Song of Granite

One might say that the grain of granite is the visible side of a mystery emanating from a child. That the grain of Pat Collins’s film is the device distinguishing fiction from archive footage, which convey a reality interspersed with fragments of radio recordings. But that would be a reductive take on this patient portrait of the world-renowned “King of Irish singers”, an acolyte of John Cage in his “writing through Finnegans Wake”, after James Joyce. Indeed the core of the film is where the singing rises.