Background
Kieran Hickey was born in 1936 in Dublin, Ireland.
Kieran Hickey was born in 1936 in Dublin, Ireland.
Kieran was a filmmaker, and a film-goer, too. In the early 1960s, as he worked at a large department store. Here is the list of those years still, and here is one week for 1961:
Affair in Havana (Laslo Benedek)
Queen’s, Bayswater
The Naked Dawn (Edgar G. Ulmer)
the Toliner
Men in War (Anthony Mann) the Toliner Saint Tropez Blues (Marcel Moussy)
Cameo Royal
Blast of Silence (Allen Baron)
Cameo Royal
A Taste of Honey (Tony Richardson)
Leicester Square Theatre Bonjour Tristesse (Otto Preminger)
Cameo, Victoria
La Coup de Berger (Jacques Rivette)
Everyman, Hampstead
Les 400 Coups (François Truffaut)
Everyman, Hampstead
Dark Victory (Edmund Colliding) N.F.T.
L’Avventura (Michelangelo Antonioni)
Classic, Tooting
Bellissima (Luchino Visconti) N.F.T.
Beyond the Forest (King Vidor) N.F.T.
Senso (Luchino Visconti) N.F.T.
Using the library of the British Film Institute, he compiled filmographies for directors: in 1961 no such things were available. Again, in 1961, there was no more than a handful of books on movie subjects, and none of those claimed to be a work of reference.
It was Kieran who taught that to talk about something was to risk losing it, or letting it escape.
Kieran went back to Dublin, having failed to find away into the British picture business. He began to make films: Faithful Departed, a reverie on Dublin on Bloomsbury; a life of Jonathan Swift; a little short story, A Child's Voice; several documentaries, including one on Irish movies in the years 1945-58; and a series of exceptional short fictional films that explored such topics as sexuality and education in Ireland—Exposure, Criminal Conversation, Attracta (adapted by William Trevor from his own story, and starring Wendy Hiller), and The Rockingham Shoot (from a John McGahern story).
His deepest contribution was the climate of taking pictures seriously. I
In the summer of 1993 he was to have open-heart surgery. He was a very hospitable man: there were visitors in and out of the house all the time, and he was busy making tea and cutting cake.
The Inpass was a success. He was doing beautifully, until an embolism took him off in an hour or so.