A century of moving pictures

IT was 100 years ago today, on April 20th 1896, that Dan Lowrey's Star of Erin Theatre of Varieties unveiled "the world's most scientific invention: The greatest, most amazing and grandest novelty ever presented in Dublin: The Cinematographe".

Despite the hyperbole, the first screenings were a disappointment - problems with illumination meant that the audience could barely make out the flickering images of an acrobat, fighting cats and a Scots drummer. Undeterred, Lowrey ironed out the problems for a second show later the same year, which proved an enormous hit. Cinema had arrived in Ireland.

A century later, as we settle down with our popcorn in the local multiplex, or hit the "play" button on the VCR, or even point and click on our CD ROM, we might reflect on the importance of that first underwhelming spectacle on Dame Street 100 years ago. This has been the century of the moving image. From Mussolini to Berlusconi, from Eisenstein to Spielberg, movies have shaped our understanding of the world and of ourselves.

Despite the huge changes of the last 100 years, and the advent of sound, colour, video and computers, the basic technology used by the "Conjuror Operator" at those first screenings is surprisingly similar in principle to what you would find in a modern projection booth. By the standards of the 1990s, 35 millimetre film (the standard gauge for most movies) pushed through a machine at 24 frames per second is very old hat indeed, but it still provides a more sophisticated image than any of its proposed digital replacements.

The history of movies in Ireland, as elsewhere, mirrors and influences the cultural, social and political history of the country over the last 100 years. In particular, it forms a crucial part, of our relationship with the outside world and, through representations of this country on screen, of the world's image of us. Governments have always understood this, and tried energetically to control it.

For most of the history of this State cinema has been seen by those in power as a threat, a cultural pollutant which threatened the moral health of the population. Its only in the last decade that more time, energy and honey has been spent on the production of films than on their censorship. The only way to evade the censor's net was through a members only society (a strategy that, continues to this day, with a film like Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers receiving its only screening, at the Dublin Film Festival).

The history of film production in Ireland is largely one of American and British control, from the early efforts of the Kalem Company like Rory O'More and The Colleen Bawn, through the many Irish themed films of John Ford, to more recent productions like Far and Away. Meanwhile, the efforts of early pioneers like Liam O'Leary to foster an indigenous film culture were met with indifference or suspicion, while the building of Ardmore Studios in the 1950s served largely to perpetuate the notion of the country as a serviceable location for Anglo American production.

But nowadays the international perception is that Ireland is going through a Golden Age. The 30 year decline in attendances was finally arrested 10 years, ago, and audiences have been steadily growing since the mid 1980s, fuelled by the mushrooming of new, comfortable multiplexes around the country. The much hyped renaissance of Irish film production will be fully in evidence this centenary year, with an unprecedented, number of titles due for release, including Michael Collins. The Van, Snakes And Ladders, The Last Of The High Kings, This Is The Sea, Some Mother's Son, A Further Gesture, Trojan Eddie, Nothing Personal, The Boy From Mercury, The Sun, The Moon And The Stars and The Disappearance of Finbar. This is a prodigious out put from such a small country, and the next months will tell whether the new Irish cinema is attractive to international audiences.

Whether it is really possible to speak of a "national" cinema at all remains a hotly disputed question. We must start by being Irish in our point of view, and when our work is finished it must be of such a character that there will be no doubt in anyone's mind that the result attained is all the time Irish. This does not necessarily preconceive narrowness of treatment; it means that the only picture worth making in Ireland is an Irish picture," said a commentator in The Irish Times in January 1922, the month the Treaty was approved by the Dail.

It's a view that would have been shared more than 50 years later by the first wave of independent film makers, directors like Cathal Black, Joe Comerford and Pat Murphy, who argued that the State had a duty to encourage and support film as an important art form in Ireland. But the State supported cinemas of most European countries are in terrible trouble, divorced from their audiences and surviving on a life support system of subsidy, and protection. Even in France, audiences for indigenous films continue to decline in the face of Hollywood's dominance.

European film makers rightly point out the huge advantages that the American studios have through their economies of scale and control of distribution and exhibition outlets. But the fact remains that American cinema continues to be by far the most attractive choice for the vast majority of moviegoers.

"COME on, motherf...er! Come on and die, you slimeball f...! Fry, f..head if that's what you wanna do!" shouts the Exterminator from the window of Hollywood Nites video shop at the close at Patrick McCabe's The Dead School confirming the worst fears of Oliver St John Goga who told the Seanad in 1930 that the talkies "use a cosmopolitan lingo which always degrading, and which is distracting the English speaking nations from the source of the language and from its own centre".

Vulgarity and amorality are still the bogeymen - cinema's roots in vaudeville and the freakshow deep. Whatever you say about file they can't be accused of growing old gracefully, but nostalgia and the movies go hand in hand - McCabe's novel contains sweet, wistful reminiscence of Midnight Cowboy and Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia films that would probably have caused a collective cardiac arrest among Gogarty's fellow senators.

We have seen ourselves and our country on the screen often enough," opined the film critic of the Irish Independent in 1946. "Englishmen, Scotsmen and Americans have come here with their, cameras and sent hack their celluloid impressions. Sometimes these impressions made us angry, sometimes we just laughed. Seldom if ever were we satisfied."

The issue of national representation remains an important one, perhaps more important than ever in the face of cultural globalisation and new technology, but for most people its an irrelevance - the cinema is precisely the place where you don't want to see yourself, where for a couple of hours you can become any one you want to transported there by an antique optical illusion. As cheap conjuring tricks go, it's undeniably the best.