SOURCE:
Newsreels in Film Archives. A Survey Based on the FIAF Newsreel Symposium, ed.
Roger Smither and Wolfgang Klaue, Associated University Press, NJ, 1996.
Sunniva O’Flynn, Irish Newsreels:
An Expression of National Identity?
Any
examination of newsreel production in Ireland, of the effect newsreel
exhibition may have had on audiences, of the response they may have elicited
from the British authorities prior to independence, or of the political
intentions of their generators, is severely constrained by the relatively
modest levels of indigenous production and the sparsity of film and related
material which has survived through the intervening decades. In the absence, until relatively recently, of
a national film archive, much early indigenous newsreel material which still
exists does so because it was salvaged as material of “historical”
importance. Two notable collections of
early newsreels exist in Ireland. In the
1940s the National Library acquired film material deemed of political
significance from the national film censor’s office, from the Irish Film
Society and from private sources. This
material, together with supplementary material from the British news libraries,
was compiled in the late 1950s by George Morrison into two feature-length documentaries
based almost exclusively on contemporary newsreel and actuality footage. The films – Mise Éire (I am Ireland)
and Saoirse? (Freedom?) – examine the history of Ireland between
1900 and 1922 and present a potent expression of a formative period in Irish
history. However, the salvage of
newsreels towards the production of these films was inevitably a selective
process. The newsreel items which have
survived are illustrative almost exclusively of political and “historical”
activity, without the balancing effect of the social interest / magazine items
which were common in complete newsreels at the time.
Another source of surviving newsreel
images from this early period is the Baum Collection, which recently came to
auction in Dublin. Harold Baum, cinema
owner and film distributor, avidly collected early Irish and British
newsreels. However, he appears to have
been interested only in those films which illustrated political and military
activity, or related to aviation.
The Irish Film Archive recently
preserved a collection of films made by camera-man Gordon Lewis who worked
originally with Norman Whitten on the Irish Events Newsreel and later as a
stringer for Pathé in Dublin. The collection donated to the Archive by Sean,
son of Gordon, Lewis includes fragments of original camera negatives of Irish
subjects filmed for both the Irish and British news companies. Most are images
of political significance: British
troops in Ireland; Dublin after the 1916 Rising; Sinn Fein funerals; Michael
Collins during his election campaign in Armagh.
There are also sequences of social interest such as an agricultural show
at the RDS and a garden party in Dublin Zoo.
It is not yet clear what, if any, was Lewis' selection criteria for
these surviving images or indeed if the donated collection represents all of
the material he retained.
While it is therefore true that,
because of the existence of the moving image, our impressions of Irish history
in the 20th Century are qualitatively different from any earlier
period, the selective rescue of images from this period creates a somewhat
distorted impression of that history.
The history of cinema in Ireland is
almost as old as the history of cinema itself.
Dublin had its first public screening of films from the Lumière brothers
in April 1896, just months after the Paris screenings. The first Irish subject
films were made by an agent of the Lumière Brothers - probably Alexander Promio
- in late September 1897. Items included
panoramas from aboard the Belfast-Dublin train, activities of Dublin and
Belfast Firemen, and horse-back displays by the 13th Hussars. In
1898 Robert A Mitchell, a Belfast medical practitioner, became the first
Irish-born filmmaker when he filmed the
Bangor Yacht Race, before heading to South Africa where he filmed several local
activities (now preserved in the National Film and Television Archive in
London).
The first
newsreel proper which we know to have been produced in Ireland was for the
visit of Queen Victoria to Dublin in 1900.
It was a splendid affair with great pageantry, filmed by Englishman,
Cecil Hepworth. Hepworth may have
returned to Ireland in 1903 to film the Gordon Bennet Car Race (which could not
be run in Britain because of a ban on car-racing on public roads).
Foreign newsreels widely recorded
Irish events. In the years prior to
independence and following the consolidation of the Irish State in 1923, news
was being produced by British companies:
Pathè Gazette, Topical Budget and Gaumont Graphic.
The earliest home-produced newsreel
which can be dated is a commemoration celebration of Irish revolutionary Wolfe
Tone in Bodenstown, 1913, which was shown in cinemas throughout Ireland. It was filmed by James T Jameson of the Irish
Animated Picture Company on the advice of Tom Clarke, one of the leaders of the
1916 Rebellion. We know from Tom
Clarke’s correspondence that he hoped the film could raise money for the Wolfe
Tone Fund and further the Irish nationalist cause in the United States.
Although it does not appear that the
tradition was as common in Ireland as in the UK, there are a number of
surviving examples of “local topicals” – those local newsreels were made by
enterprising cinema and shown locally guaranteed a full house. Thomas Horgan in Youghal, County Cork, filmed
a series of local events, beauty spots, religious processions and rallies for
his occasional newsreel, The Youghal Gazette. Of the surviving material,
it is interesting to see how the Gazette appears to transcend any
political bias, with one issue showing great celebrations at the release of
hunger strikers from Wormwood Scrubs prison – local men, who had been interned
for their role in the 1916 Rising – and a later issue marking the glorious
return of local men from the First World War where they had fought alongside
British soldiers. Like any
self-respecting cinema owner, Horgan knew that any event that attracted such
enormous crowds was worthy of filming, regardless of the underlying political
agenda: his two lengthiest issues were of the annual Corpus Christi procession,
attended by thousands of townspeople,
and of crowds of church-goers leaving Sunday Mass.
In 1910 Norman Whitten, the
photographer of Cecil Hepworth’s film Rescued by Rover, set up the
General Film Supply Company originally as a distributor of films in
Dublin. The work of Whitten and his
cameraman, Gordon Lewis, through Whitten’s company, the General Film Supply,
and later through his Irish Events newsreel which ran between 1917 and
1920, is particularly noteworthy because of the political climate in which they
were working. The newsreel and a handful
of films they shot prior to the launch of Irish Events recorded
incidents surrounding the Rebellion in Dublin in 1916, the subsequent execution
of its leaders, and activities leading up to the War of Independence. We know
that in 1914 Whitten filmed the funerals of the Bachelor’s Walk victims who had
been shot by British soldiers following an Irish Volunteer Force gun-running
incident. In 1915 Whitten filmed the
funeral of the Fenian, and founder of the Phoenix Society, O’Donovan Rossa.
In 1917 Norman Whitten set up the
first continuous Irish newsreel, Irish Events; Gordon Lewis was
appointed his camerman. The Irish
Events issues were at first infrequent but later became regular. Both Lewis
and Whitten filmed the funeral of Thomas Ashe, the Sinn Féin leader who died on
hunger strike in 1917. In June 1917, in
an impressive display of speed and skill, Whitten filmed the return of Sinn
Féin prisoners from British prisons and by the same evening had the film
processed and on several of Dublin’s cinema screens. Kevin Rockett refers to the Irish
Limelight account of the day:
Some of the ex-prisoners and their friends could not resist the
temptation to see themselves “in the pictures”, and a contingent marched up to
the Rotunda in the afternoon. They
cheerfully acceded to the genial manager’s request that they should leave their
flags in the porch, and, when inside, gave every indication of enjoying not
only “their own film” but the rest of the programme.
Rockett describes how the interest
generated throughout the country in this and events filmed over the next few
months, such as the opening of the Irish Convention, the funeral of Mrs
MacDonagh (mother of John MacDonagh, a filmmaker of some significance, and of
Thomas MacDonagh, the 1916 martyr), the Phoenix Park demonstrations and the 12
July celebrations in Belfast, ensured that Irish Events became a firm
fixture in most cinema programmes. He
describes how the newsreel caught the attention of the military authorities in
1919 when a compilation newsreel outlining the history of Sinn Féin – the party
which formed the New Irish Assembly of Dáil Éireann – was produced by Irish
Events. On demand, the film was
submitted for police inspection. The
report deemed it propagandist and objectionable, and, despite Whitten’s
insistence that all the footage had been previously released by Irish Events
and that many items had been included in Pathé Gazette and the War
Office Official Topical Budget, it was banned from further screening. It has since disappeared, denying us a
valuable opportunity to compare indigenous impressions of Sinn Féin activity
with the British newsreel companies’ impressions of the same events.
Although many of these Irish Events
items survive today, providing vibrant images of an interesting and volatile
period of Irish history, we must remember that our viewing of the images today
is quite different from how they originally would have been seen. These news items would have been diluted by
the accompanying uncontroversial items.
In January 1918 the Irish Limelight carried an advertisement for Irish
Events which listed no overtly political material in their catalogue. It included:
The Galway Races Puck
Fair
The Lucan Horse-Jumping
Competition A Red Cross
Pageant
Ford Works at Cork Jockeys’
Football Match
A British Military
Tournament Films
Taken From Aeroplanes
The First All-Irish
Cartoons Drawn by Frank Leah and Filmed by Gordon Lewis
To our knowledge, none of
these items exists today.
The Irish Events
series seems to have ceased production in 1920.
Whitten and Lewis worked together on one final project, In the Days
of Saint Patrick, an elaborate feature film about the life of Saint Patrick
in which a thousand local artists appeared.
Whitten then made three more feature films in Ireland – comedies
starring the well-known Jimmy O’Dea – before returning to England. Gordon Lewis, however, returned to newsreel
production. He seems to have joined Pathé
Gazette and continued to work for them as a news cameraman, filming in
Ireland throughout the 1920s. He filmed
both Irish and British military activities. His scoops included the first film of Michael
Collins, and the British Army stopping and searching civilians.
An interesting footnote
to newsreel production activities in this period is a short film (a copy of
which survives) by John MacDonagh. It
was made in 1919 during the filming in Patrick Pearse’s school, St Edna’s, of Willy
Reilly and His Colleen Bawn, a film which carried a message of
reconciliation. MacDonagh was in no
doubt about the propaganda value of film and took advantage of the production
facilities to hand designed to make a short film promoting the sale of
Republican Loan Bonds. These were designed to generate funds for the fledgling
government which had not yet been recognised by Westminster. The film featured
Michael Collins, Arthur Griffith, Patrick Pearse’s mother and sister, and
widows of some of the men executed in 1916. In Ireland the film was distributed
by Irish Volunteers, who would force projectionists at gunpoint to interrupt
the programme and to run the Republican Loan film. The film ran for just 6½ minutes –
sufficiently long to convey a message so effective that the film helped raise
£350,000 for the Sinn Féin government, and sufficiently short to allow the
Volunteers to escape with the film from the projection box before the
authorities arrived.
Following this busy
period of indigenous newsreel activity, there was a long silence due to lack of
facilities and film stock during the Second World War, and, probably more
importantly, due to the tight hold the studio-controlled distributors had on
cinema screens. Throughout the 1920s and
1930s British newsreels were standard fare, punctuated occasionally by Irish
editions. From the mid 1930s Movietone
had a twice-weekly Irish edition, which included at least one Irish item, and
produced an annual, exclusively Irish edition.
During the war the Department of Defence produced a series of Army
recruiting shorts which were included in the Irish edition of Movietone.
In 1946 Scathann na
hÉireann was produced on film equipment which had been used in the making
of The Dawn (1936), Ireland’s first indigenous sound feature film. Unfortunately, during production of the
newsreel, which focused on an Irish-language pantomime at the Abbey Theatre,
the primitive camera equipment, which had not apparently been well-maintained
in the intervening ten years, broke down.
Sound was recorded simultaneously on disc by Radio Éireann and, together
with the picture that had survived, was sent to London for processing. Sadly, on its first screening, the film was
so badly synchronised that the film’s sponsors, the New Ireland Assurance
Company, disowned the project and it went no further.
In 1949 the Leichmann
Brothers from London set up the First National Irish Film Corporation,
establishing studios in an old lead mine outside Dublin and installing
equipment from the Limegrove Studios in England. Three issues of The Irish Pictorial Review
were produced. The newsreels, directed
by Anthony Housset, were issued with no regularity. Two have survived are preserved in the Irish
Film Archive. Items on the first issue
were all Dublin stories and included a schoolboy's sports meet in Crumlin, a chimpanzees tea party in the zoo and a
Corpus Christi Procession in Mount Argus.
The second issue featured filmed include a football match, the 1949 Dawn
Beauty Competition fashion show, and a formation dancing competition in which
an Irish team loses to a British one and for which the commentary was far from
objective. Without a firm distribution network and faced with stiff competition
from Movietone’s Irish editions, Pathé and Universal newsreels, the failure of
The Irish Pictorial Review was somewhat inevitable.
In the 1940s and early
1950s the Rank Studios had a hold on all the major screens in the country and Universal
News was shown in all of these. As
it became increasingly apparent that there was a hunger for Irish material in
the cinemas, Rank’s man in Dublin, Bobby McHugh, persuaded the studio to
produce an Irish edition. Between 1952
and 1959 the Universal Irish News was produced. Although essentially a British production, it
is worthy of mention here. It was issued
twice-weekly with one Irish item added to the standard British issue and a
customised Irish commentary by Eamon Andrews.
1956 saw the launch of
Ireland’s most successful and longest running newsreel series. Amharc Éireann (A View of Ireland),
an Irish-language newsreel, was produced by Colm O Laoghaire for Gael
Linn. The series ran from June 1956 to
July 1964, firstly in a monthly, single item per issue, magazine format
(1956-1959), and later as a standard, weekly, multi-item issue newsreel; both
were shot on 35mm. The early single-term
issues were shown with Universal Irish News until 1959, when all foreign
newsreels were withdrawn from Irish cinemas.
The multi-item weekly issues subsequently took off. On average, four items a week were covered,
with the duration of each issue remaining at approximately four minutes.
Occasionally an issue would concentrate on a single special event. Compilation issues were released at the end
of the year.
Amharc Éireann’s subject matter, although
rarely controversial, was wide-ranging, drawing on political and diplomatic
activities, human interest stories, fashion and beauty competitions, sporting
events, and parades and state occasions.
Distributed to cinemas nationwide, the series provides a clear picture
of a relatively prosperous and stable period of Irish history. In its use of the Irish Language and its
focus on domestic affairs, it provides a distinctly Irish picture of Ireland.
As in many other
countries, the role of the newsreel was subsumed by television. Amharc Éireann came to an end. Its demise can be attributed both to the
general decline in cinema audiences and to the influence of Radio Telefís
Éireann (RTE), the recently established national broadcasting service.
To the modern eye, more
acquainted with the daily and even round the clock bulletins broadcast by
television, the theatrical newsreel may seem quaint and lacking in the hard immediacy
of today’s news. However, the weekly
theatrical newsreel had not only to convey news, but also to be entertaining,
to maintain the interest of a broad based cinema audience, and, in the case of
he Amharc Éireann series, to rejuvenate the Irish language. In Ireland the cinema newsreel, particularly The
Irish Pictorial Review and the Amharc Éireann series, focused
primarily on local events and those of human and topical interest. The tone, although up-beat, was rarely as
overtly patriotic or propagandist as the tone of contemporaneous British
newsreels, but the promotion of Ireland and Irishness through a focus on its
social and cultural activities is clear.
The existence of an indigenous newsreel is probably of most significance
in a country such as Ireland where the tradition of production was patchy and
where cinema screens were more often saturated with films from Britain and the
United States. The importance of the
indigenous newsreel images of Ireland for Irish people can not be overestimated.
There is more to be
learned about the subject from newsreels yet to be found and from further
research on contemporary written material.
Two invaluable sources of information on the subject and on the wider
subject of Irish cinema exist: Kevin Rockett’s contribution to Cinema and
Ireland provides an historical and analytical examination of cinema in
Ireland; Memories in Focus, produced by Peter Canning and researched by
Robert (Bob) Monks is the definitive television history of indigenous Irish
film production. This essay could not
have been written without Bob’s generosity and his phenomenal memory.
Note: Irish Limelight 1:7 (July 1917): 16-17, quoted in Kevin Rockett,
Luke Gibbons and John Hill, Cinema and Ireland (London: Sydney: Croom Helm,
1987): 34