Recalling the days when a travelling cinema was a common feature in the Irish countryside, a mobile cinema operating in east Co Clare has been pulling in the crowds. The brainchild of Dublin native Mr Liam Dowling, the venture got off the ground last year with grant aid of £4,500 from LEADER, through Rural Resource Development Ltd.
Borrowing the equivalent sum from the bank, Liam purchased a digital projector and a nine-by-12-foot screen. He says: "We have tried to bring it as close to a cinema feel as possible." He says the venture is not about making money. "It is about bringing quality cinema to people who can't travel into the towns. It also has a social function because there is not much to draw people together in remote areas."
Already, the cinema has journeyed from Lakelands Hotel in Scariff to Joyce's pub, Tuamgraney, and has also had a run at the Old Ground Hotel in Ennis. Requests have come in for screenings in Kilkee and the south Galway town of Gort.
The mobile cinema is run in conjunction with the Midnight Court Film Society, and Mr Dowling says it shows mainly art-house films rarely seen outside the major cities. Films shown to date include the Oscar winning Central Station and the Dutch-made Antonia's Line. Most of the patrons are those who have come to live in east Clare in recent years, many of them attracted to the Cooleenbridge Steiner School at Tuamgraney.
Liam says several people have come up to him telling him his enterprise has reminded them of the travelling cinemas that traversed the countryside in the 1940s and 1950s.
This is confirmed by cinema historian Mr Robert Monks, who says the travelling cinema was a major feature on the Irish landscape from 1948 to the early 1960s.
"The travelling cinema was highly popular. It was very organised, there was a circuit
of parish halls the cinema used to call to at least once a week," he says.
"Unfortunately, the advent of television killed the travelling cinema off in the 1960s."
Liam Dowling's venture coincides with a more dramatic version of the mobile cinema that will be travelling throughout the west of Ireland and Co Leitrim later this year. Cinemobile 2000 has secured £531,000 from the Millennium Committee to buy a truck which folds out into a 100-seater cinema, replete with aisles and carpets, generators and film/video projectors. Owned by the Irish Film Institute and run by a new subsidiary, Fis na Milaoise, it will be a sister project to Leitrim's mobile cinema which is also expected to become operational in the autumn. Pioneered by Leitrim County Council, the mobile cinema will also function as an all-purpose arts venue.
However, the next assignment for Liam Dowling's mobile cinema is in the scenic east Clare village of Mountshannon, for the Iniscealtra Festival of Arts, which will run from May 28th to June 5th.
Next Tuesday will be a real family event when a silent 45-minute film of Frank O'Connor's Guests of the Nation will be shown at the Mountshannon Hotel. Directed by Denis Johnston in 1935, the film will be introduced by Mr Johnston's son, Micheal, while his grandson Josh will accompany it on piano.