Pat Murphy (director)

Pat Murphy
Born	1951 (age 65–66) Dublin, Ireland
Occupation	Film director, screenwriter
Years active	1982–2002

Pat Murphy (born 1951) is an Irish feminist filmmaker and lecturer, the director of Maeve (1982), Anne Devlin (1984) and Nora (2000).

Born in Dublin, Murphy graduated from the Ulster College of Art and Design, followed by a BA in fine art at Hornsey College of Art and an MA in film and television from the Royal College of Art in London where she studied under feminist theorist Laura Mulvey. Hoping to train as a cinematographer, in 1977 she was the first European to achieve a scholarship year at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, influencing her decision to become a director. She completed a short film, Rituals of Memory, before returning to Ireland to work on her first feature film.

Co-directed with John Davies but generally attributed to Murphy, Maeve (1981) was funded by the British Film Institute and later judged by Irish Times film critic Tara Brady to be "Ireland's first bona-fide feminist film." In 2012, Murphy recalled her approach: "I didn't think about story. I'd think something like: representations of Northern Ireland are unsatisfactory: I'm going to make Maeve and sort it all out... Maeve was asking how does a woman position herself against the background of what was going on in the North and within the history of republicanism and memory and landscape... I was influenced by [Jean Luc] Godard and [Bertholt] Brecht." The film's narrative and timeline meander far from the linear throughout.

Murphy's second film, Anne Devlin, was a less cut-up affair, with the filmmaker working from the prison diaries of 19th Century Irish revolutionary Robert Emmet's housekeeper to rediscover her life and times. "I was amazed by how cinematic it was. Scenes were described in enough detail to construct shots for the movie. I think after making Maeve I became more interested in story. And with Anne Devlin's journal I wanted to tell a story that was like a ballad". It represented Ireland at international festivals such as Edinburgh, Moscow, Chicago, Toronto and London.

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