The Lad and Lasses from Ould Ireland
Desmond Bell examines images of the Irish in early cinemas.

The birth of cinema coincided with the period of greatest immigration into the US. Movies were made for and by the new Americans. The Irish poured into the eastern seaboard cities of the US in the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first of the twentieth. Many became enthusiastic customers for the filmic novelties offered in the arcades and nickelodeons springing up on every downtown street corner. What sort of films were they watching? What sort of representations of the Irish were present in early silent cinema? What role did the Irish play in forging early cinema? To what extent was early cinema coloured by the diasporic imagination?

A number of film researchers, like myself, are now looking into this forgotten aspect of film history. My interest in this topic initially resulted from my involvement in the documentary film The Hard Road to Klondike, completed in 1999 for RTÉ and TG4, and later invited to the Venice Film Festival. We used a range of early film archive to tell the story of Donegal emigrant, Micí Mac Giobhann’s journey through the US to the Alaskan Gold Rush. With researchers Declan Smith and Bonny Rowan I unearthed a fascinating range of early film material locked in the vaults of the Library of Congress, a small sample of which we reworked for our film. The Klondike project gave us the opportunity to share with an Irish television audience some of the earliest films.

I imagined hat the first thing a newly arrived Irish emigrant like Micí Mac Giobhann might have done, after clearing the immigration controls on Ellis Island, would have been to make their way to Broadway and to the Mutoscope (peep show) arcades located there. For five cents anyone could experience the magic of motion pictures. You can imagine the sense of wonder the immigrants would have had as they glimpsed panoramas of the city in which they had just arrived, the wild west about which they could only dream and professional boxing matches (where Irish pugilists were well represented). The Irish arrivals would also have seen far from flattering portraits of themselves in films like the The Finish of Briget McKeen (1901) and actualities of the Irish American community like St.Patrick’s Day Parade in Lowell, Mass. (1905).

The full article is printed in Film Ireland 115.