Ireland a Nation | |
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Directed by | Walter MacNamara |
Written by | Walter MacNamara |
Produced by | Walter MacNamara |
Starring | Barry O'Brien Patrick Ennis Dominick Reilly Barney Magee P J Bourke Fred O’Donovan |
Production company | MacNamara Feature Film Company |
Distributed by | T A Sparling Gaelic Film Company |
Release dates |
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Running time | 52 minutes |
Countries | United Kingdom Ireland |
Languages | Silent film English intertitles |
Ireland a Nation is a 1914 silent film directed, written and produced by Walter MacNamara, telling the history of Ireland between 1798 and 1914. [1] [2]
The film depicts major political events in Ireland between 1798 and 1914, including the 1798 Rebellion, the 1800 Act of Union, the 1803 Rebellion of Robert Emmet, Catholic Emancipation, the Great Famine and the Home Rule movement.
It takes several liberties with history; most notably, Father John Murphy (executed in 1798) is shown reacting to the 1800 Act of Union; Anne Devlin is depicted as the wife of Michael Dwyer, when they were cousins and not romantically involved; and Robert Emmet is shown speaking with Napoleon, when that meeting is not thought to have occurred. [3]
Ireland a Nation was filmed on 35 mm. [4] Production was financed by Emmett Moore. Filming took place in summer 1914 on location in Ireland and at Kew Bridge Studios in Twickenham. [1]
Ireland a Nation was premiered in the U.S. on 23 September 1914. It received poor reviews but was very popular with Irish Americans, running for 20 weeks in Chicago. [5] [6] In May 1915 a copy was sent to Great Britain aboard the RMS Lusitania, which was sunk by a German submarine off Ireland. [7] [8]
The film received a Press Censor's Certificate in December 1916, although some scenes had to be cut and intertitles rewritten. It went on release in Ireland on 8 January 1917 at the Rotunda Picture House, Dublin, just 8 months after the Easter Rising. It was shut down by military order just two days after, apparently because the audience were deemed to be too pleased by certain scenes, such as the killing of British soldiers. [9] [10]
It was reissued in 1920 with additional material covering the intervening years. This new edition was first shown in Ireland in January 1922.
The film only survives in part, with 34 minutes of dramatised footage and 8 minutes of actuality footage surviving; the entire first reel is lost. [3]
Robert Emmet was an Irish Republican, orator and rebel leader. Following the suppression of the United Irish uprising in 1798, he sought to organise a renewed attempt to overthrow the British Crown and Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland, and to establish a nationally representative government. Emmet entertained, but ultimately abandoned, hopes of immediate French assistance and of coordination with radical militants in Great Britain. In Ireland, many of the surviving veterans of '98 hesitated to lend their support, and his rising in Dublin in 1803 proved abortive.
The Society of United Irishmen was a sworn association, formed in the wake of the French Revolution, to secure representative government in Ireland. Despairing of constitutional reform, and in defiance both of British Crown forces and of Irish sectarian division, in 1798 the United Irishmen instigated a republican rebellion. Their suppression was a prelude to the abolition of the Irish Parliament in Dublin and to Ireland's incorporation in a United Kingdom with Great Britain.
The Irish Rebellion of 1798 was a popular insurrection against the British Crown in what was then the separate, but subordinate, Kingdom of Ireland. The main organising force was the Society of United Irishmen. First formed in Belfast by Presbyterians opposed to the landed Anglican establishment, the Society, despairing of reform, sought to secure a republic through a revolutionary union with the country's Catholic majority. The grievances of a rack-rented tenantry drove recruitment.
Anne Devlin was an Irish republican who in 1803, while his ostensible housekeeper, conspired with Robert Emmet, and with her cousin, the rebel outlaw Michael Dwyer to renew the United Irish insurrection against the British Crown. When their plans for a rising in Dublin, the Irish capital, misfired, she endured torture and imprisonment. Outrage over her treatment secured her release in 1806, after which she was assisted for a period by the Emmet family. A long working life as a laundress ended in destitution.
Joseph Henabery was an American film actor, screenplay writer, and director. He is best known for his portrayal of Abraham Lincoln in D.W. Griffith's controversial 1915 silent historical epic The Birth of a Nation.
MylesByrne was an insurgent leader in Wexford in the Irish Rebellion of 1798 and a fighter in the continued guerrilla struggle against British Crown forces in the Wicklow Hills until 1802. In 1803 collaborated closely with Robert Emmet in plans for a renewed insurrection in Dublin. After these misfired, he took a commission in Napoleon’s Irish Legion, seeing action in the Low Countries, Spain and at the Battle of Leipzig. Under the Bourbon Restoration he was deployed to Greece, and retired as a chef de bataillon. In his later years, he was the Paris correspondent for the Young Irelander paper The Nation, and dictated his memoirs. In these, he advanced the image of the United Irishmen as a cohesive revolutionary organisation dedicated to the achievement of a national democratic government.
Events from the year 1798 in Ireland.
Edward Marshall Kimball was an American male actor of the silent era. He appeared in more than 60 films between 1912 and 1936. Like many older actors of the Victorian and Edwardian eras, he enjoyed a varied stage career on and off Broadway before entering the silent films.
Dick La Reno was an American film actor of the silent era. He appeared in more than 80 films between 1914 and 1931. He was born in Ireland and died in Hollywood, California.
Richard Robert Madden was an Irish doctor, writer, abolitionist and historian of the United Irishmen. Madden took an active role in trying to impose anti-slavery rules in Jamaica on behalf of the British government.
The Irish rebellion of 1803 was an attempt by Irish republicans to seize the seat of the British government in Ireland, Dublin Castle, and trigger a nationwide insurrection. Renewing the struggle of 1798, they were organised under a reconstituted United Irish directorate. Hopes of French aid, of a diversionary rising by radical militants in England, and of Presbyterians in the north-east rallying once more to the cause of a republic were disappointed. The rising in Dublin misfired, and after a series of street skirmishes, the rebels dispersed. Their principal leader, Robert Emmet, was executed; others went into exile.
Ireland was involved in the Coalition Wars, also known as the French Revolutionary (1792–1802) and Napoleonic (1804–1815) Wars. The island, then ruled by the United Kingdom, was the location of the Irish Rebellion of 1798, which was aided by the French. A minor, abortive uprising in 1803 resulted in the death of Ireland's chief justice, although this rising was not aided by the French.
Rory O'More is a 1911 American silent film produced by Kalem Company. It was directed by Sidney Olcott and Robert G. Vignola, with Gene Gauntier and Jack J. Clark in the leading roles. It is based on the novel and play by Samuel Lover. While the historical Rory O'More took part in the Irish Rebellion of 1641, the film places the story in the context of the Irish Rebellion of 1798.
The Croppies' Acre, officially the Croppies Acre Memorial Park, is a public park in Dublin, Ireland. It contains a memorial to the dead of the 1798 Rebellion.
Women's suffrage, the legal right of women to vote, has been depicted in film in a variety of ways since the invention of narrative film in the late nineteenth century. Some early films satirized and mocked suffragists and Suffragettes as "unwomanly" "man-haters," or sensationalized documentary footage. Suffragists countered these depictions by releasing narrative films and newsreels that argued for their cause. After women won the vote in countries with a national cinema, women's suffrage became a historical event depicted in both fiction and nonfiction films.
Hal Clements (1869-1957) was an American actor and director of silent films. He starred in dozens of silent films. He married writer Olga Printzlau.
Kay-Bee Pictures, or Kessel and Baumann, was an American silent film studio, and part of the New York Motion Picture Company. The company's mottos included, "every picture a headliner" and "Kay-Bee stands for Kessel and Baumann and Kessel and Baumann stands for quality", referring to Adam Kessel and Charles Baumann. It was party of the New York Motion Picture Company and was used after a settlement with rival Universal Pictures to end the film division named 101 Bison. Anna Little was one of its stars. Its executives included Thomas Ince.
Lance Daly is an Irish film director, screenwriter and producer.
Robert Broderick was an American actor in silent films and "light opera". He starred in Arizona.
Norman Hughes Chaplen Whitten was an English silent film producer, director and actor and the first actor to play the Mad Hatter in film, which he did in the 1903 film Alice in Wonderland, the first film adaptation of Lewis Carroll's 1865 children's book Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. In 1907 he married May Clark, who had played Alice. A pioneer of early film in Ireland, Whitten made newsreels, light comedies and dramas and Ireland's first animated film.