Troubled Frames: Cinema and the Colonial Gaze in Northern Ireland

Jul 01, 2025

The cinematic landscape of Northern Ireland remains both politically fraught and narratively unresolved. While The Troubles have provided fertile ground for international filmmakers, the ways in which this conflict is depicted often reveal more about the filmmakers’ ideological position than the historical or human truth of the region. This essay interrogates the cinematic gaze applied to The Troubles, focusing not merely on the stories told, but on who tells them, how they are framed, and to what end. It argues that films have largely served non-Irish audiences, framing political violence through lenses of tragedy, spectacle, or redemption; frequently flattening complex struggles into consumable narratives. In doing so, cinema has often neutralised anti-colonial resistance, demonised Catholic identity, and erased female and political agency. The counter-gaze offered by Irish filmmakers, however, increasingly reclaims this narrative terrain.

Who’s Holding the Camera?

The politics of authorship fundamentally shape how The Troubles are depicted and for whom. When British filmmakers hold the camera, they are not just documenting the Irish conflict; they are curating it for external consumption, often reinforcing Britain’s role as reluctant arbiter rather than implicated coloniser. This narrative positioning mirrors colonial historiography: control the archive, and you control the memory.

Films like ’71 (Yann Demange, 2014), Harry’s Game (Lawrence Gordon Clark, 1982), and Resurrection Man (Marc Evans, 1998) exemplify this dynamic. They impose narrative distance through surveillance tropes, shifting perspectives, and moral ambiguity. In ’71, the protagonist is a British soldier abandoned in West Belfast; a cipher for viewer sympathy. Irish characters swirl around him as unknowable agents of chaos, vengeance, or brutality. The audience is aligned not with the oppressed, but with the observer, echoing what Ella Shohat and Robert Stam call the “imperial spectator position”; a mode of seeing shaped by colonial authority.

This aligns with Frantz Fanon’s insight that colonial narratives do not merely reflect violence; they structure it. The colonial subject is not allowed to speak for themselves, except through the ventriloquism of imperial narrative frames. The British camera, then, becomes a prosthesis of state power, filtering Irish history through the gaze of its former occupier.

Psychoanalytically, this maps onto Jacques Lacan’s theory of the gaze—particularly the “symbolic order” through which meaning is constructed. The British narrative gaze imposes coherence and rationality on a conflict it helped generate, creating what Slavoj Žižek might call an obscene supplement: the fantasy that Britain is outside the mess, trying to contain it, rather than central to its cause. The Irish subject is constructed as the Real; a traumatic kernel to be contained or explained away.

This authorship asymmetry also recalls Laura Mulvey’s theory of visual pleasure in cinema: just as women are turned into passive spectacles for the male gaze, the Irish become passive objects in the imperial frame; seen but not self-seeing. Authorship becomes a kind of visual colonisation.

Even in well-meaning films, the British hold on narrative authorship remains strong. Bloody Sunday (2002), while sympathetic, was made for ITV; Hunger (2008), though directed by Steve McQueen, was framed by British press as an “art film” about human endurance rather than a political act of defiance. The framing mechanisms, the interviews, the production companies, the funding bodies, all matter. As Trinh T. Minh-ha writes, “There is no such thing as documentary; there is only a point of view.”

In contrast, Irish-authored works such as H3 (Les Blair, 2001), Omagh (Pete Travis, 2004), and Five Minutes of Heaven (written by Guy Hibbert) centre Irish subjectivity and not just Irish suffering. They engage with memory, trauma, and the reverberations of injustice, often using local dialects, actors, and locations that resist aestheticisation. These films reclaim the “speaking subject” role: the shift, as Minh-ha describes, from object of narration to narrator in one’s own right.

The stakes are high. When British filmmakers package The Troubles for global audiences, they do more than tell stories—they define which stories count. This is what postcolonial scholar Gayatri Spivak calls epistemic violence: the power not only to silence, but to pre-define the terms of intelligibility. In Troubles cinema, that violence is rarely seen—but always structured into the frame.

Thematic Analysis: Not Just Bombs and Brothers

1. The Erasure of Politics

Many mainstream portrayals evacuate The Troubles of political content. In The Devil’s Own (1997), Patriot Games (1992), and Blown Away (1994), the IRA is represented as a monolith of fanaticism, disconnected from historical grievances such as housing discrimination, gerrymandering or civil rights marches. There is little attempt to contextualise the violence; it emerges from an apparently innate cultural pathology. To be clear, contextualising the violence is not the same as commending it. To understand the origins of The Troubles, and thus the distortions in how they are depicted onscreen, one must first confront the material reality of Catholic life in Northern Ireland prior to 1969. Catholics were systematically disenfranchised: denied housing, jobs, and voting rights under a Protestant-majority unionist government. Gerrymandering skewed local elections. Police forces like the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) acted as instruments of sectarian intimidation. Civil rights marches—calling for basic equality—were met with batons and bullets. This was not a “conflict of both sides,” but the escalation of state-backed oppression against a community long treated as politically subversive by default.

New Insight: When cinema omits these conditions, or gestures to them without anchoring them, it evacuates Irish resistance of moral coherence. The IRA is thus filmed not as a reaction to injustice, but as a cultural inevitability: angry Irish men doing angry Irish things. Context becomes background noise. Rebellion becomes pathology.

This historical flattening is not accidental. It is narrative strategy. It protects the myth of British neutrality and recasts colonial policing as crisis management but to erase Catholic oppression is to erase the political why behind the violence and in doing so, reassign blame to the oppressed.

This flattening serves an ideological function. These films often replace political motivation with personal pathology: vengeance, anger, grief. Sean Bean’s character in Patriot Games seeks revenge, not justice; Brad Pitt in The Devil’s Own is torn not by political commitment, but inner conflict. This emotional framing depoliticises the cause, transforming systemic struggle into character melodrama. In doing so, the audience is shielded from confronting colonialism’s structural legacy.

This is not just historical erasure. It is emotional management. It allows global viewers to consume the Irish conflict as thriller content without moral discomfort. What remains is a vacuum where politics should be; a vacuum filled with violence that seems ethnic, emotional, and inevitable. The logic mirrors other post-Cold War cinema, especially in portrayals of Middle Eastern conflict, where ideology is erased in favour of villainy.

By contrast, H3 and Hunger (Steve McQueen, 2008) restore the political dimension. Bobby Sands’ body in Hunger becomes a site of protest, a literal text through which historical grievances are re-inscribed. His suffering is not just personal but rather historical, structural, and deliberate. The prison becomes a theatre of state power, and the camera does not look away.

Hunger does not aestheticise suffering as a universal human condition. It locates that suffering within empire. The body decays not to symbolise fragility but to testify to defiance. Edward Said’s critique of narrative flattening in colonial literature, where rebellion is stripped of its context to justify repression, finds cinematic expression here: Hunger re-contextualises violence as resistance, not pathology.

In this, Hunger reframes the act of violence not as spectacle, but as evidence. It forces the viewer to engage with the very politics other films omit. In doing so, it reclaims not just Irish history, but Irish visibility.

2. The Demonisation (and Silencing) of Catholicism and Catholics

Catholicism in Troubles cinema is frequently coded as repressive, melancholic, or masochistic but so too are Catholics themselves. The Irish Catholic subject is often constructed through tropes of guilt, emotional volatility, irrationality, or tribalism. The faith becomes shorthand not for inner strength or community, but for inner torment and fatalism.

In Cal (1984), Marcella and Cal both embody a kind of tragic fatalism; Cal’s guilt over his involvement in an IRA murder is compounded by Catholic imagery; crucifixes, prayers, funerals that serve less as spiritual comfort than ritualised self-punishment. His faith doesn’t offer redemption; it traps him. His physical appearance, pale, sweating, wracked with guilt, reinforces this sense of inherited doom. He is less a political agent than a walking confession.

In Resurrection Man (1998), Victor Kelly, a Protestant killer modelled on real-life loyalist Lenny Murphy, fixates on Catholic bodies as objects of desecration. Catholicism is here the enemy, but the visual language is the same: blood on altar cloths, violated iconography. The Catholic community is rendered faceless, defined by suffering rather than subjectivity.

Even in ostensibly sympathetic portrayals like In the Name of the Father (1993), Catholics are framed through the lens of suffering and ignorance. Gerry Conlon is passionate and innocent, but also reckless, immature, and temperamental. His father, Giuseppe, is saintly, but silent. The Catholicism that surrounds them, rosary beads, prison priests, is muted, marginal, or ineffectual.

This consistent construction aligns with Mary Douglas’s theory of religion as a pollutant in moral narratives: Catholicism in these films is a contaminant, something to be hidden or cleansed, not something that offers coherence or resistance. It also draws from Foucault’s idea of internalised surveillance: the Catholic subject is watched not just by the state, but by their own conscience, shaped by clerical power and national trauma.

The visual rhetoric often reinforces stereotypes. Irish Catholics are filmed in dimly lit spaces, churches, pubs, kitchens, marked by heavy accents, working-class settings, and emotionally charged speech. They are frequently reactive, not strategic. This plays into long-standing colonial tropes: the Irish as emotional, backward, irrational and what Homi Bhabha called the “almost the same, but not quite” of colonial mimicry.

There are counterexamples. Some Mother’s Son (1996) provides one: Helen Mirren’s character, Kathleen Quigley, navigates her son’s hunger strike with dignity, and her faith becomes a source of moral clarity. She prays not to repress her pain, but to endure it. Her Catholicism does not render her irrational but elevates her. This is rare.

Likewise, The Magdalene Sisters (2002) and Philomena (2013), though not set during The Troubles, show the Catholic Church as an institution of cruelty but crucially, the individual Catholic women reclaim their narrative by resisting it. These stories show Catholics as capable of moral critique from within.

However, in the majority of Troubles-related cinema, Catholic characters are either martyrs or monsters, rarely strategists, leaders, or visionaries. This absence is ideological. It removes Catholicism as a framework for legitimate resistance and reduces it to a symptom of backwardness.

3. Gendered Silence

Women in Troubles cinema are frequently used to anchor male pain, not as political agents in their own right. This is not merely a storytelling flaw, it’s a narrative tactic that aligns with the broader pattern of depoliticisation and dehumanisation. By silencing or sidelining female characters, these films erase a crucial aspect of the conflict: the role women played as organisers, resistors, and moral leaders within both the Republican and Loyalist communities.

In Cal (1984), Marcella functions primarily as the grieving widow whose presence deepens Cal’s guilt. Her emotional labour is for his arc, not her own. In In the Name of the Father (1993), Giuseppe Conlon’s wife appears in brief, quiet scenes, supportive, sorrowful, but politically invisible. She represents maternal suffering, not resistance or rage.

Even Hunger (2008), a film lauded for its aesthetic and political radicalism, relegates women to the margins. They appear as nurses, cleaners, or voiceless family members. The prison is a masculine theatre of endurance and death; the women remain offstage, unacknowledged despite the real historical involvement of women in the prison protests (notably the Armagh hunger strikes). This is not oversight, it is cinematic strategy.

The one film that attempts to centre a female protagonist, Shadow Dancer (2012), offers only partial success. Andrea Riseborough’s character is caught between her IRA family and her MI5 handler, and while the film initially appears to give her agency, her story is ultimately manipulated by the men around her. She becomes a pawn in a larger masculine game of betrayal and surveillance. Her choices are limited, reactive, surveilled.

Laura Mulvey’s theory of women as passive objects in narrative cinema resonates here: women do not drive the plot; they give it emotional stakes but Judith Butler’s concept of gendered grief helps deepen this critique. In Troubles cinema, women are often bearers of loss, mothers of the dead, lovers of the condemned. Their grief gives the male characters moral legitimacy, while obscuring their own political desires or actions. The woman becomes the emotional echo of male suffering.

New Insight: Gendered silence works ideologically to reinforce the myth of masculine conflict, that The Troubles were a war between men, with women as innocent collateral. This is false. In reality, women organised housing protests, ran prisoner welfare networks, published underground newspapers, and played central roles in peacebuilding. Their omission sanitises the conflict, making it seem more tragic and less systemic.

The visual language of these films reinforces this erasure. Female characters are often filmed in domestic spaces, kitchens, bedrooms, hospital rooms, locations of waiting and mourning. They are literally framed as confined. When they do act politically, as in Shadow Dancer, it is through whisper, not declaration.

This omission matters because it aligns with the broader project of flattening The Troubles into a digestible moral narrative. Just as Catholicism is aestheticised and resistance decontextualised, so too is female agency removed to simplify the story. A fully realised woman with political intent would disrupt the frame and so she is written out.

There are rare counterpoints; Pat Murphy’s Maeve (1981), for example, is a feminist film that explicitly critiques the male-dominated memory of Republican struggle but it remains marginal in cinematic discourse, rarely mentioned alongside more mainstream portrayals.

Gendered silence, then, is not just a missing element but a structural symptom of a cinema that prefers pain to power, emotion to history, and spectacle to truth.

4. The War Without a Villain: British Amnesia

In much of Troubles cinema, the British state is conspicuously absent as a historical antagonist. British soldiers are often portrayed not as occupiers, but as confused, reluctant young men caught in a situation beyond their understanding. In ’71 (2014), the protagonist is a British squaddie accidentally left behind in hostile West Belfast. His suffering is personal, his confusion palpable and he becomes the victim of both sides. There is no villain here, only violence.

The Boxer (1997) takes this further. The film casts the British presence as background noise, visible in checkpoints and uniforms but not implicated. The conflict is rendered as communal dysfunction, a failure of Irish reconciliation rather than a product of decades of colonial division, militarised policing, and systemic injustice.

New Insight: This is not just absence but a form of narrative laundering. British cinema sanitises the role of the state by erasing its methods: internment without trial, psychological warfare, collusion with loyalist paramilitaries, and the covert operations that fuelled cycles of retaliatory violence. This omission functions ideologically: it transforms empire from aggressor into mediator.

Few films confront these realities directly. Omagh (2004) does, highlighting police negligence and institutional betrayal. Bloody Sunday (2002), though sympathetic, was largely confined to TV in Britain, and its theatrical release was international. Its final scenes show civilians murdered by British paratroopers but even then, the state as a system is not interrogated; it’s individualised as a “bad day.”

Paul Gilroy’s concept of postcolonial melancholia applies sharply: the desire to mourn empire without accepting its violence. British culture wants to remember its colonial past as difficult, even tragic but never culpable. Troubles cinema becomes, in effect, a post-imperial coping mechanism.

Visual Language: British soldiers are often shot in soft lighting, handheld camera, close-ups of trembling hands or haunted eyes. Their humanity is emphasised, their actions blurred. Irish violence, by contrast, is often abrupt, framed from a distance, faceless. This is the grammar of moral asymmetry.

Surveillance is another tool. Films like Harry’s Game or ’71 use the British intelligence gaze as a stabilising perspective, dispassionate, analytical, above the fray. This positions the viewer with the state, even when that state is nominally neutral. The viewer becomes complicit in the surveillance and in the forgetting.

What this reveals is a broader discomfort: British cinema cannot admit that Northern Ireland was, and in many ways still is, a colonial holding. To do so would require a reckoning not just with the past, but with present structures: militarism, racism, and the myth of moral exceptionalism.

When was the last time a British film depicted a soldier as a war criminal? Cinema about Vietnam (Platoon, Apocalypse Now), Iraq (The Hurt Locker, Green Zone), or the U.S. Civil War can interrogate national guilt. Troubles cinema, by contrast, is built around guilt denial. The result is not healing but historical distortion.

To name the British state as the antagonist would rupture the liberal fantasy of Britain as a force for stability and so cinema renders its colonial violence as ambient, accidental, or tragic but never strategic. This is not just amnesia. It is protection. Not for the viewer, but for the nation’s conscience.

5. The Role of Landscape

The Irish landscape in Troubles cinema is rarely neutral. Fog-covered hills, stone ruins, misty fields, and coastal cliffs are repeatedly used to frame the conflict not just in period films like The Wind That Shakes the Barley (2006), but in more contemporary pieces like Cal (1984) and Hunger (2008). These images work not only to aestheticise violence, but to suggest that violence is endemic to the land itself. Conflict is recast as natural, inevitable, growing from the soil, not from history.

This aligns with Raymond Williams’s theory of nature as ideology: landscape becomes a vessel for myth, used to naturalise what is in fact political. The rural aestheticisation of Ireland enables a quiet ideological move as it transforms the Troubles from a modern anti-colonial struggle into a timeless tribal wound. The implication is that Irish violence is not produced by state repression or political betrayal, but by something intrinsic, even geological.

New Insight: The landscape becomes a kind of pastoral trap, Ireland as the eternally grieving, pre-modern nation. This imagery invites a romantic sorrow rather than critical engagement. It allows global viewers to mourn Ireland rather than understand it.

Films like The Wind That Shakes the Barley lean heavily on this symbolism. Rolling hills and quiet farms become spaces of betrayal and trauma, but the visuals lull the viewer into a sense of tragic beauty. The aesthetic softens the political message. Cal does this too: the misty countryside and ruined stone cottages become visual metaphors for Irish emotional damage, haunting, beautiful, but de-historicised.

The land is often feminised, fertile, wounded, silent. In colonial discourse, this positions Ireland as the violated body of the nation, echoing the trope of “Mother Ireland”. But in cinema, this feminisation has a pacifying effect: the nation suffers rather than resists. The countryside doesn’t demand justice; it absorbs pain.

We also see this in sound design. Hunger, for instance, uses environmental silence, wind, dripping water, scuffing footsteps to heighten the bodily decay of Bobby Sands. Nature becomes complicit in the stripping down of political identity. It is not the stage for revolution; it is the frame for martyrdom.

Frantz Fanon’s lens might push this further: colonialism rewrites the geography of the colonised. In cinema, this becomes a visual act. The land is not shown as a space of mobilisation or ownership. It is empty, open, tragic. A blank canvas for others to frame.

There are few cinematic counterexamples where Irish land is shown as politicised space: as something fought for, worked on, or reimagined. Most portrayals either empty it of people (The Quiet Man tradition) or fill it with ghosts. This is not landscape. It is containment by aesthetics. It offers no exit, only endurance.

In this way, the Irish landscape becomes not the backdrop to politics, but the substitute for it. The land mourns so the viewer doesn’t have to think. It is not neutral but narrative.

IV. Counter-Narratives: Cinema as Resistance

Amid the dominant cinematic discourse that aestheticises, decontextualises, and dehumanises The Troubles, a handful of films stand apart by resisting spectacle and offering radical acts of remembrance. Omagh (2004) and Bloody Sunday (2002) are not just fact-based dramas. They are cinematic acts of protest. By refusing stylisation and hero-villain binaries, they confront the viewer with the human and institutional cost of political violence.

Both films deploy documentary-style realism: handheld cameras, natural lighting, long takes, and non-professional or regionally authentic actors. These aesthetic choices serve a political function. They strip away cinematic polish to foreground urgency, testimony, and specificity. Bloody Sunday, in particular, reconstructs the events of January 30, 1972, not as a dramatized climax but as a procedural breakdown. There are no cathartic arcs. No closure. The film ends not with resolution, but with a chilling silence—an institutional void where justice should have been.

New Insight: This refusal of narrative resolution is radical. It denies the audience the comfort of symbolic healing. Where most cinema about the Troubles is structured to contain grief, to turn it into pathos or plot, Bloody Sunday and Omagh leave it unprocessed. They are cinematic wounds, not memorials.

Pierre Nora’s concept of lieux de mémoire (sites of memory) versus milieux de mémoire (living memory) helps explain this. Mainstream films turn history into lieux, fixed, consumable representations but Omagh and Bloody Sunday operate as milieux: not representations of the past, but spaces where memory is contested, raw, and unresolved. These films do not close chapters; they open files.

Where other films personalise the conflict, framing it around individual guilt or redemption, these counter-narratives collectivise grief. Omagh focuses not on one heroic character but on a community’s demand for truth amid state obfuscation. Grief becomes evidence. Testimony becomes confrontation.

These films align with what Paul Ricoeur calls “memory as justice”—the ethical obligation to remember not as nostalgia, but as accountability. They indict the systems that enable forgetting: media, bureaucracy, political theatre.

What’s especially significant is that these films were co-produced with Irish broadcasters or international funders not mainstream British cinema. Their distribution was limited, often consigned to television or art-house release. This marginalisation mirrors the treatment of the memories they contain. Just as the victims of Bloody Sunday were silenced for decades, the films that represent them are often placed outside the cultural mainstream.

By using realism, long silences, and ensemble casts, these films refuse the grammar of conventional cinema. They don’t build toward transformation; they hold the audience in stasis. This is resistance, not in theme alone, but in form.

In this way, Omagh and Bloody Sunday don’t just depict resistance; they perform it. They reject the visual habits of empire, stylisation, individualisation, closure, and replace them with ethical witnessing. They are not cathartic. They are indictments.

V. Contemporary Implications: The Irish Gaze Today

Post-Troubles cinema occupies a complex cultural space, neither in the midst of conflict nor free from its residue. As Ireland seeks to narrate itself in the 21st century, its filmmakers are faced with a dual imperative: to be legible on the global stage and to remain truthful to a trauma that resists neat resolution. What emerges is not a post-conflict cinema, but a cinema of narrative negotiation.

Derry Girls (2018–2022), one of the most internationally successful depictions of the Troubles era, uses sitcom form to explore adolescent life during the peace process. Its brilliance lies in its tonal tightrope: it neither centres the violence nor ignores it. However, its humour and nostalgia risk packaging a time of unresolved political tension as a kind of quirky backdrop. The Good Friday Agreement becomes set dressing for teen antics. The trauma is acknowledged but defanged.

New Insight: What Derry Girls reveals is the tension between cultural memory and marketable memory. The past must be made palatable for export, funny, familial, and ultimately resolved. The edge is dulled to widen appeal.

Martin McDonagh’s The Banshees of Inisherin (2022) takes a different approach. Though not explicitly about The Troubles, its allegorical civil war—two men severing a friendship for reasons neither can fully articulate—has been widely read as a commentary on Ireland’s internal divisions. But here, the politics are abstracted into absurdism. The violence is intimate, symbolic, and ultimately senseless.

New Insight: This metaphorisation functions both as artistic elevation and historical displacement. It gestures toward Irish trauma but never names it. The result is a film that feels like it has political weight but operates more as existential parable than national reckoning. It is elegant, but evasive.

These trends reflect the challenges facing Irish filmmakers today. On one hand, they are claiming authorship in ways previous generations could not. On the other, global platforms and co-productions impose new constraints: language must be accessible, references must be universal, and endings must satisfy. The story must travel but at what cost?

This dilemma mirrors Homi Bhabha’s notion of “the in-between space”, the tension of creating culture at the intersection of local identity and global legibility. Irish cinema is caught between authenticity and recognisability. The danger is a new kind of flattening: not by empire, but by platform.

A recent example like Bobby Sands: 66 Days (2016) shows an attempt to retain complexity: blending documentary, archival footage, and political commentary. Yet even this was met with criticism for its pacing and stylistic choices, suggesting that Irish filmmakers remain under pressure to conform to cinematic norms shaped by non-Irish expectations.

Meanwhile, younger audiences increasingly access their Irishness through media exported back to them. The Irish gaze is rising, but it’s still filtered by Netflix algorithms, British distributors, and American festival circuits. The battle is no longer just about representation. It’s about translation without distortion.

What if the Irish film that tells the truth about The Troubles never gets made because it wouldn’t sell? What if visibility now requires aesthetic compromise?

The struggle today, then, is not merely to be seen, but to be seen on one’s own terms. Post-Troubles cinema must reject both the silence of empire and the seduction of global palatability. It must speak not only for memory, but against its commodification.

Cinema about The Troubles is not a neutral archive, it is a battlefield of memory, shaped by those who seek to narrate history and those who are denied that right. For decades, film has offered viewers not the truth of Northern Ireland, but a curated comfort: British soldiers as victims, Catholics as irrational or haunted, women as shadows, and violence as inevitable. These portrayals serve not to inform, but to soothe, to render empire palatable and rebellion incoherent.

This is not simply a question of misrepresentation. It is a question of power: who gets to narrate history, and who becomes its background noise? Mainstream cinema, whether through silence or stylisation, has repeatedly privileged the gaze of the coloniser, repackaging state violence, emotional trauma, and cultural resistance as consumable drama.

But the Irish gaze is not gone. It is re-emerging in counter-narratives that refuse spectacle, in films that centre collective grief over heroic redemption, in new works that question who the audience is really meant to be. These films do not close wounds, they keep them visible and in doing so, they challenge us to sit with the discomfort that history demands.

The real struggle in Troubles cinema is not between British and Irish characters, it is between the imperial gaze and the speaking subject. To reclaim the Irish frame is to wrest control of memory from those who never bore its cost. It is to insist that seeing clearly requires troubling the frame, politically, aesthetically, and ethically.

Reclaiming the frame is not about visibility. It is about refusal to be narrated, aestheticised, or mourned by those who did the wounding.