A half-century of movie memories

The gala opening of the 50th Cork Film Festival featured blasts from the past - and future, writes Michael Dwyer

Judiciously blending nostalgia for its past, seriousness of intent for its present and technology for its future, the 50th anniversary Cork Film Festival opened on a high note on Sunday night. There was a great deal to celebrate, given that so many international film festivals set up over the past 50 years have ceased to exist, and as festival director Mick Hannigan noted on the night, the Cork festival has experienced its own ups and downs.

Cork Opera House was full to capacity with an avid audience, most of whom observed the dress code of black tie (a nod to the convention in the festival's earlier years) or funky Fifties. There were even usherettes wearing fur stoles and selling ice cream on trays suspended from their necks.

As the lights dimmed, the screen filled with a rapid-fire collage of covers from programme brochures extending back to the inaugural event in 1956. Four uniformed musicians took to the stage to perform a ceremonial fanfare, followed by the evening's relaxed, urbane MC, Cork-based journalist and broadcaster Dave McArdle, who admitted he was "unfortunate" not to come from Cork.

Stills and archive footage from the festival's first night was shown, including shots of its enterprising founder, the late Dermot Breen, leading Italian director Vittorio De Sica into the Savoy cinema. In a corner of that picture was a dapper young man named Charlie Hennessy, who, 50 years on, presides as festival president, and he was given a rousing reception.

In the early days, he recalled, he had the important task of transporting prints by bicycle between the Savoy and the screening room on Bridge Street. He made special mention of former festival director Robin O'Sullivan, who was in the audience and who, Hennessy said, "kept this festival alive when it was in very low water".

To loud cheers and whistles, President Hennessy was presented with a special award, a statuette of St Finbarr, based on the original award given by the festival in its early years. Following some more amusing archive material, director Mick Hannigan came on stage, insisting that he was "in a tuxedo under duress". He read Dermot Breen's introduction from the first-ever brochure, and noted how many cinemas were in Cork city in those days. The only surviving one, the Capitol, is due to close next month.

He introduced fellow Corkman Louis Marcus, who was visible on the screen in that 1956 opening night picture as a young UCC student with "my first beard". Marcus recalled the first Cork festival as "a feast of intoxication, and not just at the festival club", and how it inspired him to make his first documentary, The Silent Art, dealing with Cork sculptor Seamus Murphy, which he proudly presented at the festival in 1959.

Marcus, who went on to collect Oscar nominations for Páistí ag Obair (1973) and Conquest of Light (1975), is the subject of a tribute programme at this year's festival. Conquest of Light was shown in Sunday's opening programme before Marcus was presented with a special 50th anniversary lifetime achievement award, which he described as "a tremendous honour".

Then the festival presented rare, recently rediscovered footage shot by Sagar Mitchell and James Kenyon in Cork over the first two years of the 20th century. This triggered a hum of recognition across the audience, and some laughter at the sight of a Union Jack flying above a store on Patrick Street. A 42-minute programme of Mitchell and Kenyon's Cork footage will be screened on Friday night.

Tribute was paid to Cork-born, Los Angeles-based artist Patrick Morrison, who took a bow and whose striking painting, Mambo Negro, from his "Memories of the Savoy series", adorns the cover of this year's 140-page brochure.

Arts Council chairwoman Olive Braiden declared the festival open, noting the "happy coincidence" of its 50th anniversary with Cork's status as European Capital of Culture. Lauding the achievements of the festival, and its emphasis on short films, she said the council had provided major funding for it. It was all the more appropriate, then, that she was followed by a new Irish short film, in which past and present collided imaginatively - Andrew Legge's witty, skilfully sustained silent movie pastiche, The Unusual Inventions of Henry Cavendish, complete with live piano accompaniment on stage.

Just when everyone thought it was interval time, there was a clip of the comic Cha and Miah in a festival skit duo from a 1971 edition of the satirical TV series, Hall's Pictorial Weekly.

The second half of the evening could hardly have been more contrasting, a leap into the future as four men in black - the veejay mixers of audiovisual group Addictive TV and electric guitarist Alejaandro de Valera - performed a punchy, atmospheric soundtrack to 8mm footage shot in the 1950s by French pilot Raymond Lamy on his travels, from high up in the clouds to down on the streets of Karachi, Saigon and San Francisco.

Addictive TV will be back on stage in Cork on Thursday night in the Savoy. The silent films of pioneering director Georges Melies will be introduced on Wednesday at the Opera House by his great-granddaughter Marie-Helene Melies, whose own son will provide accompaniment on a grand piano. There are free drive-in movies on Wednesday (Some Like It Hot) and Thursday (Raging Bull) in the Munster Showgrounds, dozens of shorts from all over the world (from a record entry of more than 2,000), and a raft of enticing new feature films, from the fine Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line, to the hugely entertaining animated feature Tim Burton's Corpse Bride, to the hit French documentary, March of the Penguins.

Energetic as ever at 50, Cork Film Festival continues to offer a feast of intoxication.

www.corkfilmfest.org