UI Press | Maria Pramaggiore

Neil Jordan

An Irish director of dark narratives with a postmodern sense of irony

Best known for his enormously successful independent film The Crying Game, Irish director Neil Jordan has made sixteen feature films since 1982. Even after achieving commercial success and critical acclaim with such films as Interview with the Vampire and The Butcher Boy, Jordan remains a curiously elusive figure in the era of the celebrity filmmaker. Maria Pramaggiore addresses this conundrum by examining Jordan's distinctive style across a surprisingly broad range of genres and production contexts, including horror and gangster films, Irish-themed movies, and Hollywood remakes.

Despite the striking diversity of Jordan's films, the director consistently returns to gothic themes of loss, violence, and madness. In her sophisticated examination of Mona Lisa, Michael Collins, and The Good Thief, Pramaggiore shows how Jordan presents these dark narratives with a uniquely Irish and postmodern sense of irony. This illuminating analysis of one of the cinema's most important artists will be of keen interest to movie enthusiasts as well as students and scholars of contemporary film.

"This book is a brilliant treatment of perhaps the most important contemporary Irish filmmaker. Under Pramaggiore's keen scrutiny, a career that might have seemed diffuse emerges as remarkably coherent, even while Pramaggiore's scrupulous attention to nuance never slights the differences across Jordan's films. An exceptional contribution to film studies."--James Morrison, author of Roman Polanski

Maria Pramaggiore is a professor of film studies at North Carolina State University. She is the author of Irish and African American Cinema: Identifying Others and Performing Identities, 1980-2000 and coauthor (with Tom Wallis) of Film: A Critical Introduction.