Bemoaning the inability of recent films about Northern Ireland to ‘advance understanding’, John Hill, writing in 1988, ended his consideration of ‘images of violence’ in Irish cinema with the following remarks:

This perceived absence is one that Hill's book Cinema and Ireland (co-written with Kevin Rockett and Luke Gibbons) returns to repeatedly. While this text is, in many ways, a key work of definition and codification, its prevailing tone is one of regret for missed opportunities and a slight fatigue with the manner in which films about Ireland, both North and South, circulate obsessively around tired oppositions and implicit prejudices. In these terms the history of Irish film-making, as Cinema and Ireland charts it, conforms to a more general lament often found in materialist film criticism. As Annette Michelson in her essay ‘Film and the Radical Aspiration’ proclaims with understandable frustration: ‘The history of cinema is, like that of revolution in our time, a chronicle of hopes and expectations, aroused and suspended, tested and deceived.’ Hill's complaint, then, can perhaps be perceived as a symptom of what Jean-Pierre Oudart refers to as ‘the utopia of a Marxist cinema’: a cultural practice unrealised and possibly unrealisable but one that is ‘very precious in so far as it is the only representation available to us today for imagining a cinema different from that which we criticise’. As present cultural practice is unsatisfactory, so the assertion of a utopia gains ethical force as the only possible way of maintaining a critical position founded in opposition. And yet, as the unrealised nature of Oudart's project suggests, such a utopia is inevitably imagined in terms of that which already exists; both the definition and purpose of it arise from current bourgeois cultural hegemony.