Irresistible toy or social leveller: motion pictures in Irish life, 1900 - 1939

Abstract

This research examines the cinema as an important alternative public sphere in 1920s and 1930s Ireland. The cinema-going public in Ireland during the first two decades of the Free State's existence kept in touch with the modern world in a way that balanced and modified the prevailing influence of the nationalist inward-looking world-view of Ireland at that time. Cinema was a notable agent of change during that crucial time as it was the main interface for the masses of Irish people with modernism and the greater outside/Western world at that time.