FILM: KEVIN ROCKETTreviews Ireland in the Newsreels By Ciara Chambers Irish Academic Press, 314pp. €60 hardback, €22.95 paperback
NAMING IS ALWAYS fraught with difficulties, and in this instance the name Ireland in the Newsreels is misleading, in terms of both the limited time frame covered and the originating countries of the newsreels. Chambers, a lecturer in film studies at the University of Ulster in Coleraine, makes limited references to newsreels produced by indigenous Irish companies, such as the pioneering Irish Events (1917-20), but she gives a handful of American-produced newsreels, notably March of Time’s Irish editions, more attention. Equally disappointingly, Gael Linn’s hugely important Irish-language cinema newsreel, Amharc Éireann (1956-64), which comprises roughly 1,000 items over 267 episodes, is entirely absent from Chambers’s otherwise impressive 45-page, 2,000-item filmography.
Instead, the study, of interest to academics and general readers alike, and which sets out to demonstrate that newsreels were an important popular cultural force in reinforcing the notion of Irish partition, mostly focuses on the representation of Ireland by British newsreel companies from 1910 to 1945. Primary among these are the long-running British Pathé (1910-70), which issued about 1,600 items relating to Ireland (a collection available free online); and Topical Budget (1911-30), which, despite priding itself on promoting British identity, sometimes treated the Irish people’s struggle for self-determination sympathetically, as explored by Luke McKernan in his 1992 book on the company.
Although, in terms of the immediacy of the delivery of news, cinema was unequal to the print media, it not only had the advantage of being able to produce dramatic moving pictures but also, from its beginnings, had been closely aligned to actuality and the representation or re-presentation and framing of reality. Initially, very often, these images depicted ordinary events, such as Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory (1895), but increasingly they represented local activities, including sport, religious processions and cultural and political events. As cinema moved towards explicitly staged fictional narratives, actuality found its home in newsreels, formalised as a new format in France in 1908 and in Britain two years later.
Planned events were most suited to the medium, as they allowed for advantageous camera positions to be set up. One of the earliest such news events was Queen Victoria’s visit to Ireland in April 1900, when not just Cecil Hepworth came to Dublin, as Chambers states, but also another British pioneer, Robert Paul, as well as the Belfast film-makers J Lazars and “Professor Kineto” (John Walter Hicks), who that same day screened his film at Belfast’s Empire music hall.
If images could not be captured, then film-makers often resorted to restaging events or even substituting “similar” footage for the real thing, as in the case of the sinking of Titanic. In all instances, however, the reality was necessarily “reformed”: firstly, by the ideological and/or aesthetic choices with regard to filming (shot content and type or angle of shot); secondly, through the addition of intertitles or, by the 1930s, the more intrusive “authoritative” commentary and rousing music; and finally, by the editorial process of the various companies’ programming policies, whereby, for example, only six or seven of a possible 60-90 stories supplied by their camera operators would be selected each week for distribution.
Notwithstanding that most British-
produced newsreel items were concerned with sporting events, royalty and famous personalities, Chambers places most emphasis on newsreels depicting the competing ideologies of nationalism and unionism in Ireland, and how they used already established stereotypes of the two traditions. Dividing the text into four main periods – Home Rule and the first World War; the War of Independence and the Civil War; the 1930s; and the second World War – she traces these stereotypes and argues that the newsreels contrasted the “masculine” urban north, with its industrial heartland, against the “feminine” and “backward” rural south. Clearly, this had an impact on their reception in both parts of Ireland.
There is evidence, for example, that certain films, such as British recruitment propaganda during the first World War, were disrupted in Dublin cinemas. The authorities were sufficiently alert to the possibility of strong nationalist responses that, in 1919, they banned Sinn Féin Review, a newsreel compilation produced by Irish Events, the maker of The Agony of Belfast (circa 1920), a film that depicts the complexity of the city by including not just a Catholic eviction but also the poverty of loyalist Belfast. Though research into contemporary newspaper and magazine sources might have provided more complete accounts of the reception of the newsreels in the two Irish jurisdictions, it seems, from the limited evidence uncovered, that loyalist Belfast, unsurprisingly, embraced images of the union with more enthusiasm than the south.
Though the two world wars and especially the Battle of the Somme, in 1916 – the subject of a graphic and controversial documentary/newsreel, which, ironically, did not feature Ulster’s soldiers – helped most to knit unionists into a sense of British identity, nevertheless, even before the outbreak of war, newsreels were sympathetically representing unionist opposition to Home Rule, especially through the unionist strategy of building up Edward Carson as an iconic figure in 1912-14.
By contrast, not only did images of the Easter Rising barely feature in cinema programmes, and no such nationalist icon appear until the emergence of the charismatic Michael Collins three years later, but footage of the War of Independence was usually restricted to uncontextualised smoky scenes showing the aftermath of devastation and suggesting a people wedded to violence, a trope later recycled within British feature films dealing with partition.
Even if the destruction had been the result of British actions, the context was displaced. “Ireland’s agony” was caused, a newsreel’s intertitle tells us in relation to the reprisal burning of Cork in December 1920 for the Kilmichael ambush, by a “mystery fire”. With the effective imposition of partition by then, Northern Ireland was presented as exclusively unionist with no nationalist perspective offered, even at election time.
Unsurprisingly, the newsreels proved to be pro-Treaty and demonised the “irreconcilable” Éamon de Valera and others opposed to its provisions. This pattern remained in the interwar period, even if newsreels found it difficult to deal with de Valera as a constitutionalist, while during the second World War, unionists most effectively contrasted their (half-hearted) support for the war with the south’s neutrality. It was the time, Chambers and others have argued, when partition was most thoroughly institutionalised.
Although the book would have benefited from more periodic overviews (the detailed accounts of so many films leads to a certain weariness with lists of titles) and a more complete consideration of peacetime censorship (even the pope was cut from a 1937 newsreel by the Irish censor), perhaps its greatest omission is that it does not address the afterlife of the newsreel and how such material is used by film-makers, few of whom have been as considered as George Morrison, whose groundbreaking Mise Éire (1959) and Saoirse? (1961) set a template, not just in Ireland but internationally, for the use of actuality material.
Despite this, Chambers presents a welcome addition to the more than 20 books that have now addressed aspects of Irish film history or contemporary Irish film culture. It is a well-researched work that offers the first book-length study of mainly British-produced newsreels about Ireland.
Kevin Rockett is a professor of film studies at Trinity College Dublin. His most recent books (with Emer Rockett) are Magic Lantern, Panorama and Moving Picture Shows in Ireland, 1786-1909 and Film Exhibition and Distribution in Ireland, 1909-2010, both published by Four Courts Press in 2011
