![]() While giving a new impetus to the idea of transitional cinema, the collected essays also illuminate the importance of film’s transnational circulation. ![]() Much emphasis is given to the transitional period of silent cinema (1910s to the early 1920s), which emerges as the field where feminist film scholars are beginning to claim their own theoretical and historical ‘place’. The volume builds on the thematic, methodological, and material diversity that characterized earlier efforts in women’s film history, and the originating context of the sixth Women and the Silent Screen conference (Bologna, 2010). What motivates feminist film research today? Exploring women’s contribution to silent cinema, scholars from across the globe address questions of performance, nationality, industry, technology, labor, and theory of feminist historiography. These were among the reasons why cinema came more fully to dominate the cultural life of the city in the following years. ![]() As well as providing escapist entertainment, picture houses also screened images – coded in the language of the medium and presented with locally inflected musical accompaniment – addressing directly relevant events. In the immediate aftermath of the Rising, picture houses were the first to offer Dubliners a place in the city and suburbs to meet acquaintances and discuss the momentous events. Cinema in Dublin in 1916 was a highly developed entertainment business and widely accessible cultural medium. Given the fact that no dedicated film venue had existed ten years previously, this was a remarkable development, and it followed a boom in picture-house construction in Ireland between 1910 and the beginning of World War I. Picture houses – as the dedicated film-exhibition venues were most often called – were coming to be the dominant choice for those seeking popular entertainment and were far more numerous, were accessible to a larger segment of the population, were more geographically widespread and had collectively many more seats than Dublin’s theatres. As a result, cinema’s institutionalization in Sligo was largely determined by the priorities of existing institutions.Ĭinema has been too little considered in relation to the Easter Rising of 1916, despite the fact that it was an important part of Dublin streetscape and mediascape in which the Rising largely took place. As labour militancy increased with the introduction of trade unions to Sligo at precisely the same time as cinema, the church and business owners of the town saw the value of cinema in distracting the working class from socialist ideas and effective organization in their own interests. While the Picture Theatre was an expansion of the commercial interests of a family in the photographic trade, the church’s initial interest in cinema arose from its temperance organization’s need to have evening activities for teetotallers. When the Sligo Picture Theatre opened in late 1911, it was one of the first dedicated film venues in Ireland outside the major cities but it already had to compete against a rival film show run by the Catholic Church. Examination of the institutionalization of cinema in Sligo, Ireland, demonstrates the uniqueness of local conditions that led to cinema’s second birth.
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