The Hidden Ireland, 2020: Aidan Killian's film, ‘Once Upon a Lockdown’
‘A woman in this room told me that, during the dark times she went shopping, and a man came up and shouted in her face: ‘You’ve got no mask on!’, to which she responded: ‘I’ve no knickers on either!"'
Horrific scene from lockdown, Ireland 2020
History Never Ends
In a healthy culture and society, Aidan Killian’s film, Once Upon a Lockdown, would be the toast and wonder of the country, and maybe one dawning day in the future it will be so. It is the story-within-a-story of the darkest times of our national lives, the new Penal Era of Convid, when the supposed government anointed by the sovereign People went rogue and set to oppressing its employers on the instructions of criminal outsiders, deploying to this end a mixture of lies, fear-mongering, and the wanton abuse of collectively-licensed state coercion.
Once Upon a Lockdown is a true story within a mythological one — or perhaps the other way around — the story of a young man whose grandmother is dying alone in a nursing home, forbidden to spend her last days in the arms of her beloved ones. To heal his own heart and those of others, the young man goes on the road to relate the story his grandmother has told him of the Tuatha De Danann and the Formorians, drawn from the imaginative foundations of the Irish nation. His aim is to tell this story to the peoples of the 32 counties of a captured and broken Ireland. Over the course of 2020 and 2021, Aidan tells his story in living rooms, ancient ruins, tents; on roofs, hillsides and beaches, to anyone who says they would like to hear it.
Once Upon a Lockdown is, accordingly, also the story of the vertical cultures of story and myth and traditions overcoming both the sway of the horizontal culture of diversion, reduction and propaganda, and the manipulation of these tawdry instruments to enslave and imprison whole peoples. It does this by the mere fact of its witness to continuance, to the possibility of the reignition of the most ancient impulses in times of stress and danger — and hatred posing as compassion and concern.
Tyranny triumphs, Václav Havel told us, when the ‘story’ — that which gives human history its shape and meaning and structure — is eliminated from human culture. In the evolution of Soviet communism, he continued, ‘[s]ince the mystery in a story is the articulated mystery of man,’ totalitarianism begins when the story of man begins to lose its human content. When that happened, he continued, ‘the uniqueness of the human creature became a mere embellishment on the laws of history, and the tension and thrill in real events were dismissed as accidental and therefore unworthy of the attention of scholarship. History became boredom.’ With that, the mystery of humanity began to wither and shrivel.
The sole instruments we posses to combat such drifts are those of tongue and ear and pen and memory, by which to continue to tell ourselves the true stories of human endeavour and indefatigability.
In the spring of 2020, as though instinctually, Aidan Killian understood what was happening in its deepest meanings, and set out to combat it with the weapons of word, story, memory, joke, satire and charisma, toting his personality and his yarn from county to county, town to town, glen to glen, bringing the balms of laughter and mythology to the starving peoples of a broken country. Aidan is a comedian, but also a master storyteller in the tradition of the ancient seanchaí. And, on this journey, he followed in the tracks and walked in the footsteps not merely of the fabled Irish bards, but also of the ancient European giullari — jugglers, strolling comics and wise storytellers who went around trading in sarcasm, irony, ridicule and stories at the expense of the great and powerful — lacing his ‘narrative’ (oh!, corrupted word!) with contextual contemporary commentary and reassuring raillery. In a time when the artistic community — almost to a (wo/)man — laid down its barbs and invocations and pledged allegiance not to the truth but to the Regime, Aidan Killian joined the heroic line of MacCraith, Corkery, Ó Faoláin, Yeats and Moriarty as a chronicler of the Soul of Ireland, driven underground yet again by evil and tyranny and cowardices, this time recording the evidence of ‘the story,’ the story behind ‘the story', the responses from the floor and the interruptions from without — so that we, his starving people, might remember what happened as it really was.
With this magnificent documentary, Aidan Killian has created a living document of that all but dead time, when he breathed new life into the lungs of his country and recorded the resumption of vital signs. In this, the centenary year of The Hidden Ireland, Daniel Corkery’s magnificent history of the ancient bards and poets of Munster in the dark days of the Penal Laws, he has added another — all-Ireland — chapter, as though to alert us to the vital verity that history never ends.