War In Ireland - Easter Rebellion (1916)

The reopening of the Rotunda picture house at the top of Sackville Street in the early weeks of May, 1916 was a signal of the gradual restoration of normality to Dublin after the Easter Rising. Indeed the cinema on the city’s central thoroughfare was fortunate to survive intact, as their advertisement placed in The Irish Times on 9 May explained: ‘[t]he fabric of that historic building, the Rotunda, has happily escaped almost unscathed from the recent ordeal of fire…’. Those Dubliners hoping to escape the flickering embers of this ordeal by taking in a silent film or two may, however, have been bitterly disappointed. While the cinema’s feature-length listings were diverse, promising D. W. Griffith’s comedy Three Friends, and the adaptation of Cleveland Moffat’s puzzling short story The Mysterious Card, the Rotunda would also broadcast moving images of a more recent and local source: newsreel footage from the ‘Recent events in Dublin’, which largely featured scenes of the ruins surrounding the Liffey. The Rotunda’s neighbour and rival Carlton Cinema, located on Upper Sackville Street, promised the even more specific Dublin Ruins, ‘depicting the desolation of the Irish metropolis, consequent upon the insurrection’.