Review of Portrait of Ireland

Introduction

Setting aside the occasional unpleasantness, Ireland is a truly beautiful country. I feel qualified to say this having lived in Ireland (both North and South) for 33 years. The Portrait of Ireland DVD attempts to capture the beauty and charm of Ireland with stunning visuals set to evocative music. Well, that was the idea anyway.

Video

The filmmaker Dann Moss certainly had some superb visual raw material to work with here. For its size, Ireland must have the highest concentration of spectacular/beautiful/charming sights in the world (OK, I’m biased). Consider that the geological grandeur of the Giant’s Causeway, the eerie limestone landscape of The Burren, the lakes of the Shannon, the Mourne mountains and glistening Carlingford Lough, the Mediterranean charm of Dalkey and the elemental fury that pounds the Cliffs of Moher are all within a day’s drive of each other. This could have been superb.

But it isn’t.

In fact, it is downright terrible. Rather than picking genuinely spectacular (and recognisable) landmarks, Moss produces the blandest visual representation of Ireland I have ever seen. We are subjected to a parade of generic clichés such as rolling green fields, thatched cottages and toothless yokels. Even when dealing with a specific feature (such as the aforementioned Giant’s Causeway), Moss films it in such an inappropriate fashion as to suck all the character right out.

And if that wasn’t bad enough, the video quality is appalling; easily the worst I have ever seen on DVD. It looks as if this has been transferred straight from a low quality video master. The image is soft and unfocussed, colours are poorly reproduced, and the image is subject to various flaws such as very obvious sparkles and flares.

I have seen better video quality on VHS.

Audio

After the appalling video, the audio isn’t bad. All you get is a series of music tracks playing over the video. Whether you like the music (James Galway, The Chieftains, Enya) will be down to personal taste but, of its type, it is quality stuff. Galway may choose some cheesy material but he is a master flautist, the Chieftains are magnificent no matter what they play and Enya is at her most accessible on the tracks featured here.

The sound is DD 2.0. Quality is not great (you get some audible hiss now and again) but overall it is acceptable. Turn off the visuals and you have a pretty good sampling of a particular type of Irish music.

Features

None. This is a real shame because I can see how the subtitles and alternate soundtracks could be of real advantage to a “Portrait of Ireland” type DVD.

All this particular DVD has is video and music. However, subtitles could be used to identify the landmarks. An alternate audio track could include narration on the history of the various features. Narration could be available with and without musical background. And, of course, the narration could be available in multiple languages. Also, for this type of DVD, a picture gallery may be wholly appropriate.

But this DVD has nothing.

Conclusion

This has to be one of the worst representations of Ireland I have ever seen. It is bland and characterless and does both the Irish landscape and its people a great disservice.

It is also a truly terrible DVD.

Avoid!