Cinema and Ireland

Kevin Rockett, Luke Gibbons, John Hill

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317928577
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

This was the first comprehensive study of film production in Ireland from the silent period to the present day, and of representations of Ireland and 'Irishness' in native, British, and American films. It remains an authority on the topic. The book focuses on Irish history and politics to examine the context and significance of such films as Irish Destiny, The Quiet Man, Ryan's Daughter, Man of Aran, Cal, The Courier, and The Dead.

PART ONE:
History, Politics and Irish Cinema

1
The Silent Period

Kevin Rockett

Early exhibition

In The Freeman’s Journal of 17 April 1896 Dan Lowrey’s Star of Erin Theatre of Varieties (now the Olympia) announced ‘the world’s most scientific invention: The greatest, most amazing and grandest novelty ever presented in Dublin: The Cinématographe’. Three days later the cinema arrived in Ireland. Dublin’s first screenings took place only four months after the Lumières’ first public screenings in Paris on 28 December 1895 and exactly two months after London’s first screenings on 20 February. Using the equipment and films from London’s Empire Palace this first series of screenings lasted one week:

Great pains were taken. Intense secrecy was maintained as to how this miracle worked. Stage hands and staff were under orders not to tell. A boxlike shelter was built to hide the Conjuror-Operator … and his machinery. Box office was excellent …¹

But all that happened initially was some flickering which revealed a pair of prize-fighters. After a breakdown, an acrobat, fighting cats, a Scots dancer and a drummer became discernible.

Poor illumination was the problem and Lowrey went to London to seek a more effective show. This time he arranged for the Lumières’ agent, Felicien Trewey, to bring his apparatus to the Star of Erin at a cost of £70 per week, £10 more than for the April showings and much cheaper than the £150 per week Trewey was being paid at the Empire Palace the previous March.² Trewey himself acted as Operator, ensuring a much more professional performance. The series began on 29 October and proved enormously successful. Seven thousand attended during the first week and the screenings continued, in tandem with the regular music hall acts, until 14 November. A new series of pictures was presented during the last week. As in Paris the Lumières’ Train Coming Into A Station had an immediate impact. The Freeman’s Journal reported:³

This very wonderful instrument (the Cinématographe) produces with absolute correctness in every detail animated representations of scenes and incidents which are witnessed in everyday life. To those who witness the exhibition for the first time the effect is startling. The figures are thrown upon a screen erected in front of the audience and, taking one of the scenes depicted — that of a very busy Railway Terminus into which the locomotive and a number of carriages dash with great rapidity — the effect is so realistic that for the moment one is almost apt to forget that the representation is artificial. When the train comes to a standstill the passengers are seen hurrying out of the carriages, bearing their luggage, the greetings between themselves and their friends are all represented perfectly true to life and the scene is an exact reproduction of the life and the bustle and tumult to be witnessed at the great Railway depots of the world.

The representation of Westminster Bridge was equally attractive. A representation of a Cavalry charge, in which every action of the galloping horses in the advancing line was distinctly marked, was a grand picture. The Wedding of H.R.H. Princess Maude of Wales and the Procession in St. James’s Street after the ceremony were magnificent and impressive spectacles, second only to the actual scenes themselves. The representation of the Sea-bathing was also wonderfully true to life. The audience witnessed the bathers jumping into the water and the spray caused by the plunge rose into the air and descended again in fleecy showers.

The Lumière films continued to prove a major source of entertainment. Their run of pictures at the Star of Erin in January 1897 ‘eclipsed’ the accompanying music hall acts and crowded the house to ‘suffocation’.⁴ Six weeks of Professor Jolly’s Cinématographe followed. These ‘Animated Photographs’ with titles such as People Walking in Sackville St, Traffic on Carlisle Bridge and the 13th Hussars marching through the City were amongst the first filmed scenes of Dublin. Prof. Jolly’s Cinématographe also provided Cork’s first film show at the opening of Dan Lowrey’s Variety Theatre on Easter Monday, 1897. Lowrey also reopened the Star of Erin as the Empire Palace in Dublin on 13 November 1897 and once again it was the Lumière films which provided the finale. By then control of the theatre had begun to shift to the English Moss and Stoll variety theatre organisations.

Between 1896 and 1909 Irish exhibition began to grow. Films were included in music hall shows, screened in town and village halls, fairgrounds and any location where a building could accommodate an audience and where a travelling projectionist could set up his apparatus. It was not until 1909 that Ireland’s first permanent cinema, the Volta, opened. The idea for the cinema originated in Trieste when James Joyce’s sister, Eva, commented that Dublin, a city larger than Trieste, had no cinema. James Joyce took up the idea with four local businessmen including exhibitors with cinema interests in Trieste and Bucharest. They agreed to put up the necessary capital while Joyce would organise the venture in return for a 10 per cent share of the profits. Joyce arrived in Dublin on 21 October 1909 and set about acquiring premises. This he did a week later when he located 45 Mary St, near Dublin’s main thoroughfare, Sackville St. He then proceeded to convert the premises into a cinema. Two of his Italian partners arrived a few weeks later and went with Joyce to both Belfast and Cork in search of further premises. Another partner and the cinema’s manager, Novak, arrived from Italy in early December accompanied by an Italian projectionist.⁵

For the opening of the Volta Cinema on 20 December 1909 Joyce chose a varied programme. Devilled Crab was a comedy while Bewitched Castle was ‘a magnificent fantastic picture’ according to the Dublin Evening Mail.⁶ Other films in the 35–40 minute programme were The First Paris Orphanage, La Pourponniere and a story of patricide, The Tragic Story of Beatrice Cenci (1908) which The Freeman’s Journal⁷ described as ‘very excellent’ but complained that it

was hardly as exhilarating a subject as one would desire on the eve of the festive season. But it was very much appreciated and applauded.

The Dublin Evening Mail had also found the films ‘very praiseworthy’ and the Volta ‘a fine hall’.

Despite the favourable notices for the new venture poor weather gave the cinema a slow start. Joyce did succeed in obtaining a permanent licence for the cinema from the Recorder but by this time his enthusiasm had begun to wane. He left Dublin for Trieste with his sister, Eileen, on 2 January leaving the management of the Volta in the hands of Novak. Richard Ellmann takes up the story:⁸

… the Volta stumbled and fell. Under Novak’s management the theatre failed to break even. Stanislaus suspected, perhaps rightly, that his brother’s neglect of the enterprise had doomed it. Certainly James would have been able to sense the quirky turns of the Dublin public better than a Triestine bicycle shop proprietor. The heavy emphasis on Italian films probably did not help much. The partners decided they must cut the theatre adrift so as to avoid losing more than the 1600 pounds they had already invested, of which Novak had himself contributed the larger share. Joyce asked his father to offer the Volta to the Provincial Theatre Co., an English firm; but before John Joyce bestirred himself, Novak negotiated the sale to them for a thousand pounds, a loss of forty per cent.

The Volta was sold to the Provincial Theatre Co. in July 1910. Later, as Ellmann notes,⁹ Joyce ‘laboured briefly under the impression that he would receive £40 as his share, but his partners … undeceived him’. The Volta was to continue as a cinema until the later 1940s, by which time it had 420 seats.

The Volta provided the catalyst for a rapid expansion in the number of cinemas over the following few years. By 1916, 149 cinemas and halls were listed as showing motion pictures and, by the end of the silent period, 1930, there were 265 cinemas and halls throughout the island as a whole.¹⁰

With the exception of occasional images of landscape and scenes of people or events as photographic records, the films shown to Irish audiences during the early years of exhibition were almost exclusively foreign-produced. The first native company to exhibit and distribute films, Irish Animated Picture Company, was in business at the beginning of the century and its projectionist, Louis de Clerq, made the first Irish documentary, Life on the Great Southern and Western Railway (1904).¹¹ The pioneer English inventor and film-maker, Robert Paul, who screened films in Belfast and Cork at the very beginnings of film exhibition, later made two Irish films. A Cattle Drive in Galway (1908) was an Irish Land War film and Whaling Ashore and Afloat (1908) recorded these activities off the Irish coast.¹² Another English film pioneer, Arthur Melbourne-Cooper, owner of the Alpha Picture Co., London, chose Ireland as the main location for the longest film made up to that time. Melbourne-Cooper set out with his brother from Paddington Station, London on 12 October 1907 in a ‘specially constructed observation coach’ on which his camera was fixed to make the 3,000 feet London to Killarney (1907). Distributed in four parts — Glimpses of Erin, Irish Life and Character, The Railway from Waterford to Wexford and Transferring Mails at Queens-town — its contents varied from film of Killarney and the Giant’s Causeway (!) to an old couple dancing a jig. On this trip they also made a comedy, Irish Wives and English Husbands (1907), which starred a local Killarney girl, Kate O’Connor, who subsequently achieved fame as the girl on the posters issued by the Great Western Railway Co. advertising tours to Ireland.¹³ While this film is probably the first fiction film made in Ireland it was not until three years later, in 1910, that there began the most active period of fiction film-making of the silent period.

During the 1910s and early 1920s indigenous film-makers and sympathetic foreigners produced a range of material — from historical dramas to comedies and love stories — based on both Irish novels and plays as well as original scripts. It was the historical films which were to prove of particular importance in their contribution towards advancing nationalist consciousness. The comedies and love stories provided general film fare. The most important fiction film companies were the American company, Kalem, and their ex-employees, 1910–14, and the Film Company of Ireland, 1916–20, while General Film Supply’s Irish Events newsreel, 1917–20, regularly recorded contemporary events.

Kalem

The first of those to make an impact in Ireland was Sidney Olcott, director of the Kalem films. Born in Toronto, Canada, of Irish parents, Olcott was one of Kalem’s top directors, having made a one reel version of Ben Hur in 1907. After a series of successes with location shoots, he was given the oportunity to film outside the US. He chose Ireland and in 1910 he arrived at Queenstown (now Cobh), Co. Cork. With him was Gene Gauntier, the scriptwriter from Ben Hur and the actress who was to play the lead in most of the Kalem films made in Ireland. Before her retirement from films in 1918 she was to write or act in 500 films. The third member of the crew was cameraman George Hollister. They made their way to Killarney where they shot one fiction film, The Lad From Old Ireland, which is regarded as the first American film made on location outside the US.¹⁴ The three film-makers then proceeded to Dublin where they stayed before returning to the US.

Following the commercial success of The Lad From Old Ireland Kalem sent a much larger crew and stock company to Europe the following summer. Once again their first stop was Ireland and their base the small village of Beaufort, near Killarney. During an 18 week stay they made 17 films, a remarkable output considering the primitive, electricity-less environment. George Hollister, who once again acted as cameraman, set up a laboratory in which the films were processed.¹⁵ The films made show a very wide interest in Irish subjects. They varied from a tale of gypsies, Gypsies in Ireland, to the historical films Rory O’ More and Ireland the Oppressed; an adaption of a Tom Moore poem, You’ll Remember Ellen; and the first of what was to become a series of adaptions of the plays of Dion Boucicault, including The Colleen Bawn (in which Olcott played Danny Mann) and Arrah-na-Pogue.

After their stay in Kerry the Kalem company travelled to Europe, touring 15 countries during the remainder of 1911 and in 1912 from where folk tales, dramas and travelogues were sent back to Kalem. The international success of their tour was From the Manger to the Cross (1912), the ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Part One History, Politics and Irish Cinema
• Part Two Representations of Ireland
• Bibliography
• Index