This filmed documentary on The Life and Times of Liam Clancy brought home to me how much this group of four were the precursors of so many groups from the Beatles to U2. The folk tradition mutated into Rock and Roll.

The Director, Alan Gilsenan, made two versions, one for cinema and one for RTé, and they took four years to finish. The amount of archival research is impressive, and we see footage that has been unseen up to now.

This is compelling viewing from many perspectives. First there is the personal story of Liam himself, a story of innocence and experience, with all the emotional highs and lows you can imagine.

Then there are the political and social contexts: evocative images of Carrick on Suir; race riots in the States; war scenes from Vietnam; meetings with De Valera and President Kennedy.

A scene around a kitchen table singing an anti-war song with Pete Seeger is timeless in its condemnation of war, and the exasperated cry of why little if anything has been learned. Liam is at his most passionate here, and his compassion for the injustice of the slave trade, and black people in particular, consequented in white people refusing to go to their concerts for a time. They were labelled ‘nigger lovers’. Seeger and Bob Dylan liked them because they sang about everyday things, and did not buy the political correctness of helping people to forget the depression.

The interviews and the musical interludes are combined in a way that gives a cinematic rhythm to the 120 minutes of this intimate account of a life lived from the euphoria of popular success, (I hadn’t realised just how big they were for a time, filling Carnegie Hall and outselling The Beatles for example), to the tragic loss of a sister killed in a car crash, and the group breaking up, Liam losing all due to tax failures, the addictions, and more. Liam’s description of his nervous breakdown is heartbreaking, and yet he came through with heart renewed.

A review normally begins with the title, but here it is so enigmatic that it only makes sense in the final sequence where Liam, having opened his heart in heartrending fashion, concludes by saying no one knows anyone, in the sense that our inner selves can never be fully shared; that all is a mask. He compares himself to the ‘the yellow bittern’, to the bird in the poem, but the parallel is lost on me.

This well-constructed narrative of the last surviving Clancy brother, the kid brother who grew up from being treated like one and talked down to, to an adult with a mind of his own, and who took principled positions, especially when it came to contracts. His principled stands led to bickering and tensions and yet the family survived, and the shots of a show in The Olympia in 1964 that reunited the group are exuberantly energetic, funny and joyful.

But they are of their time. The exuberance of a Mamma Mia, the energy of U2 are on a different level in our time. There is an argument that divides our time into a pre-Vatican II time, and a post-Vatican II era, or a pre- and post-Beatle generation. This documentary provides evidence that this is so, without denying the timeless truth that being is basically a round ball. Its colour, shape and size are secondary.

If you want to know more about the cultural conditions that preceded our time, this is a film for you. Here is not only entertainment, albeit of an older generation, but much information about the Ireland of my generation.

Some of the language is of our time, but behind the brash New York tone at times there comes across the Irish spirit of universal compassion, not to mention the musical talent that paved the way for the sounds we live with now.

Of the two versions, the RTé version is more condensed and sharper, (90 minutes), deeper in a way, but the cinema version fills out more, especially Liam’s early attraction to poetry, and his first experiences of erotic love, naive in the extreme. This version also fills out the poem behind the title. I think The Yellow Bittern is about layers, visible and invisible.

But the beauty of this film is in the way it goes beyond the glamour of fame and fortune to the tedium, drudgery and pitfalls of live performances.

The content may be old but the method of presentation is modern: a studio setting, like many a Picasso; in some scenes we are looking at Liam looking at images on a large screen, while he is looking at us looking at him for most of the time. The editing enables much memory jogging, as the way the film is made echoes the way our minds and the eye of our mind works.

The Clancy Brothers may not have been big in your family. Like Joyce, they were exiles, but they never lost their love of old Irish songs, which they revived, and their collaborations with the Dubliners and the Fureys testify to this.

This is a personal portrait, that is confessional, without being mawkish, and revelatory without being embarrassing. A rare combination in art or life.

This film should be treasured as a historical gem.

 

Liam Clancy died 4 December, 2009