In 1988 José Luis Guerín took a film crew from Spain to the western coast of Ireland, in search of the filming locations of John Ford's The Quiet Man (1952). The resultant film, Innisfree (1990), blends documentary with fiction, and the present with the past, to seemingly uncover the physical, cultural and spectral remnants of the Hollywood production in this small rural locality. Innisfree is both the product of a journey (the Spanish filmmaker's fannish field trip) and the representation of several journeys and returns. This essay will examine Guerín's depiction of the ghostly persistence of The Quiet Man in the landscape, by using Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of the chronotope to identify the lasting significance of real and imagined time-spaces in the cinematic landscape. Just as immigrant Irishman Sean Thornton (John Wayne) returns to his spiritual homeland from Pittsburgh, USA to reclaim his family land, Ford himself returns to the land of his parents’ birth. In Innisfree Thornton’s, Ford's and Guerín's imagined Irelands all mingle and intertwine in a confusing crossroads of time, fiction, memory and landscape.

Fragments

The narrative and temporal structure of Innisfree is complex. Its form defeats conventional, linear, coherent approaches to critical analysis. Therefore, this essay will adopt something of the lane-hopping, timetravelling, fragmentary structure of the film. It calls for a mixture of rudimentary, pragmatic analysis and impressionistic theory. Perhaps we should begin with the former. We might identify the main timelines and storylines as follows:

• a. 1988, the present day of the production, when the Spanish film crew document the people, places and customs of Cong, Co. Galway, Ireland.

• b. 1951, the shooting of The Quiet Man in Cong and other locations around the west of Ireland, encountered through behind-the-scenes and personal photographs, and the recounted tales and memories of the Cong residents.

• c. 1927, the Inisfree of The Quiet Man, a forged geography constructed of a variety of locations around Cong. Sean Thornton (John Wayne), an Irish immigrant, returns from Pittsburgh after killing a man in the boxing ring. He seeks a peaceful life in the family home his mother spoke of. He falls in love with local woman Mary-Kate Danaher (Maureen O’Hara) but her brother ‘Red’ Will proves to be an obstacle to their happiness.