'Responsible Irresponsibility'

by Miriam Sun May 10, 2009 14:36

From Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Quinn_(Irish_filmmaker)

by movie viewer Sun May 10, 2009 15:10

His book Maverick, about his efforts to improve the cultural content of RTE television, is a must read for students of media. Here is a link to Bob Quin's own website: http://www.conamara.org/

by Miriam Mon May 11, 2009 12:40

"Next Thurs, 14th May, marks the 40th anniversary of an RTE crew being
hijacked and brought to Clare Island, Co.Mayo by one of its own producers,
who wrote a much publicised letter to his friends and colleagues in the
station.
Little has changed in RTE."

Text of his letter is here for those can't be arsed to go to the link!

"Clare Island,
Wednesday, 14th May 1969

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

Over the past couple of years it will have become apparent to the more perceptive among you that RTE (henceforth to be known as the Factory) has been developing along certain regrettable but inevitable lines.

These tendencies towards a large, impersonal technocracy have been justified on the grounds of efficiency, the same grounds on which the wholesale exploitation of the resources of this country by our speculative leaders is based. In this sense, the Factory is fulfilling one of its functions, i.e. the reflecting of the country as a whole. This of course is ignoring one its other, equally important functions, the educational one. It is also ignoring the fact that one has not only the duty of reporting fairly what is happening, but if the situation is serious enough, of intervening personally, not as an organisation man, but as a man.

The Factory, as we are all aware, has grown into a large organisation. Organisations are not run by people. They are run by the systems which people invent to avoid the business of thinking. Eventually the people become the functionaries of the systems, in some cases, happy functionaries, in most cases, vaguely dissatisfied employees. The liberal conservative would describe the latter category as an expression of the Human Condition. This is not only rubbish, but dangerous rubbish. The human condition is defined by man; the degrees of comfort or discomfort are the direct responsibility of man.

What can one person do?

When confronted by a monolith which proposes to eat you, even in the nicest possible manner, you must do something. The worst thing to do is to allow the monolith to define the terms of battle. Ignore its pleas for logic, because it uses logic to obscure the truth; ignore its calls for reasonableness, the assumptions and premises of which are entirely questionable; query its sacred cows, its gods and its liturgies, its systems, its impeccable phrases imported from the respectable corruption of business management. Ignore above all its offers of a comfortable place in the technocratic womb; its bribes of security, status and free burial service.

Having ignored all of these expressions you will now find yourself out of a job. And you can’t afford this because you have a mortgage, an overdraft, a hire-purchase agreement and a realisation that you were never free. So you will not follow the advice in the preceding paragraph. That is when the organisation laughs.

What all this amounts to is that you can do absolutely nothing. You are completely trapped. You must now enter a period of despair, in which you will fulfil your functions in a perfect mechanical, unthinking, organisational manner. And this is all that is required by the system of organisation in which you work. And that is why the organisation decays and becomes a bloated and swelling corpse, feeding the increasing number of parasites but incapable of directing itself because there is no life, no human spirit to quicken it.

This, I suggest, is the situation in which the Factory finds itself. This despite the efforts of bright young men in advertising agencies to string gaudy beads around the neck of the corpse, the vile body, in an effort to persuade the people of this country that their property is still working on their behalf. It is not. It is simply a vehuicle for the frustrated fantasies of ad-men, the megalomania of insane technocrats and the sanctification of the acts of a conservative government. If one looks closely at those lines, one will see evidence of the greatest sell-out ever perpetrated on a nation – by the nation itself, through its sons.

And what do I propose to do about it? Mine is a personal philosophy of responsible irresponsibility. It attempts to counter the organisation’s pseudo-philosophy of irresponsible responsibility. If you follow me. I propose to get a boat and sail off, Charlie-Bubbles-like into the setting sun. All contributions will be tolerated, and appreciated if they’re in the form of moral support.

Yours Sincerely

Bob Quinn"

by admirer Mon May 11, 2009 15:20

In his letter about the Factory he proposed a sea voyage to be funded by a whiparound: "All contributions will be tolerated, and appreciated if they’re in the form of moral support." In the turn of events Bob Quinn, along with Lelia Doolan and Jack Dowling resigned from the Belly of the Beast that was Montrose television station and in 1971 issued a self published book giving their cultural reasons why (the subtitle says a lot) entitled Sit Down and be Counted - the cultural evolution of a television station. Jack Dowling (we should be told more about him and his intellectual interests) eventually passed away; Lelia Doolan had a satisfactory career in theatrical production and lecturing in journalism; Bob sailed his currach to the ends of South Connemara, also known as Iarchonnacht, where he lived on the edge metaphorically and financially. I visited his Cine Gael, a converted knitwear factory build by the Congested Districts Board (a sort of British third world aid programme in the 1890s), many years ago and enjoyed the evening programme of an Irish-made documentary and main feature of foreign provenance. I signed in as a temporary club member, paying a half crown membership fee in addition to another half crown ticket admission. One side of the old building was installed with cinema seats while the other half was outfitted as family living quarters. Taréis an sho bhi Bob agus a bhean chéile flaithiul go leor agus bain me lan taitneamh as na cainte leis na cairde go déanaí san oíche. After twenty minutes of Gaelic Bob felt that we had paid our respects to a language that metropolitan officialdom had left up the pole, and we switched over to English, in which we discussed various political and other questions.

Bob wouldn't remember me and many other city pilgrims who knocked on his humble door over the years, but most of us will always remember him and his pioneering cinematography against the odds, and his stream of letters and other verbal projectiles aimed at the cultural degradation of our country. We need deep cultural criticism in the spirit of Bob.