Cinema’s quiet coming of age’, Sight and Sound, 32 (5), 2022, pp. 9-10