Emerald Illusions, The Irish in early American Cinema by Gary D. Rhodes (review)

Scholars in the area of Irish film studies have generally included Irish-American film production in their canon. There is an intuitive case for taking a diasporic approach to Irish cultural production in America. After all, Americans of Irish descent created work in the early film period. Irish characters, both immigrants and the descendants of Irish immigrants, appear in its films. Filmmakers of the period include Ireland as a setting. Plot lines frequently follow the progress of Irish characters. They exploit the Irish-typed characters of the cop, the boxer, and the priest. Irish scholars of the early cinema period naturally trained their attention to American film production, since they had so few examples of indigenous film production.

Gary D. Rhodes, in his 2012 work, Emerald Illusions, The Irish in early American Cinema, convincingly takes the diaspora approach to task. In fact, he makes it hard to trust the intuitive approach summarized above. With exhaustive research and crystalline prose, Rhodes examines the presence of Irish content in the context of pre-cinema cultural production to demonstrate his thesis: Our 21st Century view of Irish content in early American film represents, in fact, but a small part of a much larger unfolding immigrant story. For instance, does the fact that a character has the surname "Hooligan" mean that either the filmmaker or the audience understood that an Irish name meant the character was representative of Irish culture? In Rhodes view, the answer is "no." Contemporaneous American audiences were unlikely to attach any particular meaning to that name. Even if they were aware that it was an Irish name, the mixed heritage of American society created cultural ambiguity around any character. An audience, then, only read the particular circumstances of the unfolding action to understand the character. We cannot say that they further endowed him or her with Irish traits based on the sole characteristic of a surname.

Rhodes begins his inquiry by considering the case of D.W. Griffith's 1908 American Mutoscope & Biograph Company release, Caught By Wireless. Thanks to Grapevine Video's 2011 DVD release, I was able to view Caught By Wireless before I proceeded through Rhodes' discussion. I thought about his twofold goal: to prove that images of Irish coded content in early American film were illusory, and that current scholars who attempt to definitively identify Irish-coded themes in this period of American Cinema are, indeed, chasing a chimera.

Despite being a scholar and theater director well versed in American and European dramatic literature and theatre practices of the period as well as the canon of Irish dramatic literature and the various incarnations of the stage Irishman, I found myself grateful for Rhodes' summary of the film's plot. Without it, I could not have reconstructed the action he described. More importantly, I was incapable of identifying any Irish content on my own. I easily grasped the conflicts of class, of law breaking and struggle, and even that aboard ship Marconi's new technology thwarts the protagonist's plans. But I found any Irish coding opaque. I wondered if Griffith's audience would see any Irish content either.

With Rhodes' prompt freshly in mind, I walked through his survey of new territory with interest and appreciation for his fine sense of detail. He thoroughly contextualizes the place of overt Irish and Irish-coded content in pre-cinema performance landscape in America. While keeping a laser focus on his own task, he offers wonderful details for those interested in the theatre history of the period. His 1876 and 1896 case studies of Dion Boucicault's influence on American theatre offers details of audience responses that can surely help theatre practitioners contributing to the ongoing Boucicault revival in the regional American stage.

Rhodes' two chapters on Irish-themed lantern slide presentations and non-fiction subjects in the pre-cinema period introduced a subject area that was new to me. The illustrated travelogue tradition made me realize that...