Colm O'Regan: The UCC video library was like Tanora on tap for a young film buff
Colm O'Regan: "If you were a pretentious country teenager in a house without a VCR, there was nowhere else to watch these stuff. Watching quare/slow films was one of the reasons for going to college."
It was like if Tanora came out of a tap. This was a library where you could go to watch any odd or ‘fordin’ film you wanted: the audiovisual library on the top floor of the library in UCC.
I heard about it from my older brother. It sounded magical — before YouTube or streaming existed — to watch films recommended on ‘lists of films to watch before you die’... before you died.
The Friday of my first week in the ‘collidge’ was my first chance. I picked Aguirre, The Wrath of God, because my brother had a book about films of the 70s and Klaus Kinski’s (Aguirre) demonic face was in the book.
He was like nothing I’d ever seen before. The only place to watch ‘that kind of film’ was late on Thursday on RTÉ2 on — the home of (in my parents’ parlance) the quare or the slow film.
If you were a pretentious country teenager in a house without a VCR, there was nowhere else to watch this stuff. Watching quare/slow films was one of the reasons for going to college. I nearly put it on the CAO.
I watched it on my first Friday, the day after the Freshers ball, in a hungover fug which is the perfect way to watch a film about people going down the Amazon on a raft losing their minds.
Aguirre is Werner Herzog’s influential debut about a 16th century Spanish conquistador who leads ne’er-do-wells and desperados in search of the fabled El Dorado. I don’t think it’s a plot spoiler to say that things go horribly wrong.
It is an astonishing achievement, shot in the middle of the Peruvian Amazonian jungle in 1972. One of the cameras was stolen by Herzog from a film school. The total budget was $370,000. That’s less than one bike shed.
The money wasn’t spent on Health and Safety. In fact it’s probably one of those situations where Health and Safety rules were brought in because of it.
What a great resource it was though: a library full of films about misfits for a load of misfit students who had no access to quare/slow films. There’s no telling who it inspired along the way.
I was thinking about this because the Irish Film Institute — the epicentre of quare and slow films — has a thing called The Bigger Picture every month where they ask people to pick a film to show.
This month they asked me. And I picked because old habits of pretension die hard, but also as a tribute to the UCC Video library on Q+3.
I had to introduce the film at the start. Even though I’ve done thousands of gigs, this was the most nerve-wracking public speech I’ve done in years.
We all recommend TV and film to people. But there’s not too much at stake. To pick a film for an audience is an act of Extreme Recommendation.
Watching a film you love through 140 people’s eyes was intense. I wanted to stop and explain things — to say something like “Don’t forget! The budget was low, that’s why the fake blood looks so fake.”
Afterwards, I watched as people left, trying to gauge if they’d liked it. Did they look baffled? Disappointed. Had I ruined Christmas?
Had some other earnest young man or woman brought someone along on a date and their date’s reaction to this landmark of modern cinema was so disappointing and disappointed that they split up that second.
Two people came up to me and thanked me. I don’t know about the other 138. But I don’t mind.
Not every tap has Tanora.
- The IFI Bigger Picture runs monthly.
- ifi.ie/the-bigger-picture/
