Professor Michael Aronson is a film exhibition historian at the University of Oregon which he describes as “a fancy way of saying that I am interested in the people that made or showed films and the various types of communities that ended up watching them.”
In a fascinating conversation with Trinity’s Ruth Barton (School of Creative Arts), the Visiting Research Fellow at the Trinity Long Room Hub said that he started out in film making, and primarily shooting music videos in the late 1980s and early 1990s before transitioning into academia.
He found his niche in the “intersection of film and local communities”, trying to understand more about the theatres of the time and about the distribution of this new mass media. He spoke about the challenges of teaching this material in a discipline which is often focused on looking at film as an art form and discussing theories of film or the history of production more broadly. That’s why archival work is so important to what he does and has helped him to capture the community engagement with theatres of the time, by looking at trade magazines and many other materials around film exhibition.
Speaking about his early work at the University of Pittsburgh, he highlighted his archival research at the city’s History Museum and his study of the Nickelodeon theatre, a Pittsburgh success story which is also the subject of his first book, Nickelodeon City: Pittsburgh at the Movies, 1905-1929. The theatre was the first indoor exhibition space in the United States to only show motion pictures.
Professor Aronson said the archive “is impossible to encompass” but he also highlighted the benefits of being able to draw on a digital humanities approach.
At the Fellow in Focus discussion, he presented the map of his work here in Ireland, in a project which traces the story of Dublin’s cinemas in the first thirty years of their collective history or what is known as the “silent era.”
Early Irish Cinemas map: https://github.com/primitivecinema/irishcinemaproject
This platform uses open-source digital mapping and was co-developed with Dr Denis Condon, in Maynooth University. The “nodes and networks” of this geo-spatial map brings together the diverse disciplines of urban/geographic studies and cinema history to show the ways in which mass media flows across the country, said Professor Aronson. He also highlighted how “film flow in this period crosses the Irish border continually”, but “theatre ownership does not.”
Professor Aronson went on to discuss his further research on the popular Savoy cinema in Dublin’s O’Connell street, which was built in 1929 and is still operating today, although divided into thirteen smaller cinemas.
The Savoy Scrapbook, UCD: https://digital.ucd.ie/view/ucdlib:45872
Showing an evocative image from the Irish architectural archive of the construction of the Savoy, Professor Aronson referenced the destruction we normally associate with Dublin’s O’Connell Street of the time as a result of the Easter Rising and the Irish Civil War. He reflected however that “that destruction opened up space for the construction of cinemas.”
The theatre which seated 3000 and was seen as “the most luxurious theatre in Ireland” also represented the “duality” between a very conservative Ireland on the outside and “as Hollywood as you can get” on the inside.