Irish exilic cinema in England.

Irish exilic cinema is defined by the nexus of entanglements between Ireland and England as a subset of wider Irish–British relations. A case study of a Belfast-born director Hans – later known as Brian Desmond Hurst (1895–1986) – is offered as axiomatic of the Irish exilic manifest in cinema. Using the idea of the ‘slipzone of anxiety and imperfection’ (Hamid Naficy, ‘Situating Accented Cinema’, in Transnational Cinema (London: Routledge, 2006), 111.) to characterise the London hub of the cinema business mid-century as an uneasy socio-cultural space, it explores Hurst's career arc within this phase of Britain's imperial history, including Ireland's (re)positioning. Applying a queered concept of the auteur, Hurst's exilic Irishness and sexuality are considered as ‘performed within material and semiotic circumstances’ pertaining to a specific historical juncture (Richard Dyer, ‘Believing in Fairies’, in The Culture of Queers (London: Routledge, 2002), 35). Analysis of films from Dangerous Moonlight (1941) to Dangerous Exile (1957) shows that Hurst's most telling cinematic insights come not in films set in or about Ireland but rather in narratives of outsiders/exiles in British war and colonial films that expose socio-cultural anxieties about Englishness, class and decolonisation.