Ireland

Abstract

While Irish cinema production was sporadic for most of the twentieth century, women screenwriters were often at the core of key productions at the most significant moments, albeit in small numbers compared to their male counterparts. Evidence for this is found in the silent era, the Film Company of Ireland’s (FCOI) key films in the 1920s, the emergence of television in the 1960s, and the first wave of Irish film up to the last two decades of New Irish Cinema. Women have written, directed, edited and set designed throughout the course of Irish cinema, in small but noticeable numbers, given the limited female participation in the public sphere and a film industry that progressed through the twentieth century in what might be described as fits and starts (Rockett et al. 1987; McLoone 2000; Barton 2004). From as early as 1896, when the Lumière Brothers came to Ireland to screen films such as Train Coming into a Station not long after their first public screenings in Paris at the end of 1895 (Rockett et al. 1987: 3–5), film has played a significant role in Ireland, at times more so in exhibition than production.