IFI Irish Film Archive
CIE: Rail Presenter
A short advertisement for a new type of CIE train, showing aspects of the comfort and speed now available with rail travel.
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Women in Focus
Women in Focus is a curated selection of films by five wildly independent female amateur filmmakers: Margaret Currivan; Agnes Heron; Flora Kerrigan; Beres Laidlaw; and Sister Maureen MacMahon. Women's creative work has been under-reported and under-recognised and can be challenging to catalogue due to a lack of recorded primary information. This is exacerbated when dealing with amateur or non-professional filmmaking, where the work of individual women filmmakers has been even more invisible. In 2021, the IFI Film Archive acknowledged a limitation in the IFI Film Archive research resources and put a request out to academic partners to assist in developing new tools that would highlight the work of female filmmakers within the collection. This resulted in a collaborative research project that developed new approaches to cataloguing the creative contribution of women filmmakers in local, regional, and national archives. Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Irish Research Council, as part of the UK-Ireland Digital Humanities scheme, the project is a UK-Ireland collaboration between the University of East Anglia, Maynooth University, and the University of Sussex, with the IFI Irish Film Archive and East Anglian Film Archive as archive partners. The project has resulted in the creation of a cataloguing toolkit that helps archives with moving image collections to create clear, relevant, and easily accessible records about female filmmakers. The work presented here formed case studies for the toolkit and was digitised by the IFI Irish Film Archive. A larger selection of films from the project will be made available on the IFI Archive Player in 2025.
Come Back to Erin - Trish McAdam Filmmaker Playlist
Our second IFI Filmmaker Playlist is curated by filmmaker and visual artist Trish McAdam. Since the production of her early shorts in the 1980s, Trish has created a vibrant and varied body of work, embracing a range of forms and subjects and retaining a singular, independent voice. We're delighted to welcome Trish to the Irish Film Institute to select her top picks from films preserved in the IFI Irish Film Archive and presented on the IFI Archive Player. Only one reel of this three-reel film has survived the ravages of time and so the tale is incomplete – but worth watching nonetheless. In this transatlantic tale, feisty young Peggy O’Malley (Gene Gauntier) refuses her father's orders to marry Jerry, the village blacksmith and runs away to New York City via steam-liner. Upon landing in New York she gets a job working as a parlour maid in the home of wealthy Mrs Mortimer. The film includes striking documentary-like elements in scenes set in Ireland – at the cattle market in Killarney and scenes of the emigrant ship leaving Queenstown (now Cobh) for America. This is all that survives of the film. Contemporaneous reviews fill in the remaining story : It’s not long before Peggy falls into a bad crowd and soon finds herself arrested for a crime she didn’t commit. With the news of Peggy’s arrest having made its way back home, will her blacksmith in shining armour come to save her from her wrongful imprisonment and take her back to Ireland? A single reel of this 3 reel film was discovered in the Museum of Modern Art following research by IFI in preparation for a major retrospective of Irish cinema in MOMA in 2011.
Up the Canal
This short film explores how the Grand Canal in Dublin has changed over the years. The voiceover provided by Irish novelist, short story writer and humourist John D. Sheridan, notes how methods of transport have changed and how fewer boats and barges now use the waterway. The aural memories are illustrated by poetic footage of the canal in the 1960s. The director, Margaret Currivan, won first prize for Up the Canal in the 'Film Shows Cup’ at the 1961 Dublin Amateur Cine Society competition (a competition predominantly entered by male filmmakers at the time). Margaret Currivan (b. 1923) was an avid amateur filmmaker, most prolific from 1954 to 1966. Currivan had a keen interest in photography and co-owned Currivan's Photographic Services in Dublin with her husband, Patrick Joseph (PJ). The shop processed and sold film, projectors, cameras and equipment and the filmmaker would, therefore, have had access to equipment, supplies and quick processing. Her films chronicle the story of her family, PJ and children Helen, Dan, and Paddy, engaged in key events including birthdays, Christmases and holidays. Currivan sometimes appears in her films, alluding to partial recording made by PJ. However, the shots are few and authorship is retained by Currivan who is noted to have also meticulously edited her films using a manual reel-to-reel device and splicer.
Housing Discrimination - Trish McAdam Filmmaker Playlist
Our second IFI Filmmaker Playlist is curated by filmmaker and visual artist Trish McAdam. Since the production of her early shorts in the 1980s, Trish has created a vibrant and varied body of work, embracing a range of forms and subjects and retaining a singular, independent voice. We're delighted to welcome Trish to the Irish Film Institute to select her top picks from films preserved in the IFI Irish Film Archive and presented on the IFI Archive Player. Shot in 1953, this film highlighted housing discrimination practiced by the unionist-controlled council in the town of Fintona in County Tyrone. It outlines the inequalities faced by the poorer, and usually nationalist, inhabitants, and details how new council houses are being given to unionist residents who are in less need of the houses than nationalists. It argues that the discrimination is motivated by the desire to maintain a majority of unionist voters in certain constituencies. Housing Discrimination was produced by the Information Division of the Irish Department of External Affairs (now the Department of Foreign Affairs) and was allegedly partly shot using a hidden camera. In 1954 it was distributed in Britain by the Anti-Partition League, which prompted the Northern Ireland provincial government to complain to the British government, asking it to lodge a complaint with the Irish government. The film is interesting for a number of reasons; its originator (effectively the Irish government), its subject matter (housing discrimination in Northern Ireland), its argument (discrimination represents a conspiracy against the people of Ireland by a ruling group acting in concert with the British government) and its language (virulently Irish nationalist and anti-British). With kind permission of the Department of Foreign Affairs.
Introduction - Trish McAdam Filmmaker Playlist
Our second IFI Filmmaker Playlist is curated by filmmaker and visual artist Trish McAdam. Since the production of her early shorts in the 1980s, Trish has created a vibrant and varied body of work, embracing a range of forms and subjects and retaining a singular, independent voice. Snakes and Ladders (1997), her debut feature, was one of the first Irish films directed by a woman about contemporary women’s lives, and she continued to position women squarely on screen with her ground-breaking documentary series, Hoodwinked: Irish Women Since the 1920s. Her interest in other artists is evident in her documentary profiles of Leo O’Kelly, Donal O’Kelly and Liu Xiabo. She has recently explored new modes of storytelling in her formally exciting short films Strangers to Kindness (2015) and Confinement (2019). We’re delighted to welcome Trish to the Irish Film Institute to select her top picks from films preserved in the IFI Irish Film Archive and presented on the IFI Archive Player. Trish approached the IFI Archive Player looking to discover some hidden gems showing an alternative Irish character. Her choices can be broken down into three eras: early representations of Ireland on film (1910s – 1920s); changing culture in Ireland (1950s – 1970s); and contemporary Irish filmmaking (1980s – 2000s). The wide-ranging selection, in her own words ‘not so much a tip of an iceberg, as a scattering within the iceberg,’ is free to watch on the IFI Archive Player anywhere in the world.
Bye Bye Now
Residents of rural Ireland reminisce on the joys and sorrows of phone boxes as they become obsolete in the modern world. When phone boxes were first introduced in Irish villages in the 1920s, there was stern competition between local businesses to have one installed outside their property. The phone box would assume a monumental role in many people’s lives allowing them to stay connected with loved ones and receive all sorts of important news. In Mayo, a couple celebrating their 50th anniversary credit the box for helping to keep their long-distance romance alive. In Donegal, a man laughingly recalls how two women became trapped inside one while trying to wait out a bad storm. A young man nervously calls a maternity hospital for news of his young wife. Although many of those interviewed admitted they do not use the service anymore, the phone box is a fondly remembered feature of Irish village life. This film is part of F-Rated: Short Films by Irish Women.