Emerald Ilusions

Emerald Illusions.

Reviewed by George Fleeton.

LAST July, in an article in DownNews called the ‘Measurable Maturity of the QFT’, I commented on initiatives taken there to present live theatre, opera and ballet, plus re-issued examples of classic world cinema, as special events, which are now clearly paying dividends at the box-office.

Any small art-house cinema which can fit into its schedule a Chekhov play live from the National Theatre London, Wagner, Mozart and Britten operas live from Glyndebourne, ballets by Pugni and Tchaikovsky live from the Bolshoi Moscow, and attract full houses for all, is a treasure trove for discerning audiences.

While it wasn’t possible to catch the two recent ballets (The Sleeping Beauty and The Nutcracker), three other quite diverse events certainly caught my eye towards the end of 2011.

The first of these was ‘Emerald Illusions - The Irish in Early American Cinema’ a new book by Gary Rhodes, film studies lecturer in QUB.

It is published by the Irish Academic Press (IAP), and was launched at a publisher’s reception in the Queen’s Film Theatre on November 22, by Martin McLoone, University of Ulster, Coleraine.

The second part of the evening consisted of the screening of four short Irish-themed films, rescued from the period in Hollywood between 1910 and 1915, introduced by Gary Rhodes and accompanied on keyboard by Ruth Dodridge.

They did not appear to have been digitally restored and may simply have been old print transfers.

They were curious but strangely unappealing, and were certainly not around, as late as 1984, when our own Ulster Television series on the Cinema and Ireland was transmitted in Channel 4.

In the twenty-eight years since those six ground-breaking programmes on this subject there has been any amount of books and documentaries on Irish cinema, the Irish who worked in Hollywood (beginning from exactly one hundred years ago), films then made in or about Ireland and so on, not all of them equally good, some of them weighty academic tomes not really suitable for lay readers.

All of this interest was of course greatly facilitated by the selfless collecting and archival skills of Richard Hayward, Liam O’Leary and George Morrison, the founding fathers of film archiving and preservation in Ireland.

For example, O’Leary’s book ‘Invitation to the Film’ (1946) was the first Irish book on the cinema, and marked the 50th anniversary of the birth of film, now generally acknowledged to have taken place in Paris in December 1895.

His second book, ‘The Silent Cinema’ (1965) has become a classic text on the subject, and a third, ‘Rex Ingram – Master of the Silent Cinema’ (1980) was a fascinating biography of this less than well known Dublin-born Hollywood film director.

I treasure signed copies of all three. Later Liam and I together wrote the booklet to accompany our television series, which we called ‘A Seat Among the Stars’ ( and with which Channel 4 had a problem because they thought it would be initially read as an esoteric astronomy or astrology text).

Although there is not a single mention of Irish cinema in Mark Cousin’s land mark 512 page book ‘The Story of Film’ (in the revised hardback edition published last year, to coincide with his 15-part Channel 4 television series The Story of Film - An Odyssey) this is a perfect example of how to do proper justice to the fascinating subject of cinema.
Cousins is from Northern Ireland, and he wrote, shot and directed this superb series himself.
So why did the QFT miss a golden opportunity last September to launch that infinitely more relevant package?

See www.iap.ie for the Rhodes book, and www.anovabooks.com for Cousins’ book.

John Hodge’s new play, Collaborators, and Marcel Carné’s 1945 film Les Enfants du Paradis will be reviewed here shortly.

www.queensfilmtheatre.com

George Fleeton
©mmxii