ABSTRACT
Many members of the huge audience of regular Dublin filmgoers attending a vast range of local city picture houses in the 1950s and early 1960s may have perceived the relation between the terms ‘Ireland’ and ‘cinema’ as an extremely limited one, and indeed based on difference rather than similarity-or so it seems to me retrospectively as a onetime member of that audience. For me, and perhaps for many others, the at once public and private experience of entering this darkened space promised transportation to a fantasy ‘America’ and sometimes-often under protest-to ‘England’, an equally mythical but infinitely less habitable domain. On offer in these splendid and palatial fleapits with names like the Tivoli, the Theatre De Luxe and The Rialto was an exotic ‘non-Irish’ experience. These names still conjure up for me a foreign yet intensely ‘Irish’ experience. I hoped to understand the cultural significance of such ‘foreignness’ in this pioneering cultural history of Irish cinema.
