Audience Member
Masterpiece.
An absolutely perfect film.
Be prepared to forget who or where you are.
Rated 5/5 Stars •
Rated 5 out of 5 stars
01/15/23
Full Review
stephen c
Just didn't work for me
I really wanted to like The Image You Missed; it's a low budget documentary that takes a deeply personal approach to an inherently Irish political situation, of which any Irish person over the age of thirty will have memories. Essentially, it's a "dialogue" between writer/director Donal Foreman and his dead father, Arthur MacCaig, who moved to Belfast during the early years of The Troubles. Interested in exploring the disparity between the tribal, religious-based conflict depicted in the media, with what he saw as a non-sectarian struggle between "coloniser" and "colonised", MacCaig's unapologetically Republican stance earned him extraordinary access to the IRA.
His best-known film is The Patriot Game (1979), a feature-length documentary made for French television, which uses street-interviews and IRA-insider material to chart the history of conflict in Ulster from the formation of the Northern Irish state in 1922. As is mentioned in The Image You Missed, when the British Foreign Office warned its embassies that The Patriot Game was "damaging and highly critical of Her Majesty's Government," MacCaig welcomed it as "the best review I ever had."
MacCaig died in Belfast in 2008, when Foreman was 22. Raised in Dublin by his mother, Foreman only met MacCaig a handful of times. Nevertheless, they had reconciled a few months before MacCaig died, and after the funeral, Foreman travelled to an apartment MacCaig owned in Paris to go through his belongings. Much to his surprise, he unearthed over one-hundred hours of never-before-seen documentary footage, and the idea for The Image You Missed was born.
In the film, Foreman essentially tries to engage in a conversation with MacCaig by way of cutting between MacCaig's footage and his own, directly addressing his dead father, and reading in voiceover letters written by MacCaig. In this sense, both the poster and the opening credit read "A Film Between Donal Foreman / Arthur MacCaig". It is, at the most basic level, a film in which someone still living attempts to 'communicate' with someone already dead. With that in mind, the film has no discernible narrative as such, using editing to juxtapose, contrast, comment upon, and suggest thematic links between the footage shot by the father and that shot by the son. There's also no real central character; the documentary is not 'about' either man in the classic sense of the term; it's about the space between them.
Unfortunately, for me, it just didn't work. Apart from a pronounced failure to justify why it was being shown on the cinema as opposed to TV (there's nothing inherently cinematic in it), a major problem is a failure to contextualise, jumping in and out of scenes without suturing the viewer into the milieu. Granted, it makes no claims to be an historical overview, but the viewer still needs to be situated in relation to what they're watching. Foreman doesn't use the backdrop of the Troubles to inform the dialogue between himself and MacCaig, but neither does he use that dialogue to inform the presentation of the Troubles, so the fact that the film is set in Belfast is, bizarrely, and quite paradoxically, kind of irrelevant.
Tied to this is the most egregious issue I had with the film, a question I found myself asking after about twenty minutes - why should I, or anyone else, care that Foreman had a tough relationship with his father? Who doesn't? I wouldn't expect anyone to sit through a documentary in which I work out my daddy issues, not unless those issues speak to a more all-encompassing truth, and I'm really not sure why Foreman should be any different, as he certainly provides no such reason in the film. And precisely because he doesn't allow the personal and the political to inform one another, the film just comes across as a guy with a camera watching old footage shot by his dad.
Maybe I didn't respond correctly to the form, maybe I wasn't the target demographic (at the screening I attended, I was the youngest person in the cinema by a good ten or fifteen years at least, and I'm 40), I'm not sure, but whatever the case, I was just left wondering as to what the purpose of any of it was.
Rated 2/5 Stars •
Rated 2 out of 5 stars
03/30/23
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