The Irish Times praised the exterior upon its completion, as it “added dignity to the principal street of the capital city”. Still operating today, the grand old Dame of the screen opened in 1929, making it the oldest in the city, with a magnificent auditorium seating 3,000 the building also included a large restaurant with music and dancing “to midnight”. Here are some of the best designed cinemas in Ireland, some are new, some still standing with pride, and some no longer exist.Ī cinema close to Dubliners’ hearts, literally and metaphorically, remains The Savoy on upper O’Connell Street. Alongside the idea of content, though, we need cinemas to love as places in themselves, somewhere we visit to trigger memories like those Scorsese found as a young cinephile at the 8th Street Playhouse in New York City. Cinema as an art form will always find a way to survive. The Savoy cinema, O’Connell Street, Dublin, opened in 1929. The creator of Raging Bull and The King of Comedy sounds a defiant note in his essay, though: “The cinema has always been much more than content, and it always will be.”
The director then adds a bittersweet note: “Flash forward to the present day, as the art of cinema is being systematically devalued, sidelined, demeaned, and reduced to its lowest common denominator, ‘content’.” Martin Scorsese, writing recently in Harper’s magazine on Federico Fellini and the lost magic of cinema, uses the rapid-cut style of one of his own scripts to evocatively describe a film-going memory in the late 1950s.