A Bird Flight from Iceland to Ireland: Transculturality and Intermediality in Pat Collins’ Biopic "Song of Granite"

Résumé En

This article explores the double hybridity of media and cultural sources in Pat Collins' biopic Song of Granite (2017). This Irish-language film focuses on the life of famous sean-nós singer Seosamh Ó hÉanaí (Joe Heaney), whose instinct throughout his life, from Connemara to Scotland and New York, was to be always on the move – not unlike a migratory bird. I presuppose that both hypermediality and transculturality within the film demonstrate bird-like qualities themselves: musicality and mobility. A first-time viewer may expect a quintessentially Irish film: yet one is confronted, from the outset to the end sequence, with an intense hybridity – from literature or poetry up to film script, and often through music simultaneously. Firstly, I focus on the various types of intertexts on the screen, which are mostly deployed through many "direct" (yet still mediated) quotes from Irish legends and songs, shaping a problematic intermediality between music and literature at first, which is enhanced by the obsessive motif of the bird throughout the film, especially thanks to the meditation on Buile Shuibhne. Afterwards, I highlight the ins and outs of a foreign intertext which unfolds through a non-conventional and innovative form of hypertextuality with Icelandic novelist Halldór Laxness. Eventually, I point out to what extent the intertwinement of intermedial and transcultural phenomena through the bird motif bespeaks the intricacies of diegetic enunciation on all narrative levels in the film.