Rod Stoneman

Rod Stoneman speaking at a film festival in Tunis in 2008

Rod Stoneman is a writer, filmmaker and academic whose career intersects with key moments during the early years of three institutions: Channel 4 television in the UK; Bord Scannán na hÉireann / the Irish Film Board in Ireland; and the Huston School of Film & Digital Media at the National University of Ireland, Galway. He is Emeritus Professor at NUI Galway, Honorary Professor at the University of Exeter and Visiting Professor at the University of the West of England, Bristol.

Born in London in 1953, Stoneman grew up in Torquay in Devon in the south-west of England. He is married to Susan Clarke and lives near Galway in the west of Ireland. They have three adult children: Adam, Otto and Finn. In 2017, as Britain prepared to leave the European Union, he became an Irish citizen.

Early career

During the 1970s, following a Short Service Limited Commission in the British Army on the Rhine, Stoneman studied English and American literature at the University of Kent at Canterbury before completing a Postgraduate Diploma in the Film Unit at the Slade School of Fine Art in London. Having spent some years free-lance teaching film at the BFI and South West Arts, he managed the Arnolfini arthouse cinema in Bristol at the start of the 1980s.

During the 1970s the University of Kent at Canterbury was a recently-established red-brick university which prided itself on its exposure to continental European thought. While a student there and at the Slade, Stoneman came into contact with that moment of French structuralism which featured the unresolvable dynamic between Marxism, semiology and Lacanian psychoanalysis. Even as intellectual fashions came and went in subsequent years, he considered that framework to contain useful starting points towards understanding political, social and economic structures. Indeed, much of his pedagogy and writing in later years can be contextualised by a continuing radical, anti-establishment and non-conformist agenda, even within the walls of bureaucratic institutions, and also by a desire to encourage movement between intellectual exploration and film practice, whether in professional or academic roles.

His film-making in those years included roles as co-director and producer of Photomontage Today: Peter Kennard (35 mins, 1983), a film about the work of the visual artist Peter Kennard. He was director of Ireland: The Silent Voices (80 mins, 1983), made for Channel 4 Television; and also Italy: The Image Business (52 mins, 1984), also for Channel 4. Two years later he was director and producer of Between Object and Image: Modern British Sculpture (45 mins, 1986), made for the British Council/RTVE. He was not a prolific film-maker, however, and his appointment as Deputy Commissioning Editor with Channel 4, and his later role as Chief Executive of Bord Scannán na hÉireann / The Irish Film Board, led to a 20-year gap before returning to active film-making with -nolens volens- (47 mins, 2005), which was shown in film festivals in Sao Paolo, Aardhus and Cork.

Channel 4

In 1983 he joined the fledgling Channel 4 television station in Britain, initially on a part-time consultative basis, which allowed him to continue making programmes as an independent producer. These included the aforementioned Ireland: The Silent Voices, a documentary which offered a critique of British media coverage of events in Northern Ireland. In 1985 he was appointed Deputy Commissioning Editor with Channel 4's Independent Film and Video Department, sometimes referred to internally as the 'channel within the channel'. because of the wide range of material (including low-budget fiction, avant-garde and experimental film, political documentary, gay and lesbian programming, and feature films from the developing world) which was commissioned by this section.

Channel 4 at its inception was a significant departure in British television with a remit for innovation and a policy of ‘radical pluralism’ that embraced range and diversity in programming output and challenged the constraints of previous television output. As expressed by Jeremy Isaacs’s phrase, “There will be some diamonds, but also some dogs,” the policy of support for a multiplicity of independent production embraced greater risk-taking which inevitably led to some programmes and films that did not turn out well or did not attract significant audiences.

The Independent Film and Video Department initiated a decade of politically progressive and aesthetically avant-garde programmes screened on British television, scheduling The Eleventh Hour, People to People, Cinema of Three Continents and Out, commissioning and buying a range of political and personal documentary, experimental film, access and community programmes, low-budget fiction and third-world cinema. It also funded a network of regional workshops, ‘alternative’ film and video collectives that worked closely with trade unions, Labour local authorities, political groups, women’s organisations and ethnic minority communities.

During his time at Channel 4, Stoneman’s brief included experimental and African cinema, with involvement in over 30 African feature films. He also commissioned a number of documentaries and low-budget fiction projects dealing with Ireland. These included Margo Harkin's teenage pregnancy drama Hush-A-Bye Baby (1990) and Joe Comerford's High Boot Benny (1993), which subsequently became one of the first productions to receive support from the reconstituted Irish Film Board during the early 1990s. One of his responsibilities was to work with independent film workshops in Derry and Belfast, in an attempt to ensure direct access to the airwaves for excluded or marginalized voices. This was not an easy task during a time of armed conflict: on one occasion he rang the RUC to inquire about the whereabouts of the actress Rosena Brown, who had been arrested and held for questioning during the filming of Hush-A-Bye-Baby. A major row erupted in March 1988 following the delivery of Mother Ireland, a documentary directed by Anne Crilly, who was a member of the Derry Film and Video Workshop. The film examined Irish republicanism through a feminist lens, and from the point of view of Stoneman and Channel 4 it represented an opportunity to broadcast direct speech from an Irish nationalist and republican community in the Bogside in Derry – a community often talked about on British and Irish television at the time, but almost never given the opportunity to air its own views directly. In an unexpected and dramatic twist, however, within days of its delivery Mairéad Farrell, one of eleven people interviewed in it, was shot by a British Army SAS unit in Gibraltar along with two other Provisional IRA operatives. Her status as interviewee was instantly transformed from ex-prisoner to active PIRA member killed by British special forces in a controversial shoot-to-kill incident. In an unprecedented move, the then head of Channel 4, Michael Grade, decided to show Mother Ireland to the channel’s board in advance of screening, even though the board normally had no role in editorial decisions. When one prominent member of the board threatened to resign if the programme was broadcast, Grade decided not to transmit, and Mother Ireland was not shown until three years later as part of Banned, a season on censorship

Bord Scannán na hÉireann / The Irish Film Board

In 1993 Stoneman left Channel 4 to take up the position of Chief Executive with the newly re-established Bord Scannán na hÉireann / The Irish Film Board, based in Galway on the west coast of Ireland. It was a heady time in Irish film-making, with Michael D. Higgins, a radical left-wing Minister for Arts, Culture and the Gaeltacht (later President of Ireland), in charge of Government policy on film-making. This was reflected in the choice of film-maker Lelia Doolan as first chair of the new film board, and in a general readiness to take risks and embrace new talent. Stoneman strove to reconcile this creative impetus with the commercial demands that formed part of the Film Board’s remit, and sought to continue a version of the 'radical pluralism' that had characterized the early years of Channel 4 by supporting a wide range of films. The first annual review of the Board's activities contained a quote, inserted by Stoneman, from Mao Zedong: “Let a thousand flowers bloom, and a thousand schools of thought contend.”

In an entry in the Historical Dictionary of Irish Cinema, Irish film academic Roddy Flynn notes: “Stoneman justified such radical pluralism on more than simply academic grounds. Starting from the pragmatic basis that the Irish film industry was artisanal in nature (in contrast to the industrial approach of Hollywood), Stoneman argued that the only possible means of maintaining the authenticity and integrity of Irish cinema, whilst keeping an eye on the bottom line, was to produce the greatest possible variety of smaller films. For Stoneman, the strength of artisanal film-making lay in its unpredictability which increased the chances of capturing the public imagination (and thus achieving commercial success) in a fashion that didn't require the huge production and marketing resources brought to bear by Hollywood.”

Over the course of his tenure Stoneman adopted a broad interpretation of the Board's legal mandate to assist and encourage film-making in Ireland 'by any means it considers appropriate'. Recognising that production was only one of the issues facing Irish filmmakers, Stoneman commissioned research on the distribution of Irish (and other European) films in the United States; prepared an analysis of rural cinema exhibition (and of the viability of an arthouse cinema network); investigated the potential of digital media; and examined the Irish facilities and post-production base. By 1998 Stoneman was devoting more resources to the marketing and development of Irish films whilst continuing to defend the cultural and artistic role of cinema against those who argued for an increased emphasis on developing the audiovisual sector as a mainly business undertaking. By the time he left the Board in 2003, he could point to its involvement in the production of 100-plus features, sixty documentaries (including The Revolution Will Not Be Televised about which he wrote) eight television series and 150 short films. The Board had grown from a three person £1m operation in 1993 to one with 16 staff in 2003 and a budget of 12 million in the new European currency, the euro.

Film School

In 2003 Stoneman left Bord Scannán na hÉireann / the Irish Film Board to become the founding Director of the Huston School of Film & Digital Media at the National University of Ireland, Galway, a position he held until his retirement in 2015. The Huston school is the first and only film school in the west of Ireland, and is underfunded in comparison with other film schools, but despite this it gradually developed a modest national and international reputation for its scholarship and critical thought. As Director, Stoneman developed a number of pedagogic initiatives, notably collaboration between teams of students on the MA in Public Advocacy, who would prepare briefs for socially aware short films, and film students on the MA in Production and Direction, who would make them. This was an effort to challenge film students to move beyond the sometimes individualistic and ephemeral concerns of youth and engage in a critical manner with some of the key social issues of the day. He was also instrumental in hosting a summer school on human rights and film, and sought to expose students to diverse critical thought with an ambitious programme of visitors from Irish and UK universities, and film screenings and discussions featuring a wide range of international filmmakers and industry practitioners.

In his academic career he showed a keen awareness of the need to build spaces and opportunities in which creative and critical thought might continue to flourish despite the widespread growth of university managerialism. Within NUI Galway he was seen as one of those who battled against a corrosive neoliberal agenda that placed more emphasis on industry relevance and the statistical analysis of student numbers (as a yardstick for the allocation of resources) than on the depth and quality of the education the students received.

In addition to his work at NUI Galway, Stoneman was also involved in EU-funded film workshops in West Africa, the Maghreb and the Middle East, activities he has continued since his retirement. Writing about the future of film training in the Spring 2014 issue of Policy & Practice: A Development Education Review, he asserted that, for clear historical and political reasons, some of the most dynamic new filmmaking in the contemporary era was coming from the cultures of the Global South, where the very act of making films is both more difficult and more urgent. In the article, he invoked the French magazine Trafic (2004): “It is not overstating the crisis when suggesting that contemporary cinema ‘neither apprehends our reality honestly nor does it aid in imagining a different kind of future. It is suffocated by a set of anachronistic conventions dictated by the agents of commerce.’ The domination of the US model can be challenged and relativised by different forms of filmmaking from outside, but diverse cinemas from other countries and cultures are already situated as marginal and subordinate. Other cinemas are excluded by a dominant American cinema, commercial and confident, which contributes to the contemporary world’s image of itself and is embedded in a resilient ideology which interacts with the economic order.” Later in the same article he summarized his thinking on film and education with a succinct paragraph: “The circulation of ideas should take place alongside training to make films; theoretical considerations can also have a vital role. The encouragement of thinking about and through film must be radical and pluralist – the openness to the free movement of speculation should release curiosity, challenge supposition, develop dissent.”

Publications

Stoneman, Rod (2008). Chávez: The Revolution Will Not be Televised – A Case Study of Politics and the Media (Columbia University Press). ISBN 978-1-905674-74-9.

Stoneman, Rod & Sean Crosson, Eds, (2009) The Quiet Man … and Beyond, (Liffey Press, Dublin). ISBN 978-1905785568

Stoneman, Rod (2013) Seeing is Believing: the Politics of the Visual, (Black Dog, London). ISBN 978-1908966056

Stoneman, Rod (2014) Educating Film-Makers: Past, Present and Future, co-written with Duncan Petrie (Intellect, Bristol). ISBN 978-1783201853

Bell, Desmond, and Rod Stoneman (eds.) (2016) Mind the Gap! Seachain an Bhearna! Working Papers on Practice Based Doctoral Research in the Creative Arts and Media, (Distillers Press, National College of Art and Design, Dublin). ISBN 978-1870225021.

Filmography

Photomontage Today:  Peter Kennard, 35 mins, 1983, made for the Arts Council of Great Britain, co-director and producer.

Ireland:  The Silent Voices, 80 mins, 1983, made for Channel 4 Television, director.

Italy: The Image Business, 52 mins, 1984, made for Channel 4 Television, director.

Between Object and Image: Modern British Sculpture, 45 mins, 1986, made for the British Council/RTVE, director and producer.

-nolens volens-, 47 mins, 2005. Festivals: Sao Paolo, Aardhus, Cork, director.

A Tourist Excursion to the Burren, 30 mins, 2006. Burren Spring Conference, director.

12,000 Years of Blindness, 52 mins, 2008. Festivals: Cork, Dublin, director.

The Spindle, 17 mins, 2009, director.

Rod Stoneman

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