DN: FILM The Image You Missed
Donal Foreman’s new doc opens with a title card sequence that neatly lays its premise: “The Image You Missed” reads the actual title, followed by “A film between Donal Foreman | Arthur MacCaig.” The typographic dividing line is the big deal here, a subtle but definitive indicator of what follows: A son captures the experience of grappling with his estranged father’s life work; the two, though proximate, are separated.
Documentary filmmaker Arthur MacCaig spent much of his career energy documenting civil and political unrest in Northern Ireland. Between 1979 and 2005 he made 20 films, including his best known, Patriot Games, which was hailed as “thorough and thoughtful” by Janet Maslin in the New York Times. It was also denounced by the UK Foreign Office as “damaging and highly critical of Her Majesty’s Government." When MacCaig passed away suddenly at 60, hundreds of hours of footage and boxes of archive material came into the possession of his son, Foreman, an esteemed filmmaker in his own right, despite the estrangement that resulted from MacCaig living in Paris; Foreman in Dublin; MacCaig dedicating himself to his work while honoring a demand from his new wife not to see his son. In other words, the entire life’s work of a man Foreman barely knew was now available for him to sort through, with the all the paternal/filial/professional aspects one might expect looming over the undertaking. “I’m piecing together an image of you from these scraps, a fiction of who you might have been,” Foreman says in the form of a letter during the resultant film, clearly if not explicitly addressing MacCaig. And it's quite a thing Foreman has made from the scraps, the bits of film, photography, tape recordings, notebook entries, letters, television interviews, edited inventively together to create a conversation between son and father, filmmaker and filmmaker, observer and subject. It’s a volley; a segment from MacCaig’s archive countered with a similar shot from Foreman’s film collection. Parallels are made and Foreman works with the interconnectedness of material and the relationships. And that is indeed the “between” in the title card. Meanwhile, Foreman is able to launch ruminations into questions that grow of out that between: Who gets to tell a story? What gets left out? And what gets missed in the process? Foreman clearly wants the audience to be left to grapple with these questions, and he’s just as clearly not giving up the answers.
Foreman’s searching film, which devotes much of its attention to the father-and-son relationship, is also an inquiry into Foreman’s national identity as a Irishman and his professional one as a filmmaker. While much of the doc is spent exploring the Northern Ireland conflict, questions about the nature of filmmaking emerge: “Filmmaking is nothing more than people who find themselves in front of a camera,” MacCaig exclaims at one point. “Confronted by a filmmaker and their own experiences, in effect, they must have the courage to account for their lives. Where are you coming from? What have you done? Why? And how? What was the motivation and sense of your actions? What were the consequences for yourself and others?”
Those critical concerns around the nature of storytelling and film making provide the power behind the choices Foreman makes here: He does not come with a series of points to make—an abiding contrast between himself and his father—but rather with probing questions. It’s a brilliantly engaged examination, one conducted with his images, and those of his father, at its heart. Or, rather, between them.
Available to rent or buy on Vimeo