From Travelling Show to Cinema
Even before the turn of the century, the travelling theatres were the main venue for film projections in Ireland, and travelling shows remained popular until the 1960's. Because there were so few films, the main programme needed to have variety, and the shows also had to move around every few weeks to different places.
The shows would be set up at busy sites such as railway stations, factories or fairs. The operators attempted to attract potential customers by all conceivable means. The colourful wagon was the first eye-catcher. The illuminated facades of the mobile cinemas lit up in the darkness of night. Posters, colour and signage announced the visual sensations and fascinating programme awaiting the spectators. As there were few copies of the films, the repertoire was limited, and public interest in the cinematographic shows, particularly in smaller towns, which were now begining to have their own static Cinemas. waned very quickly. Most of the moving pictures were made by small-time producers in limited quantities for their own use. There was no highly developed distribution system, and the films were purchased directly from the producer or exchanged between the travelling showmen.
By 1910 the film sector had started to become industrialized. The mass-produced and increasingly sophisticated films needed to be distributed quickly and shown at fixed and reliable sites. The elaborate accompaniment to the film presentation became obsolete as the content of longer, more detailed and expensively produced films sold itself. A star system developed at the same time, and the performers became attractions in their own right. Film projections eventually moved away from travelling shows to permanent establishments. The travelling showmen were clearly underrepresented, and the cinema owners were also increasingly unappreciative of their showmen colleagues. They were at pains to raise the status of their metier by distancing themselves from fairground attractions and identifying themselves more with the high art of the theatre.
How Cinema Brought The World To Rural Ireland In The 1950s
Analysis: research and oral histories show how cinemas in Co Mayo and elsewhere provided a window onto the wider world in the 1950s
Like most Irish counties at that time, Mayo was dotted with cinemas in the 1950s. While today there are just three multi-screen cinemas spread across the county’s larger towns (Westport, Castlebar and Ballina), most towns and villages had their own single-screen cinema in the 1950s. Cinema-goers of the day will recall the likes of the Estoria in Ballina, the ideal in Westport, the County in Castlebar, the Central in Claremorris, the Savoy in Kiltimagh, the Rex in Ballinrobe, the Star in Ballyhaunis, the Eureka in Charlestown, the Central in Balla, and the Lyric in Swinford. And this is by no means an exhaustive list!
Some towns had more than one dedicated cinema with the programme typically changing three times a week. In villages with no permanent cinema, parish halls were also transformed into temporary screening facilities by mobile exhibitors like P J Gilmore. A native of Claremorris, Gilmore travelled around the county throughout the 1950s and 1960s screening films along with his own documentary footage of local events.
Known as the Marian Film Show, a typical week’s programming for Gilmore’s mobile cinema operation could start with a screening in the parochial hall in Shrule on the Mayo-Galway border, before travelling on to provide audiences in Williamstown, Brickens, Aghamore and Knock with an evening of cinematic entertainment.
The sheer number of cinemas and the variety of programming available to communities in Mayo, and indeed throughout the country, attests to the popularity of cinema-going as a social practice in the 1950s. But how do audiences remember these experiences? And what impact did cinema have on their lives?
Although many of the purpose built single screen cinemas that sprung up in towns and cities across the country from the 1930s onwards have long since closed, or continue to face redevelopment or demolition, the memories of ordinary cinema-goers provide an important connection with these spaces and their place within Ireland’s cultural history. The stories of cinemas like the Lyric in Swinford are emerging through the Irish Cinema Audience Project, which examines the history of cinema-going in 1950s Ireland by gathering the memories of ordinary cinema-goers from across the country.
Launched in June 2018, Irish Cinema Audiences is a collaborative project run in conjunction with Age Action Irelabd and its network of lifelong learning groups. Using a combination of questionnaires and video-interviews, the aim is to investigate the social and cultural role that cinema played in the everyday lives of Irish audiences of the 1950s.
In the middle of that decade, the national cinema-going audience peaked with people attending on average 18 times per year. Prior to the advent of television and the launch of Telefis Eireann in 1961 cinema was an important outlet for entertainment, education and social interaction, but it was also a window onto the wider world. As one female participant puts it, cinema "was the only exposure to life outside our parish" (female, born 1948, Donegal), while an urban cinema-goer from Dublin recalls the sense of "adventure and excitement", along with the opportunity that cinema afforded to "learn about a whole new world outside Ireland" (male, born 1950, Dublin).
Going back to the Lyric in Swinford
The Irish Cinema Audiences project visited Swinford Co. Mayo to interview local people about their memories of the Lyric and other cinemas in the surrounding areas. Although the Lyric ceased operation almost 50 years ago, the building still stands on Brookville Avenue and had up until recently been used as a furniture shop.
The Lyric first opened its doors to the public in September 1940 with a screening of the 1938 musical "Sweethearts" starring Jeanette Mc Donald and Nelson Eddy. Established by local business men Patrick Feeney, Douglas Kelly and G. Burke, the Lyric boasted a state of the art, luxury design with ‘"five hundred new double sprung seats" all of which were said to "command a perfect view of the programmes". Press reports at the time described the new venture as ‘an
ornament of the town and a credit to its promoters’ (The Western People, 21 September 1940) the opening night and the cinema's plush interiors and atmosphere, one interviewee commented that "you’d think you were in America" once inside the Lyric (female, born 1936, Mayo). However, others remember the Lyric as a slightly more spartan affair, like the woman who used to bring a hot water bottle and a rug due to the lack of heat (female, born 1933, Mayo). Indeed, the running of the cinema was impacted by electricity rationing in the mid-1940s as a result of the Second World War. Nevertheless, the Lyric continued to provide local audiences with a diverse range of programming from the 1940s onwards. This programming was not just limited to films; the Lyric also played host to a series of non-cinematic events including concerts, plays, quizzes, magic shows and illustrated lectures. One male interviewee noted that the Lyric’s stage meant that it was well equipped to accommodate travelling shows. In particular, he recalls seeing a magic show featuring Mandrake the Magician, which came to the Lyric in August 1959.
"a lot of the movies were forgettable", he can vividly recall being fascinated by Mandrake’s "conjuring" which involved magic ring tricks and "suspending [his] attendants on swords" (male, born 1944, Mayo). Contrasting with magic performances, and reflecting the political and religious climate of the post-war period, a series of anti-communist lectures were also held at the Lyric. In February 1952, L.F. Harvey delivered an illustrated lecture on the "Communist War on religion" and the "atrocities behind the Iron Curtain". Thanks to local collectors like Tom Hennigan and Joe Mellet, some of the original advertisements for such events have been preserved, providing a fascinating insight into the multifarious functions of rural cinemas, which were not just outlets for escape and entertainment.
Although this is just a snap shot of the Lyric cinema’s 30 year history, the stories from this time provide a rich insight into the social and cultural life that existed in rural towns of the 1950s. Indeed, Swinford is celebrating its history and heritage as a market town throughout this year with an ongoing series of events as part of The Swinford 250 and More Initiative.
PJ Gilmore - Film Maker and Mobile Exhibitor
PJ Gilmore used his film camera to record life in the west of Ireland.
Having bought a second hand projector in the 1950s and PJ Gilmore began to rent and show films to local people a couple of times a week. Once word got around he was invited to put on fiilm shows in villages and towns that had no cinema. At first it was hard to run this venture as business but then PJ Gilmore came up with the idea of buying a film camera. He began to record local life in the west of Ireland and offer people the opportunity to see themselves on the big screen.
Making his own films which documented various aspects of Irish life also created an audience who wanted to see themselves.
People...might come in if they were the stars themselves. By having them up there on the screen doing whatever they were doing in their shops or in their fields or going to mass or whatever they were doing.
Having acquired a 16mm film camera PJ Gilmore set out to capture local events all of which attracted people to cinema showings. Filming in black and white, and colour PJ Gilmore recorded aspects of life in Galway and Mayo during the 1950s, 60s and 70s.
RTÉ producer Peter Feeney came across the material while researching for the documentary series 'The Age of de Valera'. He made 'Flight from the Snipe Grass' using some of the films shot by PJ Gilmore with the script and narration provided by Breandán Ó hEithir.
'Flight from the Snipe Grass' was broadcast on 18 March 1984.
Click on the green link below to view:
P J Gilmore at work in his Film Studio
P J Gilmore. A native of Claremorris, Gilmore travelled around the county throughout the 1950s and 1960s screening films along with his own documentary footage of local events.
James Joyce's Contribution To Cinema In Ireland
Did you know James Joyce helped introduce cinema to Ireland? Not only is he celebrated as a literary icon, but he also played a key role in kickstarting the Irish film industry
After a trip to Italy, Joyce became passionate about bringing moving pictures to Ireland. In 1909, he opened the Volta Electric Theatre on Mary Street in Dublin – Ireland's first cinema
Early Irish Cinema
On 25 November 1913, Dublin’s Evening Herald reported that haulier Sidney Norman of Neath, Wales, had seriously injured himself in the early hours of the previous Saturday when he had jumped ten feet from his bedroom window while dreaming he was escaping from robbers he had seen that evening on a picture theatre screen (“Man’s Leap to Escape Cinema Robbers”). For this ordinary Welshman, the images on the screen had literally become the landscape of his dreams, to his severe bodily cost. The Herald picked this up as a news oddity and published it on its front page, where its readers might wonder at the gullibility of some picture-house patrons or the need to control this new entertainment that was coming to increasingly direct the dreams of its audience.
One of the ways in which it did this was through films of greater length and complexity. The increasing length of films had been a particular issue in the film industry since 1911. “We can remember when a drama of 1,000 ft. was often grumbled at on account of its length,” noted an editorial in the British cinema trade journal Bioscope in September 1911, “but it seems as if that day were past, and the demand for a picture play constituting the usual length of an entire programme has sprung up. The film of 1,000 feet (about 16 minutes at 16 frames a second) was the standard product of the US distributors, but in Europe, longer films, often with high-cultural prestige such as Italian company Cines’s 1913 Quo Vadis?, captured both the imagination of the public and the film market where they were sold as features or exclusives.
In Dublin in November 1913, the Phoenix Picture Palace marketed itself as the picture house that specialized in the long film. “The Phoenix Picture Palace is rapidly becoming famous for the exhibition of big classic film productions,” began a notice in the Herald, “From Manger to Cross,” “Quo Vadis?” “Monte Cristo,” “The Battle of Waterloo,” etc., have all been shown at the Phoenix within the last few months. Last evening the patrons of this popular house had presented to them the longest film yet shown in this country – the “Film D’Art’s” remarkable production of Dumas’s popular and widely read work, “The Three Musketeers”.
This issue of the long film was not resolved in 1911, however, and the Bioscope continued to favour a varied programme of shorter films, arguing in an October 1913 editorial that the long film’s “charm and importance can be better sustained outside the ordinary picture theatres. The popularity of the cinema has been built up on the variety of the entertainment it offers, and a lessening of that variety means a weakening of public interest”. Doubtless, the Bioscope was influenced in its thinking by the nature of variety theatre, cinema’s chief rival in popular entertainment in Britain, Ireland and elsewhere. A solution to providing a lengthy film as part of a variety programme was available in another popular form: the serial. Fictional writing had long been serialized in newspapers and magazines, where it appeared alongside many other kinds of writing in another kind of variety format. In November 1913, the Evening Herald carried an episode of popular novelist Emma M. Mortimer’s Robert Wynstan’s Ward each day, and this was wholly unremarkable.
However, the autumn of 1913 saw a new phenomenon arrive in Ireland: the film serial. When the Rotunda began showing the serial What Happened to Mary in September 1913, the Dublin Evening Mail commented that the Rotunda “management in producing a ‘serial’ film, have broken new ground as far as Dublin picture houses are concerned”. Unlike the Phoenix, the Rotunda favoured a more varied programme of shorter films, so that when High Tide of Misfortune, the tenth episode of What Happened to Mary, was exhibited there in the week of 24-29 November 1913, it shared the bill with the main film, Broken Threads United; a “very complete picture of the procession to Glasnevin on Sunday in connection with the Manchester Martyrs’ commemoration”; the comedies His Lady Doctor, Ghost of the White Lady and Love and Rubbish; and the Pathé Gazette newsreel. The serial was integrated into this variety film programme that was lent some locally produced coherence by being accompanied by the music of the Irish Ladies’ String Orchestra.
To what degree the variety format was more successful in attracting a larger and more diverse audience is debatable, but the inclusion of What Happened to Mary seemed a direct appeal to young women. Narrating the adventures of a country girl who comes to the city, What Happened to Mary was produced by Edison in twelve monthly episodes beginning in US picture houses in July 1912 in parallel with the serialized story that appeared in the US mass-circulation women’s magazine Ladies’ World, making its lead actress Mary Fuller into a star (Singer 213). Running from 22 September to 13 December, the first Irish exhibition at Dublin’s Rotunda tied in with its weekly serialization in the British women’s magazine Home Chat (“The Rotunda,” “The Picture Houses”). As such, it was clearly marketed primarily at women. An indication of its local success is the fact that the Rotunda immediately followed it with Who Will Marry Mary?, the Edison sequel, which again featured Mary Fuller.
Although it would take another year for the serial to reach the height of its popularity with such “serial queens” as Helen Holmes the adventurous heroine of The Hazards of Helen and Pearl Whyte in The Perils of Pauline and The Exploits of Elaine, this earlier serial followed some of the patterns of the later ones. Shelley Stamp argues that “for a complete understanding of the template serial heroines offered viewers we must look beyond the screen exploits of Pauline and her compatriots towards the substantial star discourse that circulated around the actresses who played these women on screen” (Stamp 217). Some of the Dublin reviews suggested What Happened to Mary did create the desire in its audiences for more information about Mary Fuller: “‘Alone in New York’ is the second instalment of the ‘What Happened to Mary’ serial; all who have seen the opening scenes of Mary’s adventures will be eager to know more about this fascinating actress” (“Rotunda Pictures” 27 Sep.).
More specific information on the reception of What Happened to Mary among Irish audiences, and particularly Irish women, does not seem to survive. The fact that the exhibition of the film was tied to the publication of a British magazine is indicative of the subsidiary place of Ireland in the publishing and film industries. The Irish women’s magazine Lady of the House, which had very little to say about cinema of the period, made no mention of the serial, but it and other Irish periodicals show how women were represented in popular media. Was the young flapper shown travelling on a tram in a cartoon in the glossy and expensive Irish Life in October 1913 likely to have found Mary’s adventures or Mary Fuller’s star persona enthralling? Perhaps, but it is not clear that the serial form allowed Mary Fuller to capture the imagination of the public to a greater extent than the at-least-sometimes more active heroines of stand-alone films. In the Herald’s notice for the Rotunda on 30 September, the third episode of What Happened to Mary was not mentioned, but the reviewer focused on the heroine of A Wild Ride, set on a South African ostrich farm, in which “a resourceful and up-to-date heroine, in a situation of dire extremity, outwitted cunning and ferocious savages, rode an ostrich across the trackless veldt at high speed, and brought soldiers to the relief of her imprisoned family” (“Rotunda Pictures” 30 Sep.). Such derring-do in the serial would await The Hazards of Helen, which would not hit Dublin screens until 1915.
Other kinds of film serial followed quickly on the heels of What Happened to Mary and offered different forms of fascination – whether that be attraction or repulsion. Sharing the bill at the Rotunda with A Proposal Deferred, the fifth episode of What Happened to Mary in the week beginning 20 October was the second part of Gaumont’s five-part Fantômas (1913), each of which contained three to six episodes. Directed by Louis Feuillade and based on a popular series of 32 French novels by Pierre Sauvestra and Marcel Allain that were published in monthly instalments between February 1911 and September 1913, the films followed the early exploits of the eponymous super villain as he terrorizes Paris (Walz and Smith). “Those who go to the Rotunda this week will, at any rate, get plenty of sensation,” observed the Irish Times.
The film, “Fantomas,” is a choice blend of mystery, tangled plot, and blood-curdling enterprise. It is not easy to grasp all the bearings of the incidents or their mutual relationship. The film, however, introduces us to some remarkable phases of Paris life and its institutions. And the glimpses of the city’s streets and parks are always full of interest. It is very admirably acted by all the characters.
Unlike What Happened to Mary, Fantômas did not appear on a reliable weekly or even monthly basis that might establish a loyal pattern of attendance. Nevetheless, even if not regular, Fantômas was popular, and the Rotunda continued to premiere the new parts as they were released, showing The Tragedy at the Masked Ball over the Christmas period of 1913 and the fifth part, The False Magistrate, in June 1914.
These serials were not restricted to city audiences but travelled on the important Irish Animated Picture Company exhibition circuit established by James T. Jameson of the Rotunda. In his praise of Jameson in January 1914, the Bioscope’s Irish correspondent Paddy revealed that two of the What Happened to Mary episodes had recently been seen around the country: A Proposal Deferred had been at Tralee, while the twelfth and final episode, Fortune Smiles – receiving “considerable applause” – was on the programme at Galway. The YMCA hall in Queenstown was showing the fourth part of Fantômas, The Tragedy at the Masked Ball (Paddy). As such they came, no doubt to inhabit the dream and nightmare worlds of many Irish people.
"The Wonder-Seeking Mind Of The Peasant"
By October 1913, picture houses had begun to be a permanent presence not only in such Irish cities as Dublin, Belfast and Cork but also in towns with even as few as 5,000 inhabitants. In such places, the film show would be the first professionally produced mass entertainment available on a long-term basis. However, many towns still relied on travelling companies to bring professional entertainment of any kind, including film shows. Clearly, population was not the only factor, but it was very likely in 1913 that a town with 10,000 people or more would have had at least one permanent picture house, but only some towns of around 5,000 had a dedicated film venue, and most of the latter were likely to be served by travelling picture or picture-and-variety shows. However, market towns of 5,000 might have a dedicated picture house if they also had a good train service and a local person or persons with access to capital who saw the opportunities being exploited successfully elsewhere. In early October 1913, Paddy, the Irish correspondent for the British trade. journal Bioscope reported on a film-and-variety show by Clarence Bailey in Ballina, Co. Mayo:
"To County Mayo is rather a far cry. Nevertheless, picture shows go there from time to time, and no touring show is thought so much about as the “livin’ pictur’” one. At Ballina recently, we had Clarence Bailey’s show, a mixture of variety and films. Some of the latter included the “Derby of 1913.” Wild West subjects naturally predominate in travelling shows of this nature, the breathless rush over the dusty plains appealing to the wonder-seeking mind of the peasant" .
This piece’s use of brogue and mention of “the peasant” was typical of Paddy’s humorous condescension in covering small-town and rural Ireland. Peasants are hicks who live in the far-away west, unsophisticated provincials who lap up Westerns and out-of-date news and in so doing, provide a telling contrast to the readers of Paddy’s column as well as demonstrating the increasing reach of the metropolitan film business. Nevertheless, Paddy also provides some unique details of film exhibition in the west of Ireland a century ago. Travelling shows such as Bailey’s are very difficult to track because they often did not advertise in the local newspapers of the towns they visited, and consequently, the newspapers – the source most likely to provide details of local reception – frequently ignored them unless something else newsworthy occurred. The September-October issues of the Western People and Ballina Herald do not mention, let alone give details of the programme. Clearly, Bailey was not in the first rank of Irish travelling exhibitors, which included the town-hall showman James T. Jameson and the fairground exhibitor John Toft. Bailey’s name is known to film scholars (Barton 14), but Paddy allows us to place him in Ballina showing Westerns and the newsreel of the Epson Derby that retained some interest four months after the race not only because of an abiding interest in horse racing among an audience who had not yet seen these moving pictures but also because this was the race at which suffragette Emily Wilding Davison was killed by King George V’s horse.
Ballina had recently experienced its own suffragette controversy, when Irish Women’s Franchise League members Helen Chevenix and Clara Moser visited the town on 14 August to organize a town-hall meeting for 2 September. When the women held an impromptu meeting in the street, the conservative Protestant Balina Herald claimed that “though on the whole the crowd seemed sympathetic, some unruly parties kept interrupting, and on one occasion an egg or an orange – we don’t quite know which – was flung and narrowly missed one of the ladies”. At the September meeting, the Western People explained that the women lost the sympathy of the largely nationalist audience by a “very ill-timed reference to the assistance ladies in the North were giving Sir Edward Carson in his swash buckling campaign against Home Rule [which] made many persons think that the lady who unburdened her mind in this manner came there to preach the cause of Unionism, under the guise of a Suffragette”. The People strongly denied the “statement that the motor car conveying the Suffragettes and their friends was stoned as it left the hall after the meeting,” all that occurred being “confined to derisive booing and shouting”. How these local incidents may have affected reception of the film, or how the film may have cast new light on the local events, or even which film of the Derby was shown is difficult to say, but the picture shows by travelling exhibitors such as Bailey provided the opportunity, at least, to re-examine them.
With a population of 4,662, Ballina did not have a dedicated venue at which such opportunities might arise on a regular basis. However, Ballinasloe, a town with the slightly larger population of 5,608 was in October 1913 awaiting the opening of a long-running, if not permanent, film venue. Although in the western county of Galway, Ballinasloe is located along the Galway-Dublin road and rail line, at the terminus of the Grand Canal. It is on the eastern border of that county, which means that it was and is nearer to the middle of the country than the west coast, and as such has long been an important meeting point between east and west, epitomized in its longstanding October fair, one of the oldest in Ireland. The town transport links and the fair’s large crowds drew travelling entertainers, so that in September 1913 alone, two travelling film companies visited before John Toft arrived to take part in the fair.
Toft displayed a remarkable ability to manage publicity and consequently increase his audience. The East Galway Democrat praised his “readiness to aid every good work” that included his “Benefit Night” this week in aid of the Temperance Hall, his generous subscriptions to the Nursing Fund, the Fund for the Poor, and the Gaelic League, as well as his kindness in giving the patients and inmates of our public institutions a little enjoyment. It is not to be wondered at that Mr Toft’s Amusements are well patronised, and that he makes friends wherever he goes.
However, when Toft travelled on from Ballinasloe a few day after the end of the fair, local businessmen John Thomas Greeves-O’Sullivan and Timothy J Dolan opened a winter season of their Greeves-O’Sullivan and Dolan Picture and Variety Company, running at the Town Hall from 24 November and over the Christmas period. “No expense has been spared to provide first-class pictures,” the Democrat revealed, “and the machine to be used for the purpose of showing them is one of the latest on the market. An experienced operator has been engaged, and the Ballinasloe Orchestra will discourse selections during the entertainments” .
The company advertised regularly in the press and were acknowledged with notices, including one on 6 December that appears to bear out their claim that they changed films nightly: “to-night (Friday) a grand feature film, 'Heartt of the First Empire or The Days of Napoleon,’ a splendid Military Drama; Sunday 7th Dec., ‘The Kerry Gow,’ a three-reel Irish Drama, Monday, 8th Dec., ‘Woman’s Heart,’ and on Friday, 12th Dec., ‘District Attorney’s Conscience,’ a splendid emotional drama”. Despite the use of “variety” in their name, the company appears primarily to have shown pictures and their variety seems to have been limited to selections from the orchestra between films, with the piano selections of Eddie Kelly being particularly singled out in one notice.
The use of such local resources as the orchestra for commercial gain was the main criticism of the company expressed in the press. In an exchange of letters with Greeves-O’Sullivan, the orchestra’s conductor James Roche refused to participate in the venture, explaining that although he had been working with orchestra for a year without remuneration, he was not prepared to continue unpaid “where the band was being used for a private commercial speculation”. Greeves-O’Sullivan replaced Roche with local hairdresser Patrick Burke and seems to have gone on using the orchestra, but the exploitation by local businessmen of such community resources as orchestras and town halls for their own profit did cause conflict elsewhere during this period in the development of cinema.
John Toft’s fairground cinematograph show at Tramore, Co Waterford, in 1901. Courtesy: National Library of Ireland’s Catalogue
History Without Tears in Irish Cinemas
The London-based trade journal Bioscope opened its first June issue with an editorial entitled “The Moving Picture: The New National Weapon” and subtitled “A Force which Cannot Be Destroyed and Should Therefore Be Utilized.” “The new Defence of the Realm Regulations contain a warning that penalties will be incurred by the exhibition of unpatriotic cinematograph films,” it began, before confidently asserting: We are happy to believe that the precaution was unnecessary. The power of the pictures has never yet been used in this country for the furtherance of disloyal or anti-British objects. It has, on the other hand, not seldom been employed with the utmost success in patriotic causes. Nevertheless, the British government did see a reason for tighter legislative control of cinema in pursuit of the ideological goal of promoting patriotism, unanimity and support for recruitment in the context of a lengthy and costly war. The economic need to fund the war through increased tax had most directly affected cinema through the recently introduced Entertainment Tax.
In many ways, cinema in Ireland in June 1916 looked like a mature industry, regulated by the existing laws, but also highly cognizant of and largely aligned with the London-based trade. Even Ireland’s laggardly film production showed considerable development when the Film Company of Ireland press-showed its first production, O’Neil of the Glen, on 29th. June at Dublin’s Carlton Cinema. The Bioscope was one of the ways in which this alignment was achieved, and although it was certainly read in Ireland, members of the Irish cinema trade might have been less confident of the claims of this editorial. In the same 1 June issue, the journal’s “Trade Topics” column published the assertion of J. Magner of the Clonmel Theatre that the Bioscope was the best of the cinema trade papers. And in the issue of June 22nd. the Irish columnist “Paddy” informed readers that the Bioscope was available at Mrs Dunne’s shop in Dublin’s Brunswick Street – close to the Queen’s Theatre, Norman Whitten’s General Film Supply, distributor Weisker Brothers, and other cinema businesses. In the aftermath of the Easter Rising, however, it was questionable to what the Irish population at large was loyal. Support for the war still dominated the mainstream Irish press, but antiwar and pro-republican sentiments were becoming less marginal. By June, some theatres and picture houses anxious to maintain displays of their loyalty to the Crown – and by extension, that of their patrons – encountered protests. The large Theatre Royal had been one of the first places of amusement to open after the Rising, when it had offered British Army propaganda films. This did not, however, mean that its audience could all be considered loyalists. On the 26th. of June, instance, William Charles Joseph Andrew Downes, a church decorator living at 15 Goldsmith Street, Dublin, was arrested for riotous behaviour during a live show at the Theatre Royal. He had shouted abuse related to the Boer War at a uniformed soldier who had responded to a magician’s call for a volunteer from the audience (“Scene in City Theatre”). The Boer War of 1899-1902 had been extremely divisive in Ireland, with popular support for the Boers’ stand against the British Empire extending from fiery speeches by Parnell’s Irish Parliamentary Party in Westminster to attacks on British soldiers in the streets of Dublin, and it was directly linked to the Rising in the person of executed leader and former Boer Irish Brigade major John McBride (Condon). As Downes was being escorted out the door of the Theatre Royal, he drew attention to the Irish republican badge he was wearing – a display of solidarity with the Easter rebels – and suggested that it was the reason he was being expelled. Downes’ outburst could not be completely dismissed as the actions of a drunk – the arresting constable described him as neither drunk nor sober but “half-and-half” – and it was not isolated. The previous week, seven young people between the ages of 17 and 29 – four men and three women – had been charged in Dublin’s Police Court with offenses under the Defence of the Realm Act and with assaulting the constables who had attempted to seize the green flag at the head of a procession of 400 republican supporters that had been followed through the city centre by a crowd of around 2,000
The crowd had also shouted republican slogans and booed and groaned passing soldiers. The mass arrests and deportations in May had failed to quell advanced nationalist activism that was now consciously identifying itself as republican. Dublin Evening Mail 19 Jun. 1916: 2. This republican riot on Dublin’s streets provided an immediate if unacknowledged context for press commentary on the educational value of the official war films. “The boys of the future will have many advantages over the boys of the past,” observed the Dublin Evening Mail’s “Town Topics” columnist. “They will learn by picture-houses as well as by paradigms. It has been said that there is no Royal road to learning. There may be a Theatre Royal road, however Official war films at the Gaiety; Evening Herald 14 Jun. 1916: 2. In a telling slippage, he was in fact discussing a new programme of official war films at the Gaiety Theatre rather than at the Royal. Although his point was about the ease or gaiety with which cinema could teach history, it is clear that this history would inculcate loyalty to the crown and war effort. “When I was in statu pupillari,” he continued, history was taught me not without tears. The boys of the future will learn of the great war at the picture-palaces. I saw some of the official war films last week at the Gaiety Theatre. I saw the Irish regiments marching to Mass. I saw the heavy artillery attacking a German block-house.
I saw our men in the trenches, preparing to seize the crater of a mine explosion. I saw them lobbing bombs like cricket balls at the enemy. Then I saw them – gallant Canadians at St. Eloi – fix bayonets and out over the parapet to charge across No Man’s Land and leap at the foe. Who would read the dull chronicles of Caesar of Livy after that? In making this argument, the Town Topics writer was aligning himself with the Bioscope early 1916 description of the cinema as the “nation’s historian .” Although certainly exciting, these official films were not mere entertainment but a new kind of visual historiography. And this was not just a boon for schoolboys but also a new historical method that could help historians to overcome the wartime measures introduced by governments to control the flow of information. He argued that while “ at the beginning of the war it was thought the historians would be bankrupt, because the censorship hid deeds of our men in the mystery of the night,” in fact, “the cinema will save the historian, and at least help him to pay ten shillings in the pound.” Other press coverage of the Gaiety shows gives further details of how this new history was presented and received. The choice of a large “legitimate” theatre such as the Gaiety rather than in a picture house associated the films with a site of serious cultural production aimed at a discerning audience.
On the other hand, the Gaiety adapted picture-house exhibition practices in showing the films at three shows a day beginning at 3pm. “The Gaiety Theatre opens a practically new chapter in its career,” the Freeman’s Journal commented, “by the fact that the attraction is not the familiar drama, musical or otherwise, but the production of a series of official war pictures which are, beyond all doubt, of transcendent interest”. “In imagination,” observed the Irish Times, “one may see Irish soldiers at work and play, the Connaught Rangers and Munster Fusiliers amongst them, and Captain Redmond is seen leading his company to the front lines” Similar to other entertainments at the theatre, “a most excellent musical accompaniment is supplied by the Gaiety orchestra”. Although music might contribute to the ease with which these images could be perceived, the musical director would presumably have had to be careful to avoid evoking not tears of schoolboy struggle but those of poignant loss among audience members with relatives and friends in France. More chapters of this history that could – a least theoretically – be assimilated without tears were on the way. “At the General Headquarters of the British Army in France,” reported the Dublin Evening Mail on June 22nd, “there was last night exhibited before a large gathering of distinguished officers and their guests the latest series of the official war films, which in due course will be presented to the public at home and to neutral Powers, amongst which the desire to learn what our troops are really doing is unquestionable very keen”. This first run before an expert military audience could not, however, guarantee how resistant audiences in Ireland or elsewhere might react. The Irish Catholic Church seemed to also believe that the cinema could not easily be destroyed and should therefore be, if not utilized for its own purposes, at least shaped by its ideology. With the appointment in June 1916 by Dublin Corporation’s Public Health Committee of Walter Butler and Patrick Lennon as film censors, a milestone was reached in the church’s campaign to introduce local censorship that would reflect a distinctly Irish Catholic sensibility (Rockett 50). Films shown in Ireland already bore the certificate of the British Board of Film Censorship, which had been established by the film trade as a form of self-regulation to avoid government-imposed censorship. Even as Butler and Lennon were being appointed, the British industry was discussing renewed government determination to introduce official censorship. Among the cases cited that raised this issues in London was the banning of A Tale of the Rebellion, a film about the Easter Rising that showed an Irishman being hanged. Even as they announced the introduction of censorship in Dublin, however, the Irish Vigilance Association (IVA) expressed impatience with the lack of urgency demonstrated by the Corporation in appointing censors.
From the IVA’s perspective, censorship was increasingly urgent given cinema’s growing appeal for the middle class, epitomized by improvements to cinematic music in June 1916. Three Dublin picture houses led the musical field: the city-centre Pillar and Carlton and the suburban Bohemian. Reviewing the Pillar at the end of June, the Irish Times revealed that its “orchestra including such favourites as Mr. Joseph Schofield, Mr. Harris Rosenberg, Mr. H. O’Brien, Miss Annie Kane and Mr. S. Golding, continue[s] to delight large audiences”. Just a few doors away from the Pillar on Sackville/O’Connell Street, the Carlton boasted in Erwin Goldwater an internationally renowned violinist as its orchestra leader and soloist. The Bohemian, however, outdid both of these when it engaged Achille Simonetti . “Dubliners will keenly appreciate the enterprise of the management of the Bohemian Picture Theatre in permanently engaging the services of one of the most noted violinists of the day in the person of Signor Simonetti,” the Dublin Evening Mail argued. “Henceforth Signor Simonetti will act as leader of the Bohemian orchestra – which has won such a wide repute – and will give solos, as well as Mr. Clyde Twelvetrees, Ireland’s greatest ’cellist”. Simonetti debuted alongside Twelvetrees at the Bohemian on Whit Monday, 12th. June 1916, when the bill was topped by Infelice, based on a novel by Augusta Evans-Wilson and starring Peggy Hyland. And if this was not enough to draw a large audience, the Bohemian announced that it would revise its pricing back to pre- Entertainment Tax rates, adding the line “We Pay Your Tax” to future advertisements. The Bohemian added violist George Hoyle two weeks later. “The management now consider that they have the most perfect arrangement of stringed instruments and performers for a picture theatre,” the Irish Times reported (“Platform and Stage”). In a rare article focused on “Picture House Music,” Dublin Evening Mail columnist H.R.W. agreed that the Bohemian’s orchestra was the best in the city and that Simonetti’s “distinguished abilities attract large numbers of people from the most distant parts of the city.” No ordinary musicians need apply to Bangor’s Picture Palace; The Irish Independent on 9th. Jun. 1916 commenting favourably on the tendency for picture-house orchestras to add strings and avoid brass and woodwind, it observed that while “the theatre orchestra was allowed to degenerate into mere noisy accompaniments to conversations in the auditorium during the interval,” in the picture house, “conversation is subdued, the music is subdued, the lights are subdued. The whole effect is soothing to the nerves.” Referring to Twelvetree’s impressive rendering of Max Bruch’s arrangement of “Kol Nidrei,” s/he speculated that “the exact atmosphere is created by the fact that the solos are played in half light. The attention paid by the audience shows that this new feature is appreciated to the fullest extent.” S/he concluded that “the picture houses are affording us an opportunity of hearing the very best music, and in the hands of such fine artists as I have mentioned we can hear anything from a string quartet to a symphony.” Although the official war films were not shown at the Bohemian, music of this kind could certainly play a role in assimilating the new tearless history
A Century of Cinematographing Ireland
By Denis Condon
A Century of Cinematographing Ireland One hundred years ago, on the night of Saturday, 13 August 1910, three passengers travelling from New York disembarked from the White Star Line’s steamer Baltic at what was then called Queenstown, now Cobh, with a device that was revolutionizing how people viewed the world: the cinematograph or cine-camera. This device had existed for fifteen years in 1910, and had been used to record events and film short fiction subjects. At this point, filmmakers were perfecting the techniques that would allow them to produce long fiction films for mass audiences and as result, make the cinema the twentieth century’s dominant medium. The arrival of the three-person film crew marked the beginning of the first serious effort to make Ireland not only a part of the international market for such films but also the location for their production. Sidney Olcott, Gene Gauntier and George Hollister were employees of the New York- based Kalem Company, a small film production company that made the most of its lack of studios by specializing in fiction films admired for the realism of their outdoor settings.
Cinema audiences were becoming more discerning and were increasingly choosing films in which the action unfolded in convincing locations. Between 1910 and the outbreak of World War I in 1914, these filmmakers would return each summer to shoot films in Ireland, favouring the southwest corner of the country, particularly the area around Killarney. The popularity of their films made Killarney – rural and picturesque – the authentic filmic image of Ireland that circulated to mass audiences around the world, including the growing cinema audiences in Ireland itself. Olcott was the company’s main film director as well as an actor, Gauntier was both a scriptwriter and actress, and Hollister was a cameraman, the company’s “leading expert,” in the Cork Examiner’s phrase, in the operation of the cinematograph. The Examiner carried a brief report on the filmmakers on the Thursday after their arrival. “Representatives of the Kalem Motion Picture Company, New York, are at present engaged in a tour of Ireland for the purpose of securing a series of ‘motion’ pictures for exhibition before American audiences,” it revealed. Already they have secured a number of excellent views in and around Cork. Harvesting operations yesterday formed the object of their attention. Scenes at Blarney Castle, Queenstown, and other places of interest were also taken. Of course, places like Killarney and Glengariffe will come in for special attention.
The pictures in addition to being full of interest for the American audiences will at the same time contribute a splendid advertising medium for the tourists resorts of this country. This short anonymous article gives a good indication of what filmmaking meant for observers in Ireland at the time. Its title, “Cinematographing Ireland: ‘Motion’ Pictures for America,” nicely conveys the sense in which scenic views of Ireland were to be captured for consumption by US cinema audiences. The benefits of this process for Ireland appear here to be purely secondary: the films will advertise Irish tourist resorts and encourage Americans to voyage across the Atlantic to visit those resorts and consume the authentic views themselves. Indeed, film’s potential as a promoter of Irish tourism had been recognized by 1900 and continues to influence government support for foreign filmmaking in the country to the present. Nevertheless, the article acknowledges neither that most of these picturesque images would be seen as part of a fictional narrative that would influence how audiences were likely to interpreted them nor that Irish audiences would also see these images on the growing number of screens all over Ireland.
not only formed the context of how the Kalem filmmakers made their films but also the spine of virtually all the stories they created. They wasted no time in achieving their primary goal of making best use of the real locations that they visited to produce fiction films that would appeal to the large cinema audiences in the United States, among them Irish Americans and more recent Irish immigrants. On their voyage to Queenstown, they began filming the shipboard scenes of The Lad from Old Ireland, the first surviving fiction film shot substantially in Ireland. This film shows how Terry (Olcott), unhappy with his lot in rural Rathpacon, emigrates to New York, where after ten years, he has worked himself up from navvy to mayor. Learning of the desperate plight of Aileen (Gauntier), his half-forgotten sweetheart, Terry returns to Ireland to save her from eviction and marry her. Although only one-reel – about seventeen minutes – long, this film encapsulates a myth of Irish success in America on a scale that allows the immigrant to return to remedy Ireland’s economic and political ills. This film most directly addressed and flattered those Americans of recent Irish heritage, but the story was one that would find easy resonances with immigrants from other parts of the world. Filmed not far from Cork city, The Lad from Old Ireland features an unspectacular pastoral landscape of whitewashed thatched cottages and fields divided by dry stone walls.
The Kalems shot briefly in Killarney in 1910 for the other one-reel film they made in Ireland that year, Irish Honeymoon, but they would make Killarney’s sublime picturesqueness a central feature of their emigrant dramas and adventures of Irish rebels when they returned with a larger company in 1911. That year, they made fifteen of their twenty-six Irish-shot films, including the one-reel Rory O’More, which concerns the escape from British redcoats to exile in America of a fictional 1798 rebel, a historical scenario they would rework repeatedly. During the chase, intertitles not only perform their usual task of clarifying the action for the audience but also draw attention to the landscape in which the film was shot. So, the intertitles of one sensational scene announce not only that “Rory rescues the drowning soldier” but also the scene was filmed at the “Lakes of Killarney.” For popular US audiences, the lakes of Killarney were already a place of which they had heard mention in popular songs and such plays as Dion Boucicault’s The Colleen Bawn, which was adapted on film three times in 1911 alone. What helped to make the Kalems version the most popular of the three was not only that it was three-reels (forty-five minutes) long but also that it could – and did – boast in advertising and in its intertitles that it was shot at the authentic Killarney locations. Olcott and Gauntier left Kalem at the end of 1912, but they returned to Ireland in 1913 with their own company, the Gene Gauntier Feature Players, and Olcott brought his Sid Olcott International Feature Players to Killarney for a final production season in 1914. Rumours circulated that Olcott was planning to set up a permanent studio in the village of Beaufort, near the Gap of Dunloe, but Europe’s inexorable mobilization for total war put paid to any such plans. Nevertheless, the quality of the films that they made in Ireland and their commitment to scenic realism set a high standard for those who would represent Ireland on screen.
