At the moment, I’m reading and enjoying Arthur Flynn’s book The Story of Irish Cinema. One film which grabbed my attention was Ireland, A Nation, a 1914 production which originated in the United States and dealt primarily with Irish history between the rebellion of the United Irishmen in 1798 and Emmet’s Rebellion in 1803. While the film contained many inaccuracies, it still enjoyed some success. It is noted in the excellent Cinema and Ireland that the film “had a remarkable run in Chicago, where it was shown for 20 consecutive weeks to huge crowds.” The film was heavily censored in Ireland, and the first print of the film bound for Ireland sunk with the Lusitania in 1915.
In Cinema and Ireland, we learn that when the film was first shown here, it was noted by an officer from Military Headquarters that the film was “likely to cause disaffection, owing to the cheering of the crowd, at portions of the film, the hissing of soldiers who appeared in the film, and the cries made by the audience.”
Today, we can watch 43 minutes of Ireland, A Nation thanks to the excellent work of the Trinity College Dublin Irish Film and TV Research Online team.
The film was later amended to include newsreel footage from the Irish revolutionary period of the early twentieth century.
[…] https://comeheretome.com/2013/06/30/ireland-a-nation-1914/ […]
[…] my favourite posts to write and research were on the theme of Ireland and the cinema, for example this post looking at Ireland, A Nation, a 1914 nationalist film that fell victim to British censorship, or […]