The Image You Missed

Donal Foreman rarely saw his father, Irish-American documentary filmmaker, Arthur MacCaig, who died in 2008. When he opens the personal archives of this Parisian by adoption, it is like one filmmaker discovering another. The Image You Missed sensitively interweaves the emotional contradictions of this man and his tireless filmed chronicles of the conflict in Northern Ireland. This narrative skein is in reality even more tightly woven, as Foreman inserts into the montage fragments of his own films shot when he was 11 years old, excerpts of poetic home movies made by his uncle in the 1960s and images he himself filmed in 2016, the year when Ireland commemorated the centenary of the Easter Rising, which was quashed in bloodshed by the British army. This immersion into his father’s films and rushes plunges the son into a personal and political questioning: MacCaig filmed through the nationalists’ prism, and clearly saw in his Irish ancestors a spirit of resistance that defied all subjection. His hour of glory came when the British authorities judged that his first documentary, The Patriot Game (1979) “prejudice[d] the Crown”. But The Image You Missed avoids the pitfall of the pious biopic. Foreman analyses how his father’s filmmaking shifts from “cinematic guerrilla to TV segment” as the peace process materialises – the missing image of the child left behind spawned other missing images. (Charlotte Garson)