"Hey, is that real? She couldn't be." So says Sean Thornton (John Wayne) in John Ford's The Quiet Man (1952). The "that," the "she" in question is Maureen O'Hara's red-headed, red-skirted Mary Kate Danaher. He catches sight of her in the long space of lighting a cigarette as she passes by shepherding a flock of sheep through the idyllic Irish countryside. Her vibrant redness appears with such Technicolor glory that we may feel the same––has there ever been a red so seemingly unreal against nature's sprawling green?
"Red is more durable," the Rev. Cyril Playfair (Arthur Shields) comments on the door of Sean Thornton's refurbished cottage "White O'Morn," which he has painted green––emerald green, a shade "only an American would have thought of." That is the remark of the Reverend's wife, who admires it as looking the way Irish cottages should "and seldom do." Sean Thornton spent most of his life dreaming of it, "next to the slag heaps" of Pittsburgh he boxed his way out of, and the black-smoked vistas of his past can only further glorify the picturesque blue skies of Ireland and his family's cottage, his birthplace, "White O'Morn." So when Sean asks "Is that real?" he may as well be talking about Ireland.
But the Ireland of The Quiet Man is not real. It is a space built by the imagination of its emigrants returning to find peace from the wealthy industrial boxing ring of America. Sean Thornton's wealth allows him to grow flowers instead of crops, to buy a large bed and break it without a thought, and to forget his wife's dowry although she cannot and will not forget its history. He wants to forget his own, but to find that the native Irish are even more burdened by the forces of the past than he is himself is beyond his immediate comprehension.
The relationship between the past and the present defines the Irish cinema, burdened as it is with the twin cultural powers of the United States and the United Kingdom. It is not only the history of British colonialism, or the reality of the Irish diaspora, which led so many of its children to seek refuge in America during the harsh famines of the 19th century. Its flanking nations' dominance over the Anglo-market has smothered much of Ireland's ability to create its own authentic cinema. We can see this from the very beginning of Irish cinema history.
According to most scholarly histories of Irish cinema, America's depictions predate Ireland's own self-portraits. Sidney Olcott's The Lad from Old Ireland (1910) is accepted (with acknowledgment of the great blank desert that composes silent film history) as the first Irish fiction film. American-produced, directed by the Canadian-born son of Irish immigrants, it is also accepted as a pioneer film in location-shooting, an aspect that all Sidney Olcott films would feature. Marketed as a "great transatlantic drama," even its title appeals to the masses of Irish immigrants, who could identify with the main character, all being "from" "Old" Ireland. The main character Terry O'Connor travels to America to seek riches and leaves behind his girl Aileene and her grandmother, who toil and succumb to sickness and poverty. The film uses sophisticated cross-cutting to portray the twin narrative strains.
Aileene works in the fields, Terry works in a factory.
Aileene and her grandmother wait aimlessly, Terry wins political office.
Aileene's grandmother dies and a landlord demands payment; Terry mingles in high society.
In the end, Terry returns to Ireland, pays off the debtor, and presumably lives happily ever after. The film, in its simplicity, does not resolve the tensions of Ireland and the United States. While in America, Terry's hard work results in success, wealth, and admiration. The toiling that Aileene does in Ireland is fruitless. Although the film ends in Old Ireland, although Terry pays off the landlord, it seems impossible to imagine the characters not returning to the United States.
Not all of the Irish films Olcott made (eight survive) portray Ireland in such a pessimistic light but most of them do portray America as a land of opportunity, wealth, freedom, and safety. A violinist achieves a great career in New York City in His Mother (1912), rebels seek political refuge there from the British in Rory O'More (1911) and For Ireland's Sake (1914), where the final title card reads "To the west! To the west! To the land of the free!" It is only when a woman goes alone, as in Come Back to Erin [Ireland] (1914), that she finds making her fortune difficult.
That histories of Irish cinema do use these films as something of a birthplace is ironic in part because of how self-conscious these films can be. The films are often framed as a form of tourism. The Colleen Bawn, a film based on a popular Irish melodrama play by Dion Boucicault, neither frames England as the cause of its problems nor needs America to provide safe haven for its characters, but the entire film calls upon the eye of the foreigner to enjoy its "authentic" locations and interiors by the repeated intrusion of title cards that call attention to the scenic elements rather than the dramatic action. They point to an Ireland from the past, preserved on film, for foreign enjoyment. 
Title cards from The Colleen Bawn
Sometimes, it's subsumed into the narrative, as in His Mother, which begins with an American tourist couple who "discover" the young violinist and his mother after entering their cabin. That film begins with a panning shot from the limited view of them and their car stalled on the road, to the great expanse of the Irish countryside with a little house tucked away within it. In this case, the entire act of witnessing the Irish people themselves becomes touristic.
His Mother
Olcott's films, made in the years leading up to the Easter Rising of 1916, patronize radical Irish sentiments, but remain firmly entrenched in "respectability politics." In Rory O'More, the title character on the run from British soldiers turns back to save a drowning one. Upon saving him, the other soldiers want to let him go free, but the system at hand forces them to follow through with the arrest and execution (although deft plotting in the end lets him free). Similarly, in Bold Emmett, Ireland's Martyr (1915) the protagonist defies a crowd of Irish rebels from kidnapping a wounded British officer he is hosting. When he finds himself on the executioner's landing at the end, a pardon from that British officer as well as a delay caused by Irish rebels saves him. This is the sort of "have your cake and eat it too" writing that one is apt to believe only an American could think up. Bold Emmett would be one of the last films Olcott made in Ireland, and indeed sympathies for Ireland's political situation would deteriorate as the United States allied with England in the Great War two years later.
The films Olcott made can only look to the past, however, to find their politics. Bold Emmett, Rory O'More and For Ireland's Sake all are period pieces and portray the British in the storybook style of redcoats in white wigs, a sleight-of-hand that conflates America's own hallowed history of resistance with Ireland's. Although Olcott's films have decayed and disappeared from wide consumption, the vision of Ireland––of "Old" Ireland––has remained: a fixation on the rural fields, on farmers and the past. Not only in The Quiet Man, which has some self-awareness as to its idea of the immigrant's and the immigrant's child's problematic relationship with their homeland, but in films such as Captain Lightfoot (1955), Douglas Sirk's picaresque set in 1815, or Frank Laudner's Captain Boycott (1947), set in 1880.
The year before Captain Boycott, Laudner directed I See a Dark Stranger, set in the 1940s during World War II, starring Scottish Deborah Kerr as the overzealous Bridie Quilty, a staunchly anti-British young woman who gets involved with a German spy. It presents Bridie as a Don Quixote figure, fed on romantic and exaggerated tales told by her now deceased father; a girl who wishes for radical anti-imperialist action against a country that "no longer" dominates Ireland. It presents the violence of the Irish rebellion and the Irish civil war as history––Bridie even takes a guided tour through a series of portraits of significant figures. And, more than anything else, the most consistent and memorable aspect of Bridie's anti-English fervor is her hatred of Oliver Cromwell––dead three hundred years. I See a Dark Stranger, to bolster the idea of Irish-English comradery, locates the tensions between the two nations as dead and dormant history.
Homegrown cinema, sadly, rarely stays so. When Ireland does produce its own filmmakers, they tend to look elsewhere to further their careers: Jim Sheridan and Neil Jordan are two such examples, who achieved their first successes in Ireland but then relocated to the UK or US. An earlier example, Brian Desmond Hurst, trained in Hollywood, career flourished in the UK––but for a brief moment, he was caught between the two; in Ireland, he made Riders to the Sea, an adaptation of J.M. Synge's famous short play. Synge, anthropological in style, wrote dialogue that resembled the natural rhythms and phrasing of native Irish people of the west, as opposed to the more cosmopolitan city dialects. He, in his time, did more than create a discursive space for obscure Irish peoples and dialects: he responded to a call for de-Anglicization, for a private language, made by writers like Douglas Hyde and W.B. Yeats, who in his essay "Ireland and the Arts" wrote: "I will not, however, have all my readers with me when I say that no writer, no artist [...] should try to make his work popular [...] art is not less the art of the people because it does not always speak in the language they are used to." Such a call for courage in obscurity feels more poignant than ever when hypercommercialism has prompted filmmakers like John Patrick Shanley to justify watering down Irish dialect in his film Wild Mountain Thyme by saying, "You have to make the accent more accessible to a global audience."
In Riders to the Sea, Hurst directs the Irish cast without sentimentality or preciousness; he shoots the environment the same way. The Irish shores and the looming mountains may still hold a picturesque quality to them, but the narrative resists any tourist's eye: the environment is as hostile as it is beautiful, swallowing up husbands and sons, the young and the old.
The opening images of Riders to the Sea (1936)