The butcher boy

"The Butcher Boy" is perhaps the finest film to have come out of Ireland.

Although it marks a clear break with the more banal canons of realism, it is nonetheless the most realistic of Irish films.

It engages with the society and culture of modern Ireland with a wit and ferocity that denies the viewer any easy moral position.

Cinema is often thought of as a purely visual art, but this film is adapted from a groundbreaking novel by a filmmaker who is himself a writer of prose fiction.

In this present study, Colin MacCabe examines the process by which fiction becomes film, and writing becomes image.