Although director Mary Ellen Bute’s highly regarded Finnegans Wake (aka Passages fromFinnegans Wake) is a unique film that is likely to baffle anyone unfamiliar with James Joyce, it cannot be dismissed merely as a literary exercise. The director was right in claiming that her film was ‘not a translation of the book but a reaction to it’. It is actually based on a stage play by Mary Manning, who was also responsible for the screenplay. Joyce’s elliptical rhetoric and intricate punning, which might be considered a formidable barrier to the filming of this most opaque of his works, proved to be an attraction to Bute, whose enthusiasm for the ‘visual’ and ‘kinetic’ quality of his language led her to the surprising but well-judged move of running subtitles from the original text to support the dialogue.

The screening will be introduced by filmmaker and theatre director Alan Gilsenan, who made a series of short films for the National Library’s 2004 Joyce exhibition.