Collection
Flora Kerrigan: Dream Maker
12 items
Filmmaker Flora Kerrigan, born in Cork in 1940, attended Crawford Art College before becoming an active member of the Cork Cine Club in the late 1950s and 1960s. Over eight years, she crafted remarkable animation and live-action shorts on 8mm film, earning international accolades and an airing on RTÉ. The surreal playfulness of her animations belies the painstaking meticulousness of their production, while her live-action films, featuring friends and family, are absurd, comedic, haunting and, most strikingly, explore female sexuality and desire. Many of her live-action films are located on the recognisable streets of Cork city. Speaking to ‘The Cork Examiner’ in 1961, Kerrigan explained that “it takes almost 2,000 cut-outs for a two-minute cartoon … it’s work that requires infinite patience but it is very satisfying and less expensive than ordinary filmmaking.” Kerrigan’s filmmaking life appears to have ended when she moved to London in the late 1960s. However, she pursued a creative life, taking photographs and becoming involved in activism through the Women’s Liberation Movement. She also wrote poetry under the pseudonym Eamer O’Keefe, where some of her earlier themes and her interest in graphics and typography elements were carried through from her filmmaking.
Kerrigan’s work was recently rediscovered through a collaboration between the IFI Irish Film Archive and Maynooth University. Flora looked after her films minding them carefully in Cork and London and bringing them home when she returned to Ireland some years ago to the care of her family. Her films came to the attention of Dr Sarah Arnold (MU) and Kasandra O’Connell (IFI) during their collaboration on the Women in Focus research project. The films are now preserved in the IFI Irish Film Archive.
We have presented this collection with a new music accompaniment by renowned avant-garde free-improvisational pianist Paul G. Smyth and double bass virtuoso John Edwards.
Restored with support from ACE – Association des Cinémathèques Européennes and the EU Creative Europe MEDIA programme.
Funded through the Research Ireland New Foundations Funding Grant Number NF/2024/11760.
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1m 24s
Filmmaker Flora Kerrigan, born in Cork in 1940, attended Crawford Art College before becoming an active member of the Cork Cine Club in the late 1950s and 1960s. Over eight years, she crafted remarkable animation and live-action shorts on 8mm film, earning international accolades and an airing on RTÉ. The surreal playfulness of her animations belies the painstaking meticulousness of their production, while her live-action films, featuring friends and family, are absurd, comedic, haunting and, most strikingly, explore female sexuality and desire. Many of her live-action films are located on the recognisable streets of Cork city. Speaking to ‘The Cork Examiner’ in 1961, Kerrigan explained that “it takes almost 2,000 cut-outs for a two-minute cartoon … it’s work that requires infinite patience but it is very satisfying and less expensive than ordinary filmmaking.” Kerrigan’s filmmaking life appears to have ended when she moved to London in the late 1960s. However, she pursued a creative life, taking photographs and becoming involved in activism through the Women’s Liberation Movement. She also wrote poetry under the pseudonym Eamer O’Keefe, where some of her earlier themes and her interest in graphics and typography elements were carried through from her filmmaking. Kerrigan’s work was recently rediscovered through a collaboration between the IFI Irish Film Archive and Maynooth University. Flora looked after her films minding them carefully in Cork and London and bringing them home when she returned to Ireland some years ago to the care of her family. Her films came to the attention of Dr Sarah Arnold (MU) and Kasandra O’Connell (IFI) during their collaboration on the Women in Focus research project. The films are now preserved in the IFI Irish Film Archive.
We have presented this collection with a new music accompaniment by renowned avant-garde free-improvisational pianist Paul G. Smyth and double bass virtuoso John Edwards.
Restored with support from ACE – Association des Cinémathèques Européennes and the EU Creative Europe MEDIA programme as part of A Season of Classic Films 2024.
This presentation was funded through the Research Ireland New Foundations Grant Number NF/2024/11760. Flora Kerrigan: Dream Maker was identified as part of the Women In Focus project, which was funded by Research Ireland and the Arts and Humanities Research Council as part of the UK-Ireland Digital Humanities scheme. The project was a collaboration between the University of East Anglia, Maynooth University and the University of Sussex, with the IFI Irish Film Archive and East Anglian Film Archive as archive partners.
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4m 40s
Early Animations is a compilation of short animated films created by Flora Kerrigan at the outset of her career. Playful techniques are employed to investigate the intricacies of human anatomy and movement. Chalkboard drawings, dancing puppets and stop-motion paper cut-outs feature as the filmmaker hones her craft and begins to explore the art of filmmaking.
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1m 58s
A young man experiences fitful visions on his deathbed. He visits abandoned cityscapes, follows a Grim Reaper and eventually ends up in a coffin with the Reaper looming overhead.
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6m 28s
‘A supercilious chess-player becomes obsessed with his white pawn as he sees her getting closer to becoming a queen. In his efforts to catch her, he enters into the game himself, with disastrous results.’ (Flora Kerrigan)
In this playful exploration of hierarchy and power as manifested in the game of chess, Kerrigan experiments with film technique and applies emulsion washes to the film strip itself.
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3m 21s
‘This is the story of a character who had delusions of frustration. If you can follow this film, you must be a psychotic!!’ - Flora Kerrigan
A stop-motion animation featuring meticulously crafted paper cutouts, which became a trademark of Kerrigan’s approach. Loose representations of male and female figures dance around the frame in a dramatic play of gender studies and relationship highs and lows.
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4m 42s
The Seventh Day is a stop-motion animation depicting the dawn of time and the gradual evolution of the concept of time, through images of hourglasses, clock faces and time-based mechanisms like cogs and pulleys. Eventually, time becomes so omnipotent that humans become enslaved to its demands, acting as time-based mechanisms themselves, harassed and harried across the screen by time’s fussy technology.
This title is also featured, without musical accompaniment, in the Women in Focus collection.
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3m 54s
The Worms Are Having Fun depicts a flirtatious interaction between two men and a woman. A painter views her as his muse, while the other admires her from afar. As Kerrigan explains: ‘Two men are continually being haunted by one girl.’
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5m 53s
A gothic-infused escapade where slapstick visual gags are playfully tested. A man disappears into a bathtub and out hops a woman; a fisherman casts his rod over a hill into a glass container which tries to swallow him; a gravedigger makes a futile attempt to lift a headstone. Two men enter a tunnel seconds before a train, only to exit a few moments later, visibly injured. Kerrigan flexes her filmmaking skills, masterfully playing with narratives and story telling techniques. As she explains, it’s a ‘discordant epic, culminating in an execution."
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4m 17s
‘A footprint cartoon, in three parts, about a girl who got cold feet!!!’ (Flora Kerrigan)
The highs and lows of navigating romantic ventures are joyfully explored through a three-part play of stop-motion cut-outs.
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4m 10s
‘The story of the race for space, and what happens when the space gets overcrowded.’ (Flora Kerrigan)
Bombs, rockets, a hammer and sickle, the USA flag and Laika the dog race around the moon in this powerful stop-motion animation depicting the Space Race during the Cold War. Moonshine belies Kerrigan’s political interests and demonstrates the refinement of her skill as an accomplished animator.
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4m 29s
Dream Maker explores the relationship between two young women in a tender play of furtive glances, sensual interactions and hesitations.
It’s a striking piece, and one of the few known Irish amateur films by a woman that offers such an intimate and dream-like portrayal of female characters.
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5m 28s
‘How it feels to be dead! The senses are explored, one by one. Though dead, the spirit lives on; the ideas and ideals of a man live forever. The beginning is the end, and the end is just the beginning.’ (Flora Kerrigan)
Meticulously crafted, paper cut-outs of coffins, headstones, eyes, candles, crosses, and psychedelic backgrounds dance across the screen. Sensory functions are gradually removed - an ear is broken by a hammer, a mouth is locked in a cage, a nose is put in a coffin, hands are pricked by a thorn, a heart is trapped inside a coffin – in an exploration of afterlife.