Category Archives: Sidney Olcott

A New Industry: The Film Company of Ireland’s First Season

Posted on by
3
Kathleen Murphy ET 7 Apr 1917

A photograph of Kathleen Murphy advertised the beginning of the Film Company of Ireland’s 1917 production season; Evening Telegraph 7 Apr. 1917: 4.

In April 1917, the Film Company of Ireland (FCOI) began publicizing the fact that they were beginning a second season of production. On 7 April, a photograph of Kathleen Murphy appeared in the Evening Telegraph‘s “Music and the Drama” column, with a caption indicating that she was playing the part of Nora Lahy in a film adaptation of Charles Kickham’s Knocknagow that was already in production. Based on Ireland’s most popular novel of the late-19th century, Knocknagow on film would be an ambitious undertaking, and it would be popular with contemporary Irish audiences. And because it – along with Willy Reilly and His Colleen Bawn (1920), is one of only two FCOI films that survive in a substantially complete form, it is relatively well known, at least by film scholars (see here, for example). However, the film of Knocknagow would not reach Irish audiences until early 1918.

Irish Independent 10 Nov. 1917: 2.

FCOI made two other feature films during the summer production season of 1917: the comedy Rafferty’s Rise and historical romance When Love Came to Gavin Burke. However, despite the fact that the May 1917 issue of Irish Limelight published photographs from Rafferty’s Rise, the release of these films would also take many months. As a result, the FCOI’s 1916 films continued to circulate and represent – indeed, to constitute – the company’s released output for much of 1917. Nevertheless, beyond O’Neil of the Glen and perhaps The Miser’s Gift – both of which have already been written about here – very little is known about the other 1916 films. This is not surprising because surviving information on them is scant. In marked contrast to the barrage of publicity that heralded the release of O’Neil of the Glen and, to a lesser extent, The Miser’s Gift, the later 1916 films seem to have appeared with little fanfare. Nevertheless, bringing together some of surviving information reveals hitherto unknown aspects of these obscure but important early Irish films and the company that made them.

FCOI advertised upcoming releases in the Irish press on 14-15 August 1916. This one appeared in the Irish Times 14 Aug. 1916: 4.

Even the number of films they made in 1917 is not entirely clear. With O’Neil of the Glen newly released and creating a stir in August 1916, the company announced in the Irish dailies that it had a further four films ready for release in September: The Miser’s Gift, Woman’s Wit, Food of Love and An Unfair Love Affair. As well as these presumably complete or almost complete films, it listed nine other titles that it had in production: The Upstart, Blarney, The Irish Girl, a series called Shanachies Tales, Irish Jarvey Tales – possibly another series – Bye Ways of Fate, Treasure Trove, Willie Reilly and The Girl from the Golden Vale. With so little surviving information, ads such as this have often been taken as confirming that these films were actually made. These films appear in the standard Irish and British filmographies – Kevin Rockett’s Irish Filmography and its online version, and Denis Gifford’s The British Film Catalogue, as they do in the books that take these reference works as a source.

Trade journals and local and national newspapers fill in some – but by no means all – of the details of FCOI’s filmmaking and exhibition exploits from the summer of 1916 to the summer of 1917. These sources show that all four films from the first group were subsequently released, albeit not in September 1917. Of the second group, only Willie Reilly is readily recognizable as an FCOI title – Willy Reilly and His Colleen Bawn – but it would not be released until early 1920. Some of the other eight films named in this ad may be working titles for the films that FCOI did release in late 1916 and early 1917. There is substantial evidence that in addition to the five films already named, the company released four others in this period: Puck Fair Romance, A Girl of Glenbeigh, The Eleventh Hour and Widow Malone.

Ad for FCOI films released in 1916 and made in 1917. Irish Limelight Dec. 1917: 16.

None of these corresponds exactly to the in-production titles mentioned in the ad, but some are close, such as the in-production titles The Girl from the Golden Vale and The Irish Girl which bear a similarity to A Girl of Glenbeigh. These were, of course, Irish versions of titles in the format “An X Girl” or “The Girl of X” that had been internationally popular for decades. However, as A Girl of Glenbeigh specifically names a place in Kerry, it is unlikely to have morphed from The Girl from the Golden Vale – with its reference to the rich farmland in the counties to the east of Kerry. But the film may have begun life under the less specific title The Irish Girl. That said, the in-production titles that include Irish place names suggest a different geography from the four that were finally made. Blarney and The Girl from the Golden Vale indicate a company working in Cork, while A Girl of Glenbeigh and Puck Fair Romance are firmly located in west Kerry.

The issue of the films’ geography deserves further discussion, but this blog will work on the basis that FCOI did not make all the films named in the 14-15 August ad. Evidence suggests that the company released not fourteen films but nine in its opening season, which nonetheless represents a substantial output. For clarity, those nine films are: O’Neil of the Glen, The Miser’s Gift, Woman’s Wit, Food of Love, An Unfair Love Affair, Puck Fair Romance, A Girl of Glenbeigh, The Eleventh Hour and Widow Malone. Although this blog will have something to say about the first two, it will mainly focus on the latter seven.

J. M. Kerrigan

J. M. Kerrigan, Irish Limelight January 1917: 3.

All nine of these films appear to have been directed – the contemporary term, confusingly, was “produced” – by Abbey Theatre actor J. M. Kerrigan, who also starred or at least had a prominent acting role in many of them. Kerrigan was one of FCOI co-founder and producer James Mark Sullivan’s earliest recruits to the company; he was already working with FCOI in March 1916 – the same month as Sullivan and his partner Henry Fitzgibbon registered the company – and may even have invested money in it (Holloway, 21 Mar.). Kerrigan was soon joined by other actors from the Abbey and other theatres, most frequently by Fred O’Donovan, Kathleen Murphy and Nora Clancy, and more occasionally by Brian Magowan, J. M. Carre, Irene Murphy, Valentine Roberts and others. Also a star of the Abbey, O’Donovan would take over as FCOI’s actor-director for the 1917 production season when Kerrigan left Ireland for the United States in early 1917 on a career path that would eventually see him become a well-loved Hollywood character actor. His permanent departure seems to have come as a surprise to some in the press. On 12 April, Paddy reported that Kerrigan “has left America on his return voyage, and is expected to arrive almost any day now.” A report a week later suggested that he had little thoughts of returning to Ireland. “He has ‘made good’ out there in a surprisingly short space of time,” J.A.P. (Joseph A. Power) noted in the Evening Telegraph on 20 April, referring to reviews of Kerrigan’s early US stage performances. “It is only a few months since he left Ireland, yet here are the blasé Yankee journalists hurling bouquets at him with all the vigour of the great American language” (“Gossip of the Day”).

Engaging prominent Abbey actors bolstered FCOI’s claim that it was the Film Company of Ireland and was extending into the new cinematic medium the Abbey’s project of representing Ireland differently. “With the assistance of such artists as they had associated with them,” Fitzgibbon was reported as saying at a press luncheon in June 1916 to celebrate the launch of O’Neil of the Glen, “with Irish scenery and Irish literary talent, they were bound to succeed and be proud of the enterprise in which they were engaged” (“New Irish Industry”). If anybody was well placed to revise the representation of Irish people through performance, it was Kerrigan and this group of Irish actors who were intimately familiar not only with the plays and acting styles of the Irish revival developed at the Abbey but also with the modern drama represented by Shaw and Ibsen. But the company was also open to performers from beyond Ireland: “In the next film,” the Irish Times reported, “Mrs. H. M. Fitzgibbon, a vivacious French lady will make her appearance” (“Irish Film Production”). Although FCOI publicity made much of the claim that their films were “all Irish,” Fitzgibbon’s wife Peggy Darval was mentioned among the cast on occasion (“Back from Kerry”). This remark about his marriage to an actress also suggests that Fitzgibbon, about whom little else is known, may have had a personal motivation for getting involved in the film business.

FCOI seeks scriptwriters: Irish Independent 28 Mar. 1916: 1.

But actors alone were not enough for the company’s success. When Fitzgibbon mentioned the “Irish literary talent,” he must have been referring in part to Bernard Duffy, the writer of several one-act rural comedies for the Abbey who had also attended O’Neil of the Glen’s launch. Duffy praised FCOI for its “wholesome desire to reproduce the atmosphere of the country, and the motive was not purely mercenary. A vast field of folk literature was yet to be explored and utilised” (“Irish Film Production”). Nevertheless, sourcing new or adapted stories seems to have been difficult, and few if any Abbey playwrights were involved in the company. FCOI advertised more frequently in the press in 1916 for scenario writers than for other kinds of collaborators.

Following the destruction of its offices in Henry Street during the Rising, FCOI moved to Dame Street. Dublin Evening Mail 12 May 1916: 7.

Discussion of the company often mentions the destruction during the Rising of FCOI’s offices at 16 Henry Street but less frequently reveals the names of the people who worked there or in their new offices at 34 Dame Street. All the 1916 films were shot by John A. Bennett, who had worked for many years as the chief projectionist – or “operator” – and sometimes cameraperson for James T. Jameson’s Irish Animated Film Company based mainly at Dublin’s Rotunda, as well as later acting as the Dublin manager for the distribution company Films, Limited (Paddy, 18 Nov.; 13 Jul.). However, by January 1917, Bennett was seeking other work, presumably because he was not being paid by FCOI (Paddy, 11 Jan.). In any case, FCOI’s camera work in 1917 was first taken up by the company’s secretary Robert Justice – he featured in a June 1917 Irish Limelight article in this role – before Pathé camera operator William Moser became the company’s cinematographer (“With the Film Co. of Ireland”).

Joseph Boland Irish Limelight Jun. 1917: 6.

Among the other identifiable members of the company in 1916 and early 1917 were the sales and marketing operatives Mr. Coen, Joseph Boland and Ben Cowan. These men were vital to FCOI’s success, and although usually ignored by later film historians, they received considerable attention from contemporary trade journals because these were the people that journalists and cinema managers were most likely to meet. Coen was the company’s sales agent in Ireland until September 1916 when he was replaced by Boland, who for some years had been the travelling representative for General Film Supply (GFS), Ireland’s other major film production company of the period (Paddy, 28 Sep.). Boland appears to have had a good reputation in the industry in Ireland; the distributor M.P. Sales tried unsuccessfully and publicly to lure him away from GFS in early 1916 (Paddy, 17 Feb., 24 Feb., “Bioscope Parliament”). Cowan – one of a number of Russian Jews working in the early Irish film industry – ran Express Film Agency, the Irish agent for several British distributors, and he acted as publicist for the very successful 7 August launch of O’Neil of the Glen. Following this, he told reporters that “he intends to introduce many novel ideas in the advertising line. Another Trade show will shortly be held, at which it is Mr. Cowan’s intention to screen two more subjects” (Paddy, 27 Jul.). In the event, the second trade show on 17 August 1916 at the Dame Street Picture House would feature just The Miser’s Gift.

FCOI was intensely busy in August 1916. In Dublin, Cowan was publicizing the five complete or nearly complete productions shot earlier in the summer, as well as the other eight titles notionally in production. The Miser’s Gift was trade shown three days later. At some point in early August, Sullivan and Kerrigan brought the cast and crew to Kerry to shoot the four fiction films that would actually make up the second half of their 1916 production season. The date of departure is not clear, but if Puck Fair Romance was actually shot at Killorglin’s Puck Fair in 1916, then the company would have to have been in Kerry before 12 August because the fair took place between 10 and 12 August. They were certainly in Kerry by 20 August. An article in the Kerry News reported on a fundraising concert that FCOI mounted on 3 September to clear the debt from Glenbeigh’s Catholic church. It observed that the company “came to Glenbeigh two weeks ago where they opened a tour of the Kingdom’s beauty spots, and at present they are staying at O’Sullivan’s hotel, Muckross, having the scenes in several new films laid in and around Killarney” (“Film Company of Ireland”). If “two weeks” here is to be taken literally, the company reached Kerry on or about 20 August, but this seems like a flexible temporality. Nevertheless, the concert does seem to have marked the end of FCOI’s visit to Kerry. By 5 September, Dublin’s Evening Herald was reporting the company’s return to Dublin (“Back from Kerry”).

This suggests that the production unit had left Dublin before the publication of 14 August ad mentioning the eight films that were not subsequently made, as well as the Miser’s Gift trade show. Poor communication might explain why on 14 August, the company’s publicist did not have the titles for the scenarios that had begun shooting that week nor the locations at which they were being shot. But if this is true, then the production unit, which included Sullivan and possibly Fitzgibbon – it certainly included his wife – must have been surprized by the announcement of those eight titles in the national press. The tight timeframe also suggests that at least some and possible all of the scenarios were not carefully prepared and honed in advance but were hastily written on location. Only for The Eleventh Hour was a writer subsequently identified: Mark Coakley (“New Irish Film”).

Whatever FCOI’s reason for the eventual choice of Kerry above other parts of the country, accounts in the Kerry papers of FCOI’s filmmaking are very reminiscent of Sidney Olcott and Gene Gauntier’s filmmaking adventures in Ireland between 1910 and 1914. Making films for the Kalem Company and later for themselves, Olcott and Gauntier had repeatedly gravitated back to the Killarney area, often basing themselves in the village of Beaufort and taking advantage of the rugged mountain, lake and seashore landscapes available in west Kerry. Their dramas of rural life, emigration and historical rebellion had been very popular with Irish audiences, making this region the most identifiable early Irish cinematic landscape. The Post, however, chose to compare Olcott and Gauntier’s films unfavourably to the as-yet-unseen filmmaking efforts of FCOI. “We are glad that at length an Irish Company has appeared,” a columnist commented. “The misrepresentation of Ireland and her people were the aims of most of those who took up work such as this in the past. The production created a feeling of resentment and indignation” (“Notes on News”).

The last day of The Food of Love‘s run at the Dame Street Picture House; Dublin Evening Mail 4 Nov. 1916: 2.

Nevertheless, this does not look like FCOI offering radically new representations of Ireland. With at least some of their first five films shot in Wicklow – this certainly seems to have been the case with O’Neil of the Glen and The Food of Love whose publicity made much of “the lovely scenery around Glendalough” – and the final four shot in Kerry, FCOI was once again exploiting Ireland’s most reproduced picturesque locations (“Irish Film Production”).

Kerry location at which FCOI shot in August 1916.

That said, there may be some novelty in the choice of southwest Kerry locations, which can be established readily from the titles and synopses of the films. The Bioscope short synopsis of Puck Fair Romance – which it titled A Romance of Puck Fair – gives little indication that the film was actually shot at Killorglin’s famous festival. “He was addicted to walking tours, she was an artist,” it begins. “They met in the country, on a farm, She thought him ‘a farmer’s boy,’ he thought her a farmer’s daughter. They canoodled and when their separate ways, he regretting having left her, she sorry to have deceived him. When they met in town it was all right” (“Condensed Film Critiques,” 28 Dec.). Little is made here of the fair, with its central feature: the electing of a billygoat as King Puck and parading him on a raised platform. Nevertheless, the critic was complimentary, if not completely positive, judging that it was “quite pretty, set in delightful Irish scenes, and there are two other nice people in it, his pal and her model, but they could not be expected to complete their romance in the same reel.”

Derry Journal 10 Jan. 1917: 2.

Killarney is most famous for its lakes, and as such, the lakeshore setting of The Eleventh Hour may be deemed clichéd. On the other hand, Coakley’s scenario – “in which the paternal instinct is the moving force” – was shot around the lesser known Caragh Lake, a scenic spot on the road between Glenbeigh and Killorglin (“New Irish Film”). A Girl of Glenbeigh indicates its setting in its title. Joseph Holloway’s comments on it when he saw it at the Rotunda on 15 Feb 1917 indicate how romance and landscape worked together. He observed in his diary that “[i]t told an interesting & effective love story that did not run smoothly, nicely amid beautiful scenery & surroundings – O’Donovan was the love in the story who had two strings to his bow – a farmer’s daughter & a lady. The latter two were played by the Miss Murphys.” Where Widow Malone – the fourth of the Kerry films – was shot is not clear from surviving sources. The Bioscope described its “simple” plot, in which

[p]retty widow Malone is counted by the political town councillor, the local schoolmaster and the village blacksmith. The two former are after her snug fortune, and are a couple of windbags, but the hearty smith, loyal when her fortune is supposed to be lost, wins Nora without much difficulty.” (“Condensed Film Critiques,” 14 Dec.).

While the period in Kerry was a busy one for the company, the return to Dublin seems to have put an end for some time to the involvement of many of the actors. Certainly, by the 25 September, Kerrigan and O’Donovan were back in Dublin and acting – in a special arrangement with FCOI – in John Bull’s Other Island, the opening play of the Abbey’s autumn season (“What’s on in Dublin”). There are some indications that the break up of the acting company was not altogether amicable. Holloway had a conversation with Abbey director John A. Keogh on 1 November 1916, who told him that “the Film Co. Of Ireland had burst up & the members all seeking engagements at the Abbey – O’Donovan had left it some time ago to join the Abbey Co.” Keogh comments may have to be treated with caution; he had hostility towards FCOI because of the special arrangements he had to make to be allowed to cast Kerrigan. Nevertheless, he did have information from the actors, so it may be true that “[f]unds had become low owing to the films released not catching on as was thought.”

Those involved in production may have been at a loose end by the start of September, but work for other elements of the business was increasing. At the end of August, Dublin Corporation considered an application from FCOI to build a studio on Pigeon House Road; the outcome of the application is not clear, but these studios were not built. Nevertheless, the Bioscope reported in September that FCOI “are fitting up very elaborate developing-rooms, etc., in their premises at 34, Dame Street, Dublin. Mr. W. James, chief operator at the Bohemian Theatre, Dublin, is in charge of the wiring and other electrical fittings” (“All-Irish Films”). This short item also renewed a call for scenario writers to “submit [FCOI] a sample of their work. The Scenario should preferably have Irish atmosphere, but this is not absolutely essential.”

Dublin Evening Mail 24 Oct. 1916: 4.

With this fit-out of post-production facilities underway, it took some time for the release of the remainder of the season’s films. The company’s first priority was the Irish market, and Boland appears to have been busy selling to cinemas all over the country. Despite the Dame Street Picture House claim in late October 1916 that it had secured “the initial presentation of all the films produced by the Film Co.,” the films premiered all over Ireland. Even FCOI’s long-heralded second release, The Miser’s Gift, had its first public viewings at Cork’s Coliseum on 12-14 October and a three-day run at Tralee’s Picturedrome (19-21 Oct.) before it had its Dublin debut at the Dame on 26-28 October. The Food of Love similarly premiered at the Coliseum on 23-25 October before appearing at the Dame for the three-day run of 2-4 November. However, Widow Malone was FCOI’s third release when it appeared at Kilkenny’s Cinema on Sunday, 22 October 1916 for a special benefit screening for the Gaelic League. The film had a more conventional three-day run at Belfast’s Kinema House later that week, beginning on 26 October.

Puck Fair Romance premiered in Belfast’s Kinema House; Belfast News-Letter 9 Nov. 1916: 1

Indeed, Belfast, with the largest cinema-going population in the country, could not be and was not ignored in the awarding of premieres. Audiences at the Kinema House were the first to be offered Puck Fair Romance from 9-11 November. The Dame does seem to have debuted An Unfair Love Affair on 23-25 November. A Girl of Glenbeigh, however, premiered in Kerry, at Tralee’s Picturedrome on 27-28 November. The Dame also had the first viewings of the final two releases of the year. It opened The Eleventh Hour – FCOI’s second three-reel film –on 30 November 1916 for a three-day, end-of-week run. It was nearly a month later when the final release of the season, Woman’s Wit, had its debut at the Dame on 26 December.

Much more remains to be discovered about this initial period of FCOI and the films they made in 1916, not least their November 1916 distribution deal with Davison’s Film Sales Agency and the patterns of exhibition in Britain. Let this attempt to bring together some of the newspaper and trade journal sources mark a start of that more complete account.

References

“All-Irish Films.” Bioscope 28 Sep. 1916: 1285.

“Back from Kerry: New Films Produced by Irish Company.” Evening Herald 5 Sep. 1916: 2.

“Bioscope Parliament.” Bioscope 2 Mar. 1916: 967-68.

“Condensed Film Critiques.” Bioscope 14 Dec. 1916: i; 21 Dec. 1916: iii; 28 Dec. 1916: i.

“Film Company of Ireland: Church Debt Wiped Out.” Kerry News 6 Sep. 1916: 4.

Gifford, Denis. The British Film Catalogue, vol. 1, Fiction Film, 1895-1994. 3rd ed. London and Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2001.

“Gossip of the Day.” Evening Telegraph 20 Apr. 1917: 2.

Holloway, Joseph. Holloway Diaries. National Library of Ireland.

“Irish Film Production.” Irish Times 30 Jun. 1916: 6.

“New Irish Film.” Irish Times 30 Nov. 1916: 8.

“New Irish Industry: The Film Co. of Ireland: A Promising Enterprise.” Freeman’s Journal 30 Jun. 1916: 6.

“Notes on News.” Kerry News 1 Sep. 1916: 2.

Paddy. “Pictures in Ireland.” Bioscope 18 Nov. 1915: 841; 17 Feb. 1916: 717; 24 Feb. 1916: 812; 13 Jul. 1916: 173; 27 Jul. 1916: 359; 28 Sep. 1916: 1285; 11 Jan. 1917: 194.

Rockett, Kevin. The Irish Filmography: Fiction Films, 1896-1996. Dublin: Red Mountain, 1996.

“What’s on in Dublin Next Week.” Evening Herald 23 Sep. 1916: 2.

“With the Film Co. of Ireland: A Day with the Producers.” Irish Limelight Jun. 1917: 10-11.

Shadows of Revolution in Irish Cinemas, March 1917

Posted on by
Reply

Among the offerings at Dublin’s Bohemian Picture for the first three days of the week beginning 19 March 1917, was footage of the Tsar of Russia; Dublin Evening Mail 19 Mar. 1917: 2.

“Things are very quiet in Dublin film circles just now,” observed the columnist of “Screenings: Kinematograph Notes & News” in Dublin’s Evening Telegraph on St. Patrick’s Day 1917, “but some big things are on the way.” The seeming quite may have been deceptive because big things were already underway in the shape of social upheaval in Russia, which Irish newspapers had first called a revolution the previous day. This was an event that was momentous even in a time of war, and cinema would, at the very least, provide moving images for Irish people to picture these developments. On 19 March, Dublin’s Bohemian Picture Theatre featured the “Latest Exclusive Pictures of The Czar of Russia,” and the Dublin Evening Mail reviewer thought they “should prove a source of great attraction” (“Bohemian Picture Theatre”). Despite this, no reviews of the films appear to exist by which public reaction to them might be judged. In any case, while an undoubtedly old film of the Tsar might pique the curiosity raised by unfolding events, it was unlikely to have satisfied the desire to witness recent developments. But Dublin was not alone in this. “Russian pictures have been going strong in London since the Duma won through to victory,” the “Screenings” writer noted. “And now arrangements have been made to show in the Russian provinces a kinematograph film of the revolution in Petrograd” (“Screenings,” Mar. 24).

The shadow of revolution was also closer to Ireland than this. The Irish administration feared that the first national day after the Easter Rising would occasion some “big things” in the shape of subversive activity and as a result, had put all public buildings in the city under military control for St. Patrick’s Day (“Patrick’s Day”). However, in stark contrast to occurrences in Russia, the main leaders of Ireland’s rebellion had been executed, and many rank-and-file participants remained in prison, a fact raised in speeches at Westminster comparing Ireland and Russia by such Irish MPs as John Dillon and Joseph Devlin (“Broken Pledges”).

Laurence O’Neill (centre with moustache) attending a GAA match at Croke Park, c.1919, in the company of Arthur Griffith, Eamon DeValera and Michael Collins. Wikimedia Commons.

While the question of Irish political prisoners was being discussed, many believed that a scarcity of food was a more immediate potential cause for social unrest. Earlier in March, before the strikes and demonstrations in Russian had become a revolution, Dublin’s lord mayor, Laurence O’Neill, had invoked the French Revolution to warn of the dangers in the city caused by “unemployment and the scarcity and inflated prices of foodstuffs.” “[O]ne of the principal causes of the French Revolution was the luxury of the upper classes and the poverty of the poor,” he observed, “and the lesson of that Revolution was that no matter in which age the authorities or upper classes ignored their duties to the poor, there was bound to be discontent” (“Lord Mayor”).

The first two workers’ budgets from the Leo Guild; Evening Telegraph 24 Feb. 1917: 1.

Contemporary statistics on the living conditions of Dublin’s working poor support O’Neill’s warnings. In a series of newspaper articles between February and April 1917, these statistics were presented in the form of household budgets provided by the Leo Guild, a Catholic organization interested in the welfare of the deserving poor. Named after Pope Leo XIII – the “working-man’s Pope” – the Irish branch had been founded in Dublin in 1912 to counter the increasing influence of socialism and radical labour activism among Irish workers (“Father Mathew Hall”). Members of the Guild conducted research among the poor, and although they published them anonymously, the people featured in the budgets

were not chosen as being exceptional cases of distress, but because after investigation, they were considered to be typical specimens of their class. None of them belong to the class of poor who apply to the union or the charitable institutions. They are all hard working, sober, respectable and self-respecting folk.” (“How the Poor Live.”)

The Guild’s first budgets focused on two households: that of a labourer and that of a sweated seamstress. Neither of these households had discretionary income to spend on the cinema or other entertainments. The commentary on the budgets concluded, for instance, that the labourer – earning £1 a week to support himself, his wife and seven young children – had outgoings of £1 3s 4d: “The meaning is obvious and tragic. Rent is a fixture, coal can hardly be reduced. The only thing which can be reduced is food, which is spared to stretch over the following week.”

The Guild’s statistics were prepared as part of the Catholic Church’s struggle against organized labour, but they offer some insight into who could or who likely could not have attended the cinema in early 1917. Other writers offered different views on whether or not the working poor attended cinema in 1917. In an article in the third (March 1917) issue of the recently launched cinema journal Irish Limelight, Stephanie de Maistre suggested that they could, and indeed did, form a particularly notable part of the cinema audience. Discussing her dissatisfaction with theatre and music hall and preference for cinema, she focused on one particular unnamed picture house that, “whilst always well patronised in the higher priced seats, became a popular haunt for the working man, his sweetheart or his wife and family.” Maistre’s article addresses an audience perceived to be, like herself, middle class, capable of occupying the higher-priced seats and making entertainment choices not available to working people. Her self-consciously literary account constructs cinema as a place where harmony between the classes is achieved by a cross-class interest in the entertainment provided and by an accepted stratification of the audience based on one’s ability to pay for a seat among one’s social peers. But she sees films as particularly beneficial to the working class:

You see people happy, contented: something has come to break the monotony of their lives; to give them a glimpse of the wonders of the world; to bring sentiment and poetry into drab and barren existences, and who shall say what hearts have been touched, appealed to and changed “in the shadows”?

Chaplin Count Framegrab

Eric Campbell, Charlie Chaplin and Edna Purviance in The Count (US: Lone Star, 1916).

Dublin picture-house owners’ choices of films for St Patrick’s Day suggest that they perceived their audiences to be substantially working class and interested in Irish films. Class was central to The Count (US: Lone Star, 1916), Chaplin’s latest Irish release, which ended its first Dublin run at the Pillar Picture House on 17 March. “The management of the Pillar Picture House, O’Connell street, was largely responsible for the introduction of Charlie Chaplin to the Dublin public,” the writer of “Screenings” reported on 10 March, “and they are still first in the field locally with pictures of the little comedian.” In the film, a tailor (Eric Campbell) pretends to be a count to attend a society party but finds that his employee (Chaplin) has beaten him to it and chats up both the cook and the rich hostess (Edna Purviance) until the real count unexpectedly shows up. In the week leading up to and including St Patrick’s Day, several other picture houses showed Chaplin’s The Floorwalker (US: Lone Star, 1916) and The Fireman (US: Lone Star, 1916), including the Rotunda Pictures, where it accompanied popular but sometimes controversial The Rosary (US: Selig Polyscope, 1915), the “Original Irish-American Drama.”

Chaplin was also a favourite among the children of the Irish in Britain. A 12-year-old Irish girl was one of the three London schoolgirls who in mid-March 1917 appeared before the Cinema Commission, a body formed by the National Council of Public Morals that began its inquiry into cinema’s public influence in January 1917 (“Mr. Goodwin’s Striking Figures”). When asked about the kinds of films they liked best, the girls chose Westerns and Chaplin comedies. However, they and their friends were not so enthusiastic about newsreels. “‘Sometimes when they have a Topical Budget,’ confessed one of the girls, ‘the Boys get up and go out’” (“At the Pictures”).

Boh Cleansing Fires ET 15 Mar 1917

In the three-day run up to St Patrick’s Day, the Bohemian showed the newly released Irish film The Eleventh Hour. Evening Telegraph 15 Mar. 1917: 2.

As well as the Irish-American Rosary, picture-house managers also followed the well-established practice of choosing Irish-shot films for St Patrick’s Day. In 1917, some of these were more authentically Irish shot than others. From 15-17 March, the Bohemian showed the already released The Eleventh Hour on a bill topped by Cleansing Fires. Cleansing Fires is sometimes mistaken as one of films made by the Film Company of Ireland (FCOI) in 1916, but FCOI merely controlled the rights of this film.

Film Fun July 1916: np.

Although not quite coinciding with St Patrick’s Day, The Innocent Lie (US: Famous Players, 1916) a “magnificent five-part Irish film,” opened on 26 March 1917 at Dublin’s Town Hall, Rathmines. This was the film’s second run in Dublin; its first had been at the Grafton Picture House in January 1917. Given that it had been directed by Sidney Olcott and starred Valentine Grant and Jack Clark, Irish audiences would not have doubted that it had been, as the Evening Telegraph claimed, “produced amidst beautiful scenery in the South of Ireland” (“Screenings” Mar. 17). Olcott had shot many films for Kalem and other companies in Ireland, and these had long been particularly popular around St Patrick’s Day. In 1915, for example, Dublin’s Masterpiece Cinema had run an Irish Week, at which Olcott’s The Colleen Bawn (US: Kalem, 1911), Ireland the Oppressed (US: Kalem, 1912) and The Mayor from Ireland (US: Kalem, 1912) were shown along with other Irish-shot or Irish-themed films (“Masterpiece Irish Week”). Olcott had made these films in Ireland, but the danger of U-boats on the Atlantic crossing meant that he could not do the same for The Innocent Lie. “The exteriors were photographed in Bermuda,” revealed George Blaisdell in the Moving Picture World before its US release on 8 May 1916, “and they are not only picturesque, but in atmosphere vividly remind of the land and shore of the troubled island they are intended to simulate.”

All in all, it seems things were not as quiet as they may have seemed in Irish cinema in March 1917.

References

“At the Pictures: What School Girls Like.” Evening Telegraph 20 Mar. 1917: 2.

Blaisdell, George. “‘The Innocent Lie’: Valentine Grant Makes Good in Her Debut in Famous Players Five-Part Subject.” Moving Picture World 20 May 1916: 1349.

“Bohemian Picture Theatre.” Dublin Evening Mail 20 Mar. 1917: 5.

“Broken Pledges—Empty Threats: Mr. Dillon’s Indictment of the Government.” Freeman’s Journal 21 Mar. 1917: 5.

“Father Mathew Hall: ‘Are Irish Catholics Good Citizens.’” Freeman’s Journal 18 Sep. 1912: 5.

“How the Poor Live: Typical Budget: A Crying Grievance: Result of Leo Guild Inquiry.” Evening Telegraph 24 Feb. 1917: 1.

“The Life of the Poor: More Leo Guild Budgets: A Pressing Problem.” Evening Telegraph 17 Mar. 1917: 4.

“Lord Mayor and the Distress in the City: Gravity of the Situation Stated in Plain Terms.” Evening Telegraph 12 Mar. 1917: 1.

De Maistre, Stephanie. “In the Shadows.” Irish Limelight 3:1 (Mar. 1917): 4.

“The Masterpiece Irish Week.” Evening Telegraph 16 Mar. 1915: 6.

“Mr. Goodwin’s Striking Figures: Evidence of Film Industry’s Magnitude: First Sitting of Cinema Commission.” Bioscope 11 Jan. 1917: 96.

“Patrick’s Day: Quiet Observance in Dublin.” Evening Telegraph 17 Mar. 1917: 1.

“Screenings: Kinematograph Notes & News.” Evening Telegraph 17 Mar. 1917: 5; 24 Mar. 1917: 5.

The Constant Watchfulness of Irish Cinema in March 1916

Posted on by
8
Irish-American James Mark Sullivan, who co-founded the Film Company of Ireland in March 1916. https://www.loc.gov/item/2002706157/

Irish-American James Mark Sullivan, who co-founded the Film Company of Ireland in March 1916. Image from the Library of Congress.

Although Ireland is celebrating the centenary of the 1916 Rising in March 2016, Easter was celebrated in 1916 in late April. Nevertheless, March 1916 saw such momentous cinematic events as the founding of the first major indigenous film production company. And even if Easter itself was still some way off, Irish cinema hit the beginning of the Easter season. In what was clearly a coordinated move by the Irish Catholic hierarchy, several bishops mentioned cinema in their Lenten pastorals, the letters from them read out on 5 March 1916 in churches in their dioceses to mark the start of the 40-day fasting period leading up to Easter. “Immodest representations in Theatres should be reprobated by every good man, and every effort should be made to discountenance them,” ordered the Bishop of Cork, but he had a particular warning about cinema:

We desire to direct your attention particularly to cinematograph and picture shows. The films come from outside, and from places where what concerns Christian modesty is made little of, and there is always a danger that what is unfit to be seen may be exhibited unless constant watchfulness is exercised to exclude what is objectionable and offensive in a Catholic country.(“Lenten Pastorals.”)

This call for “constant watchfulness” was an intensification of the hierarchy’s involvement in the church’s efforts to control cinema. If the church could not prevent people going to picture houses altogether, it was determined that it would shape what, where and when people would watch. The initially mainly lay Vigilance Committees had in late 1915 been put under centralized clerical control as the Irish Vigilance Association, which held a mass meeting at Dublin’s Mansion House that sent a renewed demand for the introduction of a specifically Irish film censorship (“Mansion House Meeting”). The many local campaigns against the opening of picture houses on Sunday were also led from the altar. “At different Masses on Sunday last in the four parish churches, as well as in the Black Abbey and Capuchin Friary,” reported the Kilkenny People, “a strong appeal was made to the people to abstain from attending the local Picture House on Sundays, particularly during Lent” (“Sunday Cinemas in Kilkenny”).

Ad for Stafford's Longford Cinema in St Patrick's week included an episode of The Exploits of Elaine (US: Wharton, 1914), the serial that featured the master criminal the Clutching Hand. Longford Leader 11 Mar. 1916: 3.

Ad for Stafford’s Longford Cinema in St Patrick’s week included an episode of The Exploits of Elaine (US: Wharton, 1914), the serial that featured the master criminal the Clutching Hand. Longford Leader 11 Mar. 1916: 3.

In making their calls for vigilance, the bishops could indicate the harmfulness of cinema by citing the ongoing trial of a gang of boys in Mullingar who had committed robberies inspired by onscreen criminals. The papers reported many similar cases including the prosecution of 20-year-old ex-sailor James J. Sloan who told the Belfast Assizes that his house-breaking equipment was “the materials Charlie Chaplin works with” (“Items of Interest”). The prominence of such stories led James Stafford of the Longford Cinema to refute publicly the claim made by a boy charged with larceny at the local petty session that he had committed the robbery to get money to go to the pictures. “I have made it a point not to admit to the Longford Cinema Theatre boys of this class,” Stafford contended, “and this boy in particular is one of several of his class whom I frequently refused admission” (“Unfounded Allegation”). As the Mullingar case suggests, the class he referred to was the poorest of the working-class.

The cinema industry long feared the imposition of crippling taxes, going so far in this cartoon as to identify the British government with the zeppelin raids then terrorizing southeast England. Bioscope 7 Oct. 1915: 16c.

The cinema industry long feared the imposition of crippling taxes, going so far in this cartoon as to identify the British government with the zeppelin raids then terrorizing southeast England. Bioscope 7 Oct. 1915: 16c.

The British government also had a vigilant eye on the cinema industry in Britain and Ireland as a way of raising needed war funds. Months before the imposition of an amusement tax in the May 1916 budget, there was much discussion of its likely effects on the industry and how it was to be collected. “The view which at present commends itself to the authorities,” reported the Irish Independent, “is that the Government should print the tickets for the cinema shows, and these should be purchased from the Government by the trade at a price which would cover the tax” (“Proposed Cinema Tax”). As well as further binding the cinema industry to the British war effort, the tax would alter the working-class nature of cinema. “Upon the injustices of a penny per seat tax there can be not two opinions,” argued Frank W. Ogden Smith in the trade journal Bioscope,

and if such a tax be allowed to pass unchallenged this point must be borne in mind – when we revert to peace times it will mean the cinema as a poor man’s amusement and recreation will have ceased to exist, for the Government having tasted the fruit and found it refreshing in actuality not theory, will not be likely to relinquish the tax. (“Passing of the Penny Cinema.”)

Longford and Mullingar were just two of the Irish places where this process could be most clearly seen in March 1916.

Metro ad featuring Ruffells’ parrot, Dublin Evening Mail 6 Mar. 1916: 2.

Metro ad featuring Ruffells’ parrot, Dublin Evening Mail 6 Mar. 1916: 2.

The industry as a whole – including the Bioscope – had long courted an audience far beyond the penny cinemagoer, and it did so in a climate in which many doubted that cinema represented a quality contribution to culture. At a meeting of the Cork County Council, the chairman complained that the large amount of money spent on technical education was wasted because “the people for whom it was intended showed no disposition to profit by it.” Instead, the popularity of Charlie Chaplin and picture houses were proof, he believed, of the failure of the art classes provided to raise the public taste (“Cork County Council”). Publicity strategies to counter such views and promote films and picture houses as quality entertainment were important, and one ad campaign stood out in Ireland in March 1916. Metro’s British agent Ruffells’ Exclusives was pioneering in marketing film brands to the Irish public. Ads for Metro had been appearing in newspapers for some time when the Bioscope reported that Ruffells in Dublin abandoned their trademark parrot for another animal in order to stage a spectacular publicity stunt: “This consisted of six donkey carts, all passing the leading station and advertising on large boards the display of Metro pictures. The houses showing the films were the Bohemian, the Carlton, the Grafton Street and Grand” (“Trade Topics”).

Evening Telegraph 16 Mar. 1916: 4.

Dublin’s Carlton showing Metro drama Cora. Evening Telegraph 16 Mar. 1916: 1.

These named picture houses were among Dublin’s most prominent cinemas, and each watched what the others were doing. What they were doing to ensure success was to provide lavishly comfortable buildings, feature such highly publicized films as Metro’s and offer novel musical accompaniment. Located in Phibsboro outside the city centre, the Bohemian had attracted patrons since its opening in 1914 by advertising the best musical attractions in the city. The Bohemian’s orchestra consisted of 16 musicians under musical director Percy Carver. With the increasing competition for cinema patrons in the city centre, the Carlton as the latest-opened picture house sought to secure its audience by adding to its musical attractions. Beginning on Patrick’s Day, 17 March, the Carlton challenged the Bohemian’s musical pre-eminence by engaging the concert violinist Erwin Goldwater. The Irish Times called this “[a] new departure in connection with cinema entertainments [that] takes the form of a violin recital by Mr. E. Goldwater, a pupil of Sevcik, and formerly first violin at the Royal Opera, Covent Garden. Mr. Goldwater will conduct the orchestra at the Carlton” (“Platform and Stage”).

Clontarf reopens 17 Mar 1916 ET

Ad for reopening of the Clontarf Cinema; Evening Telegraph 17 Mar. 1916: 1.

Goldwater’s engagement was not the only significant event that picture-house proprietors planned for the holiday of the Irish patron saint. A company led by I. I. Bradlaw, David Frame and Henry Grandy reopened the Clontarf Cinema in the former Clontarf Town Hall. “It has been re-decorated and reconstructed throughout in the most luxurious manner,” the Evening Telegraph announced, “and will be found to be equal in every respect to the very best picture houses in the city” (“The Cinema, Clontarf”). Several picture houses offered special programmes of Irish films and/or music. Perhaps the most surprising of these was at Belfast’s CPA (Central Presbyterian Association) Assembly Hall. “Five reels of well-selected cinema were screened, and the premier place amongst these was taken by “Brennan of the Moor,” a three-part filmisation of the Irish story,” revealed the Northern Whig. “Mr. F. J. Moffett presided at the organ, and also acted as accompanist. Mr. W. R. Gordon sang several Irish folk-songs in a most pleasing manner” (“C.P.A. Entertainments”).

“Mr. Erwin Goldwater.” Irish Limelight May 1917: 17.

Although Brennan of the Moor (US: Solax, 1913) was revived on occasion, the most popular films to constitute an Irish programme were still those made by Sidney Olcott and Gene Gauntier for Kalem and other companies in Ireland between 1910 and 1914. Nenagh’s Ormond Kinema Company provided films – including an unnamed Chaplin and The Colleen Bawn (US: Kalem, 1911) – free of charge to the Toomevara and Nenagh Hurling Club after their fund-raising concert in Nenagh’s Town Hall on 17 March (“St. Patrick’s Night’s Concert”). “Some unique films of the famous Tubberadora, Toomevara, and Thurles Teams” were also shown (“The Coming St Patrick’s Night Concert”). The Colleen Bawn was the most popular of Dublin-born Dion Boucicault’s stage melodramas, but productions of his more political Arrah-na-Pogue and The Shaughraun were particularly evident in March 1916. In early March 1916, The Shaughraun (US: Kalem, 1912) – which featured an escaped Fenian – was revived at both Dublin’s Rotunda and Bohemian; during the same period, a stage version was produced at Dublin’s Father Mathew Hall by the Barry Sullivan Society, while at the Hibernian Hall, Parnell Square, the Hibernian Players staged Arrah-na-Pogue. The Olcott and Gauntier’s Arrah-na-Pogue (US: Kalem, 1911) was shown at the newly refurbished Omagh Picture House on St Patrick’s night (“Omagh Picture House”). The Rotunda’s programme for St Patrick’s day and the two days following included two other of Kalem’s Irish-shot films: the 1798 drama Rory O’More (US: Kalem, 1911) and The Fishermaid of Ballydavid (US: Kalem, 1911).

Small ad from the Film Company of Ireland seeking Irish scenarios; Freeman's Jorunal 9 Mar. 1916: 2.

Small ad from the Film Company of Ireland seeking Irish scenarios; Freeman’s Jorunal 9 Mar. 1916: 2.

The Kalem films were so regularly revived in part because no fiction films had been shot in Ireland since Olcott had stopped coming to Ireland following the outbreak of the war. In March 1916, this situation was about to change with the founding of the most important indigenous Irish film production company of the silent period. On 2 March, Irish American lawyer and diplomat James Mark Sullivan and Henry Fitzgibbon registered the Film Company of Ireland (FCOI) at Dublin’s Companies Registration Office. The FCOI had little early press coverage. “The objects are to establish, organise and work in Ireland the manufacture and construction of cinema films of every description,” reported the Freeman’s Journal, seemingly reproducing the information on the company registration form,

and to engage in the making of scenic and dramatic moving pictures, and in the sale and exchange of cinema pictures, and to engage in the employment of skilled and unskilled labour, and of all such artistes, authors, and performers as the development of the business may require. (“An Irish Film Company.”)

Ads that appeared in the papers on 9 March specifically sought authors of “photo play scenarios, preferably with Irish atmosphere and background.” These ads gave the address of the FCOI’s offices as 16 Henry Street, uncomfortably close to the GPO, soon to be the major site of the Easter Rising.

J. M. Kerrigan with Sara Allgood in a 1911 Abbey touring production of The Playboy of the Western World. Image from Wikipedia.

J. M. Kerrigan with Sara Allgood in a 1911 Abbey touring production of The Playboy of the Western World. Image from Wikipedia.

The FCOI also sought actors, and here Joseph Holloway’s diary offers an intriguing early insight. When actor Felix Hughes answered an FCOI ad for actors, he “was astonished on entering the manager’s room to see Joe Kerrigan quite at home there with his back to the fire – the manager was seated at a table & spoke with the twang of a Yankee.” Kerrigan was one of the Abbey Theatre’s leading actors, and Hughes was surprised to encounter him seemingly embedded with Sullivan in the FCOI. However,

Kerrigan spoke up for him & said to the manager, “he’s the very one we want,” (evidently K is to be the star actor in new Co. & has some monetary interest in it as well.) “He has played at the Abbey & travelled with Co to London.” So the manager said, “We must have Felix,” & entered his name & address & said, “he would hear from him in the course of four or five weeks time when all arrangements were fixed up to begin operations. (Holloway, 21 Mar. 1916).

As its operations began, the FCOI gave the hope that cinema would not just be something that the authorities constantly surveilled but would produce challenging films for burgeoning Irish audiences at a historical moment.

References

“The Cinema, Clontarf.” Evening Telegraph 16 Mar. 1916: 2.

“The Coming St Patrick’s Night Concert.” Nenagh News 11 Mar. 1916: 4.

“Cork County Council: Annual Estimate.” Cork Examiner 1 Mar. 1916: 3.

“C.P.A. Entertainments.” Northern Whig 20 Mar. 1916: 7.

Holloway, Joseph. Holloway Diaries. National Library of Ireland.

“Items of Interest: A Youthful Burglar” Irish Independent 17 Mar. 1916: 4.

“An Irish Film Company.” Freeman’s Journal 4 Mar 1916: 2.

“Lenten Pastorals: Diocese of Cork.” Cork Examiner 6 Mar. 1916: 7.

“Mansion House Meeting: Message from the Pope.” Freeman’s Journal 14 March 1916: 3.

Ogden Smith, Frank W. “The Passing of the Penny Cinema.” Bioscope 9 Mar. 1916: 1008.

“Omagh Picture House: Extensive Alterations.” Ulster Herald 18 March 1916: 5.

“Platform and Stage.” Irish Times 18 Mar. 1916: 7.

“Proposed Cinema Tax.” Irish Independent 23 Mar. 1916: 4.

“St. Patrick’s Night’s Concert.” Nenagh News 18 Mar. 1916: 3.

“Sunday Cinemas in Kilkenny.” Kilkenny People 18 Mar. 1916: 5.

“Trade Topics.” Bioscope 30 Mar. 1916: 1377.

“An Unfounded Allegation Contradicted.” Longford Leader 25 Mar. 1916: 2.

“The Nation’s Historian” or a “Violent Stimulant to the Eyes”?: Irish Cinema at the Beginning of 1916

Posted on by
5
Balfour Bio 6 Jan 1916

Arthur Balfour, “Cabinet Minister as Cinema-Lecturer,” touts the importance of war films; Bioscope 6 Jan. 1916: 16.

On 29 December 1915, Arthur Balfour, Britain’s First Lord of the Admiralty, attended a screening of the war film Britain Prepared (Britain: Urban, 1915) at London’s Empire Theatre, Leister Square. “[T]these pictures constitute something more than an afternoon’s amusement,” he asserted. “They contain a lesson of the deepest import to us and the world” (“Britain’s Might Revealed”). The trade journal Bioscope was delighted with Balfour’s comments before the screening, drawing attention to them in a prominent article in its first 1916 issue. “This is, we believe, the first time in the history of the cinematograph that a Cabinet Minister has made a formal speech of introduction at an exhibition of moving pictures,” it claimed, “and as such it is an event of no small significance.” The Bioscope of 20 January clarified the magnitude of its significance, when it declared that cinema was now – finally – “The Nation’s Historian”:

The Trade has just cause for pride and gratification in the complete unanimity with which Press and public, Cabinet Minister and man-in-the-street alike, have welcomed the official cinematograph pictures of the war and the life and training of our soldiers and sailors. It has, we admit, taken a very long time to convince the Government and the Fourth Estate of the value of the cinematograph as the national historian, but now that their approval is forthcoming and the work pronounced to be good, we can well afford to regard the time as well spent. (“Nation’s Historian.”).

Doubtless Balfour’s endorsement of Britain Prepared was a valuable governmental recognition of the British film industry, and as such it is an important historical document. It is more doubtful that a film clearly conceived as propaganda – showing how Britain had prepared and was prepared to fight its enemies – can be considered a work of history. Nor was the Bioscope really interested in making a case for the film as history; it was enough of an achievement that Balfour’s presence and words showed how useful cinema had become to the war effort.

Metro ad DEM 3 Jan 1916

David Lloyd George and H H Asquith feature in this ad for Metro Pictures; Dublin Evening Mail 3 Jan. 1916: 5.

While Balfour argued that Britain Prepared was not mere entertainment but a film that British politicians should take seriously, one distribution company suggested that two other Cabinet ministers were watching its films for relaxation. In January 1916, the Dublin Evening Mail carried a series of ads placed by Ruffell’s, British agents for US production and distribution company Metro Pictures. The ads featured the Ruffell’s mascot, a parrot in a top hat, and in the first of these ads – which is in comic-strip form – the parrot convinces Minister for Munitions David Lloyd George and Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith to watch a Metro film as a needed break from their war duties. The incongruity of the images of these senior politicians visiting a cinema with the behatted and cigar-chewing parrot might distract from the no-less significant if admittedly less spectacular incongruity of this and other ads appearing in an Irish daily newspaper. Distribution was a wholesaling business; it acted as the intermediary between the manufacturers – film production companies such as Metro – and the retailers – the cinema-owners who actually showed the films. In the ordinary course of business, a distribution company such as Ruffell’s would advertise in such cinema trade journals as the Bioscope but not in the dailies. Ruffell’s did advertise in the trade press, but this series of ads sought to create recognition among cinema-goers of the relatively new Metro brand name and of the Ruffell’s parrot.

British Army DEM 20 Jan 1916

Official war film British Army in France at the Provincial Cinematograph Company’s Dublin picture houses. In the fist half of this week, the Grafton had shown With the Indian Troops in France. Dublin Evening Mail, 20 Jan. 1916: 5.

And the parrot was right: cinema was more likely the nation’s – or the world’s – entertainer than its historian. Amusement was the primary reason that Irish patrons visited a picture house, even if they did also come for other reasons, including to see how the war that they mostly read about in newspapers actually looked, and to cheer or to boo at a film that sought to use such images to engender patriotic feelings towards a nation that was invariably Britain. Nonetheless, the notion of the cinema as national historian had particular resonances for Ireland in 1916, as it has in 2016 as the country commemorates 1916. The experience of the more than 200,000 thousand Irishmen in the British armed forces were, of course, represented to some extent by Britain Prepared and other propaganda films that were appearing in increasing numbers. The Picture Houses in Grafton Street and in Sackville/O’Connell Street, which were owned by the British chain Provincial Cinematograph Theatres, made a particular feature of these films, promoting them with prominent illustrated ads, such as the one for British Army in France on 20 January. The Bioscope quoted Balfour as regretting that Britain did not “have a permanent record of the grand deeds of our armies in France and Flanders” (“Britain’s Might Revealed”). A number of such films did exist, but filmmakers would answer this call for a permanent record most spectacularly later in the year in the form of the film The Battle of the Somme (Britain: British Topical Committee for War Films, 1916).

As one of the main purposes of such films was to show the unity of the kingdom, they could not represent the motives of Irish nationalists, who had to look elsewhere for elements of an Irish historical experience on film. This was clearly so in the case of the separatist nationalists who sought Irish independence from Britain and opposed recruitment, but it also included the many more moderate Irish nationalists, even soldiers who had joined the war in answer to John Redmond’s call to fight for Home Rule. Nationalist MPs at Westminster ensured Ireland was treated as a special case even in relation to military recruitment, a fact emphasized in January 1916 when the Military Service Act excluded the country from the compulsory conscription. Given the paucity of film production in Ireland, there was little prospect of cinema providing a detailed film record of the struggle for Irish national self-determination. The nearest thing to such a film was Ireland a Nation (US: Macnamara, 1914), shot in Ireland in 1914 but not shown in the country until 1917. Newsreel films of armed National and Irish Volunteers parading do exist, albeit that the Ulster Volunteers were better at media management, including arranging for cinematograph operators to record significant demonstrations. Fiction films representing Ireland’s rebellions in 1798 and 1803 had been made by US companies such as Domino and Kalem, Sidney Olcott shooting many Irish-shot films for the latter. The special Sunday shows at Dublin’s Phibsboro Picture House on 23 January featured For the Wearing of the Green (US: Domino, 1914), in which “Paddy Dwyer, the Irish blacksmith, and his helper, Dennis Grady, who is also his daughter Norah’s sweetheart, are the prime leaders in the conspiracy against the Crown” (“Domino”). The Hibernian Electric Theatre’s Sunday feature a week later was Olcott’s The Mayor from Ireland (US: Kalem, 1911), in which two Irish immigrants follow each other in the office of New York mayor. Neither of these films was a new release, but their revival suggests their importance for Irish audiences in offering fictional self-representations that included revolutionary romances.

Hibernian ad ET 29 Jan 1916p1

Ad for Hibernian, Evening Telegraph 29 Jan. 1916: 1.

Indeed, the Hibernian Electric Theatre may provide one of the most direct links between Irish cinema and the revolution that was being planned for 1916. This picture house at 113 Capel Street, Dublin, had previously been called the Irish Cinema and had been owned and run by Richard Graham. Financial difficulties including rent default forced Graham to sell in late 1915 (“Capel Street Picture House”). No account of the reopening as the Hibernian appears to exist, but it was advertising in the Evening Telegraph by the start of January. The ads and short notices that month give an indication of some of the people involved, including manger Thomas Fullam and musical director Miss M. Grundy (“Hibernian Electric Theatre”). It is possible that it was owned or part owned by Michael Mallin, as later recalled by his son (Hughes 76-78.). Dublin silk weaver, British Army bugler, union organizer and leader of the Irish Citizen Army, Mallin would be executed in May 1916 for his role in the Easter Rising. How his picture-house experience may have had a bearing on his revolutionary activity or vice versa is difficult to say. Nevertheless, the Hibernian was located beside the Trades Hall – a fact noted in ads – and it is likely that its programming aimed to attract union members, as well as the many working class people who lived in the slum districts that would have been the catchment area for the cinema’s audience. In 1913 and 1914, the Irish Cinema had been the only picture house and one of the few entertainments of any kind that advertised in the radical labour journal The Irish Worker. However, apart from The Mayor from Ireland, its offerings seem little different from those of other Dublin picture houses.

Larkin Prison II 4 Jan 1916p4

Irish Independent 4 Jan. 1916: 4.

If Irish picture-house owners – even radical ones – had only moulded cinema in limited ways to produce a national moving image, religious groups were working more deliberately to ensure that cinema reflected the churches’ worldview. This was particularly the case with Catholic groups, such as the Dublin Vigilance Committee, which in December 1915 had coalesced with other vigilance groups around the country to become the Irish Vigilance Association (IVA). Following his arrest on 31 December 1915, serial cinema protester and militant IVA member William Larkin was released from Dublin’s Mountjoy Jail on 4 January 1916. He had been imprisoned for non-payment of the fine imposed on him in October and November for his protest at the Bohemian Picture Theatre in September (“Picture Theatre Protest”). The IVA arranged a parade of welcome from Larkin’s house in Sherrard Avenue in the north city to Foster Place, a favoured place to hold speeches beside the city-centre building that had until 1800 had been the Irish parliament. Larkin’s short prison term had done nothing to lessen his activism on the introduction of film censorship; indeed, it allowed him to claim a certain martyrdom. “I was treated as a low criminal in Mountjoy Jail for protesting against a film,” he claimed in an exchange of correspondence published by the Evening Telegraph. “I had to don a convict’s garb, eat skilly, lie on a board, and refuse hard bread. I had to parade with degenerates in a prison yard; and all, that our youth might be spared gazing on suggestion” (“Proposed Cinema Censorship”).

This concern with young people also prompted calls for censorship from reformers seemingly unaligned with the IVA. In a letter to the Telegraph, E. Gordon urged regulation of picture houses to prevent children from attending late evening shows. “I have seen toddlers and youngsters, aye, and smoking cigarettes (another Dublin byelaw more honoured in the breach than the observance) in picture houses at 10.30 p.m,” he observed:

Where did they get the money, and where were their homes? Where were their parents? Why are those children allowed to spend their lives thus? Perhaps the housing question would account for a lot of it. Now, those youngsters go in to a picture house (“It’s only tuppence, Billy”). They do not go in to look at a moral lesson faithfully learned, or for education – only for a laugh, and “it’s comfey.” (“Children at the Cinema.”)

Gordon wished for an educational cinema, recognizing it as “a great, wonderful and fascinating optical achievement (if directed in the proper channel) that was never dreamt of twenty years ago.” As such, it was an “accomplishment which makes old lanternists blush, and yet their blush can be condoned, for the old scientific lantern will still hold its own, at least in the class-room and lecture hall.”

In the Dublin township of Rathmines, the ongoing controversy on the opening of picture houses on Sunday continued into early 1916. At a meeting on 5 January, the council eventually split 8-8, and the chairman cast the deciding vote in favour of closing cinemas on Sundays; they had had limited opening hours before this. Councillor Thomas Kennedy spoke in favour of keeping them open, reading a supporting letter from the Ratepayers’ Protection Association that argued that soldiers’ relatives particularly liked seeing war reports and that closing cinemas on the only day when many people could visit them would drive these people to the pubs for recreation. Rejecting such arguments, Chairman Sibthorpe explained that he had cast his vote in favour of Sunday closing because oculists had “stated that their work had been more than doubled since these cinemas had been applying a violent stimulant to the eyes of the young people, and they were absolutely ruining the sight of the rising generation” (“Cinema Shows”).

Young people who got into trouble with the law – and their legal representatives – were well aware of these discourses on cinema’s pernicious effects on the young and of how to use them to their advantage. When “two young fellows” named Richard Barnes and Thomas Farrell appeared before Mr. Swifte at Dublin’s Southern Police Court on 27 January 1916, their solicitor argued that they had entered a banana store illegally because of watching burglaries at the picture houses and playing slot machines (“Cinema and Slot Machines”). These new forms of popular culture “were the means of leading many a young fellow astray,” he argued.

Charlie at the Bank

Chaplin foils a robbery in Charlie at the Bank (US: Essanay, 1915).

The person responsible for a good amount of this violent visual stimulation in Ireland in 1916 was Charlie Chaplin, but in January 1916, he was foiling robberies rather than committing them. The writer of the Evening Telegraph’s “Gleaned from All Sources” column, however, had picked up the news that Chaplin’s career was on the wane, “which is the obvious and inevitable result of overdoing the Chaplin ‘boom.’ When it came to imitations in music-hall revues and Charlie Chaplin calendars and pin-cushions,” s/he observed, “a reaction was inevitable.” Despite merchandizing and overexposure, that reaction was not apparent in Dublin picture houses, according to the review writer in the same issue of the Telegraph. Charlie at the Bank had recently been released, and the reviewer was assessing the show at the Pillar Picture House. “There is more riotous fun packed into this two-reel comedy than any other photo-play of a like length. The world’s great comedian, Charlie Chaplin, has outdone himself in this new production. While all his other comedies are funny, this one is a scream. It abounds in real humour and comic situations, with Chaplin at his best in his inimitable antics” (“Pillar Picture House,” 18 Jan.). Charlie at the Bank was shown at more picture houses than any other film that month, suggesting that cinema-owners did not believe that Chaplin’s career was experiencing a dip. Audiences seemed to agree: on account of the “hundreds who could not gain admission” during the three day run, the film was held over for a further three days (“Pillar Picture House,” 20 Jan.).

As 1916 began, Irish audiences enjoyed a thriving cinema culture that more often offered them a violent stimulant of the Chaplin kind than national history.

References

“Britain’s Might Revealed by Film: A Cabinet Minister as Cinema-Lecturer.” Bioscope 6 Jan. 1916: 16A.

“Children at the Cinema.” Evening Telegraph 8 Jan. 1916.

“Cinema and Slot Machines.” Dublin Evening Mail 27 Jan. 1916: 5.

“Cinema Shows: Sunday Performances in Rathmines: Action of Urban Council.” Evening Telegraph 5 Jan. 1916: 5.

“Domino: The Wearing of the Green.” Moving Picture World 3 Mar. 1914: 1302.

“Dublin and District: Picture Theatre Protest.” Irish Independent 1 Jan. 1916: 6.

“Gleaned from All Sources: The Late Charlie Chaplin.” Evening Telegraph 18 Jan. 1916: 1.

“Hibernian Electric Theatre.” Evening Telegraph 29 Jan. 1916: .

Hughes, Brian. Micheal Mallin. Dublin: O’Brien Press, 2012.

“The Nation’s Historian: Triumphant Vindication of the Cinematograph.” Bioscope 20 Jan. 1916: 229.

“Pillar Picture House.” Evening Telegraph 18 Jan 1916: 5; 20 Jan 1916: 5.

“Proposed Cinema Censorship.” Evening Telegraph 11 Jan. 1916: 3.

The Long and Short of the Irish Cinema Programme in Early 1914

Posted on by
4

The May 2014 announcements by US television networks of the shows that would make up the autumn schedules was just the latest instance of a process that had been going on for a century, albeit in a slightly different form. At the end of May 1914, the British trade journal Bioscope carried an article on “the Selig company’s immense production, ‘The Adventures of Kathlyn,’ which will be released in thirteen parts on alternate Mondays, commencing on Monday, July 27th, the first part being about 2,950 ft. in length, and each subsequent part 2,000 ft” (“The Selig Serial Film”). The article noted that the two-week (rather than one-week) gap between episodes was uncommon, but “it is unlikely that this somewhat unusually prolonged interval will prevent the public from following the story from beginning to end with the most lively and unwavering interest.” This article did not mention that the series had been released in America at Christmas 1913.

Kathlyn II ad Bio

Ad for the second episode of Selig’s The Adventures of Kathlyn appeared in the Bioscope in early June, offering cinema owners the opportunity to plan their autumn schedule. This episode puts Kathlyn among wild animals, but then “[n]o important Selig film would be really complete without it wild animal performers” (“The Selig Serial Film”).

With their feisty heroines, the serial-queen dramas were an extraordinary phenomenon of the 1910s that has already been discussed here. However, what is interesting in the Bioscope article is the degree to which the serial-queen phenomenon was underplayed and instead its similarities to other serials was stressed: “‘The Adventures of Kathlyn’ is to be a connected record of various amazing episodes in the strange career of an adventurous American girl, a feature in which it is identical, curiously enough with most of the other serial pictures already produced” (ibid). Although the gender of the main protagonist is, of course, mentioned, the writer of this article is more interested in reflecting on the way that filmmakers had expanded the dramatic form. “The producer of picture plays has not only created an entirely new form of art,” s/he argued,

he has also invented several original forms in which to present that art to the public First of all he gave us tabloid drama, offering us tragedies and comedies of every character more closely compressed than any we had seen before. This did not exhaust his versatile imagination, however, and, having experimented freely with plays of all shapes and lengths, he ends by giving us serial drama, thus completing his chain of novelties, which includes both the longest and the shortest plays on record. (Ibid.)

Cinema, for this writer, could encompass works of varying lengths. However given that debate in the trade in May 1914 was again cohering around the “long film,” it’s questionable how harmonious the evolution of the film programme had actually been. The debate on the composition of the programme had been going on with some heat since 1911, when films of more than one, 1000-foot reel or 15 minutes began to appear in noticeable numbers. In September 1911, the Bioscope’s editorial writer had pointed out that “[i]t may be that occasionally a lengthy film deserves its number of feet and proves a big attraction, but this very fact serves to emphasise our assertion – that variety is the key-note of the success attained by the cinematograph show” (“The Length of the Film”). At that point, a long film was any film of three reels or more, running over forty minutes. A programme consisted – and continued to consist for some time – of a variety of shorter subjects.

Bioscope ad for Keystone that includes for the first time an image of Chaplin, “the famous English pantomimist”; 14 May 1914: xxx.

Bioscope ad for Keystone that includes for the first time an image (here very indistinct) of Chaplin, “the famous English pantomimist”; 14 May 1914: xxx.

In May 1914, the Bioscope’s editorial writer seemed again to be leaning towards variety and against the long film:

For a considerable time the question of the long film has been a problem responsible for much perturbation amongst the members of the British cinematograph industry. At its first coming we were all – or most of us – enthusiastically in favour of it; now, by the usual swing of the pendulum, a large proportion of us seems to be against it. The truth is that we have scarcely had time to adopt towards it any final and settled attitude at all. (“The Long Film.”)

In fact, by 1914, it was clear that “[t]he long film is good, and, in the end, the public (especially the most intelligent and best paying sections of it) wants what is good” (ibid). It was possible in Dublin in late 1913 and early 1914 for a film to fill the two hours that a picture-house programme was expected to last, as The Messiah (France: Pathé, 1913) had recently done over Easter at Dublin’s Rotunda. It was even possible for an exceptionally long film to rearrange the screening times at a picture house, as The Three Musketeers (Les Trois Mousquetaires; France: Film d’Art, 1912) had done at Dublin’s Phoenix Picture Palace in November 1913, when the over-three-hour film necessitated cutting the usual three shows a day to two. The long film was good, but the short film was still ubiquitous and popular. For the week running from 29 June to 4 July 1914, the Phoenix’s “programme for the first half of the week contains seven films that will take two hours to unspool, the star film being a Lubin two-reel society drama entitled ‘Out of the Depths’” (“Phoenix Picture Palace”). The Rotunda’s programme for the second half of that week consisted of five films: The Flaming Diagram (US: IMP, 1914), A Deal with the Devil (Denmark: Nordisk, 1914), Broncho Billy’s True Love (US: Essanay, 1914), Mabel’s Strange Predicament (US: Keystone, 1914) and the Pathé Gazette (“Rotunda Pictures,” DEM). Although Mabel’s Strange Predicament also featured Charlie Chaplin, for Dublin newspapers Mabel Normand was the biggest star: “this little lady is the leading comedienne of filmland” (ibid).

Valentine Grant and Sidney Olcott posing for a publicity still during the shooting of their 1914 Irish films. http://irishamerica.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/19_Grant_Olcott.jpg

Valentine Grant and Sidney Olcott posing for a publicity still during the shooting of their 1914 Irish films. http://irishamerica.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/19_Grant_Olcott.jpg

Variety was an issue for Ireland’s few film producers, as well as for exhibitors anxious to underline the local elements of moving-picture entertainments. Long films were being made in Ireland in 1914. Sidney Olcott would visit for the last time that summer for the fifth year in a row and would again base himself near Killarney in Co. Kerry. At the same time, Walter Macnamara, the Waterford-born filmmaker best known as the writer-producer of George Loane Tucker’s white-slave drama Traffic in Souls (US: IMP, 1913), was in Ireland shooting the location scenes of his Irish historical epic Ireland, a Nation (US: Macnamara, 1914).

Using labour leader Jim Larkin's name as an attention grabber, Butler & Sons offered to act as Irish agents for British film companies; Bioscope 28 May 1914: 976.

Using labour leader Jim Larkin’s name as an attention grabber, George Butler & Sons offered to act as Irish agents for British film companies; Bioscope 28 May 1914: 976.

It was in actuality and newsreel subjects that Irish-based filmmakers (as distinct from the US-based Olcott and Macnamara) were active and, it seemed, thriving. Among the most prominent of these was Norman Whitten of the General Film Supply (GFS) who, the Bioscope reported in late May, was forced to move to new and larger premises at 17 Great Brunswick (now Pearse) Street, Dublin, because of increasing business, including in local topicals. The premises “are at present being fitted up, and will include laboratories with the latest machinery for film development, also a very fine showroom” (“Items of Interest”). Earlier in the month, Paddy, the Bioscope’s Ireland correspondent, had praised GFS’s topical of the Curragh races, which was the work of Benny Cann, a cameraman whom Whitten had recently employed. Cann had been through three wars, most recently the Balkans war (Paddy, 7 May). At the start of August, Paddy was reporting that Cann was again leaving Ireland for Serbia (Paddy, 6 Aug.).

Review of the Rotunda programme that mentioned the rapturous reception of the political film The Annual Pilgrimage to Wolfe Tone's Grave; Evening Telegraph 23 Jun. 1914: 2.

Review of the Rotunda programme that mentioned the rapturous reception of the political film The Annual Pilgrimage to Wolfe Tone’s Grave; Evening Telegraph 23 Jun. 1914: 2.

In moving to Great Brunswick Street, Whitten was helping to make that street the centre of the film and theatre businesses in Dublin. Among the other prominent film companies there was Rotunda proprietor James T. Jameson’s Irish Animated Picture Company at #185. Jameson showed GFS topicals, and it is likely that GFS filmed the topical of the demonstration by insurgent nationalists on 21 June at the grave of 1798 Rebellion leader Wolfe Tone. When shown at the Rotunda on a bill that included Chaplin’s Making a Living, The Annual Pilgrimage to Wolfe Tone’s Grave “was received with possibly the greatest of applause yet extended to any film previously shown at this house, and especially the portion containing the march of the Irish Volunteers to the Graveside” (“Rotunda Pictures,” ET). Such topics were not just the preserve of insurgent nationalists, as has already been seen here. On the 28 May, Paddy reported that the Unionist Ulster Volunteers’ “‘Procession at Ardoyne’ was filmed on the 10th inst., and shown at the West Belfast Picture Theatre during the week (Paddy, 28 May).

Not all film businesses were thriving by mid-1914, even in the film-mad city of Belfast. “Jotting from Ulster” on 7 May reported rumours of a new picture house on High Street, Belfast, a few doors from the Panopticon, and like it, a conversion of a furniture warehouse. However, the new cinema was “for the purpose of catering for the large body of patrons who showered their money so extensively upon the now defunct St. George’s Hall” (“Jotting,” 7 May). In losing the St. George’s Hall, Belfast had lost one of its first picture houses. Jottings had reported in November 1913 that the company “Entertainment Halls, Limited, have abandoned the pioneer palace of Belfast – St. George’s – the directorate having been unable to satisfy the requirements of the corporation” (“Jottings,” 13 Nov).

Neverthlesss, as the second half of 1914 began, both Belfast and Dublin were experiencing diversity in their range of picture houses and the nature of the programmes they provided.

References

“‘The Adventures of Kathlyn’: Selig Inaugurates New Series.” Motography vol. X, no. 13 (Christmas 1913): 459-60.

“Items of Interest.” Bioscope 28 May 1914: 900.

“Jottings from Ulster.” Bioscope 13 Nov. 1913: 589; 7 May 1914: 633.

“The Length of the Film: A Question of Policy.” Bioscope 7 Sep. 1911: 471.

“The Long Film.” Bioscope 7 May 1914: 569.

Paddy. “Pictures in Ireland.” Bioscope 7 May 1914: 629; 28 May 1914: 959; 6 Aug. 1914: 543.

“Phoenix Picture Palace.” Dublin Evening Mail 27 Jun. 1914: 3.

“Rotunda Pictures.” Evening Telegraph 23 Jun. 1914: 2.

“Rotunda Pictures.” Dublin Evening Mail 27 Jun. 1914: 3.

“The Selig Serial Film: ‘The Adventures of Kathlyn.’ Part 1.: ‘The Unwelcome Throne.’ Bioscope 21 May 1914: 837.