fbpx
  1. Home
  2. History

History

Excerpt from ‘The Callahans and the Murphys’

IFI Archive Player Admin
This excerpt from the 1927 MGM film The Callahans and the Murphys was believed to be lost. The silent comedy film, adapted from a novel by Kathleen Norris, stars Marie Dressler and Polly Moran and tells the story of two feuding Irish immigrant families living in a tenement. When the film was released, it caused […]

Bloomsday ’62 – Amharc Éireann: Eagrán 159

IFI Archive Player Admin
This edition of Gael Linn’s cinema newsreel records the opening on June 16th 1962 of the James Joyce Museum in Sandycove, Dublin where Joyce had spent time with Oliver St. John Gogarty in 1904. Guest of honour is Sylvia Beach, the American who published Ulysses in 1922 under the imprint of her Paris bookshop, Shakespeare […]

Ulys

IFI Archive Player Admin
Tim Booth’s playful animation is both a reflection on Joyce’s struggle with the writing of Ulysses (which he declares to be “a real bollix of a buk”), and a whistle-stop tour through the book itself.  It offers a potted outline and uses hand-drawn animation to conjure the fevered imaginings of Leopold Bloom and the characters […]

Pitch ‘n’ Putt with Beckett ‘n’ Joyce

IFI Archive Player Admin
Writer/director, and now film critic, Donald Clarke audaciously parodies the personae and writing styles of not one but two Irish literary giants in this short drama which finds James Joyce (Martin Murphy) and Samuel Beckett (Arthur Riordan) attempting to tee off  on a windswept green in Zurich in 1922.

Joyce’s Dublin

IFI Archive Player Admin
Directed by Mike O’Connor, and written by his brother, Joycean scholar Ulick O’Connor, this documentary portrays the Dublin in which Joyce lived and worked before his departure for Europe in 1904. Narrated by Micheál MacLiammóir, Joyce’s writing is woven through the scenes as significant locations from his life are revealed: the house in Brighton Square […]

Rose Dugdale – Mná an IRA

IFI Archive Player Admin
Rose Dugdale has led an extraordinary life and her unexpected involvement in the IRA and subsequent imprisonment became headline news all around the world in the 1970s. In this programme she tells the story of how and why she went from being a member of an aristocratic English family to becoming involved in the republican […]

Josephine Hayden – Mná an IRA

IFI Archive Player Admin
Josephine Hayden served four and a half years in prison in Limerick for transporting arms and ammunition for the Continuity IRA. She refused to support the Northern Ireland peace process and, despite suffering two heart attacks while in jail, did not take early release under the Good Friday Agreement as many other prisoners did. As […]

Pamela Kane – Mná an IRA

IFI Archive Player Admin
Pamela Kane grew up in a republican family in north Dublin. She recalls the formative impact of seeing how the nationalist population was treated when on childhood family holidays in her father’s homeland of Tyrone. She became actively involved in the republican movement during the 1980s hunger strikes in Northern Ireland. At this time, Sinn […]

Martina Anderson – Mná an IRA

IFI Archive Player Admin
Martina Anderson was born into a large republican family in the Bogside, Co Derry. In this programme she speaks of an early memory offering water and vinegar to tear gas victims during the Northern Ireland riots. She joined the IRA at an early age and at 18 was charged with possession of a firearm and […]

Rosaleen McCorley – Mná an IRA

IFI Archive Player Admin
Born in Belfast in 1957, Rosaleen McCorley left school at 17 to work in the Northern Ireland Housing Executive where she worked  until the time of her arrest in 1990. She was sentenced to 66 years for the attempted murder of an army officer and possession of explosives. She obtained two degrees and a postgraduate […]