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In Conversation Bret Easton Ellis The Image You M
issed Film Our Battle of Images This programme of rarely-seen films uses alternative stylistic approaches to explore the Northern Ireland conflict. The images that have come to define the conflict have been primarily those of television and fiction: news reports, talking head documentaries, gritty crime movies and human-interest dramas. However, there is another visual history of the conflict preserved in the lesser-known work of a diverse group of international, politically militant and formally experimental films of the 1970s and 1980s. While most could be classed as documentarians, their innovative formal approaches discourage any complacent acceptance of the ‘real’, and often highlight how images of Northern Ireland have been manipulated and weaponised by the state and the media. Coming from various radical and artistic milieus in New York, London and Paris, the filmmakers collaborated with locals eager for representation outside the narrow frames of Irish and British media. Irish Film Institute, Saturday April 6 to Tuesday April 30 ifi.ie Ellis is often classified as an enfant terrible of the literary scene but he is also a 55-year-old man now so maybe that’s just a lazy analogy. Best known for American Psycho and its chilling protagonist Patrick Bateman, Easton Ellis mostly hangs in LA these days presenting his Patreon-supported podcast. He’s here, mainly, to discuss White, his first work of non-fiction, which is being touted as “an incendiary polemic about this young century’s failings, e-driven and otherwise…a denunciation of censorship, particularly the self-inflicted sort committed in hopes of being ‘accepted,’ and a bracing view of a life devoted to authenticity.” Once an enfant terrible, always an… O’Reilly Theatre, Thursday April 25, €18/€20 Exhibition Gabhann Dunne - Crossing the Salt The migration of birds to lands anew, entwined with their aerial movement, inform Crossing the Salt, an exhibition in which Dunne paints over 100 birds as they dip and soar; capturing their elegance, purpose and fragility in colourful palettes. Bird watchers will have a proverbial field day distinguishing the lapwings from redwings while the less informed can simply appreciate the beautiful brushstrokes. Farmleigh Gallery, Phoenix Park, until May 25. Open Tuesday to Sunday 10am-1pm, 2pm-5pm photo Mark McGuinness 88