The Volta Picture Theatre, at 45 Mary Street Dublin, was Ireland's first cinema. It was opened in December 1909 by James Joyce, on a return visit from Trieste. At the time, Trieste had 21 cinemas, even though it had a smaller population than Dublin. For Joyce, managing a cinema in Dublin, which didn't have any of them, seemed an obvious way to make money.
I've made a diorama of A Night at the Volta for the cinema-themed exhibition, Raiders of the Lost Cabinets, which you can see in the Open Market in Brighton from now until August.
Curated by George Coles, who also made the cabinets, it comprises 56 dioramas by different artists, illustrating various films.
The film Joyce is showing in my diorama is Percy Stow's A Glass of Goat's Milk, which was screened at the Volta in February 1910. Filmed in 1909 on the streets of Croydon, it shows a timid man terrorised by an aggressive goat. The goat's owner milks her and gives the man a glass to drink. As he does, he undergoes a transformation - growing a goatee and long goat horns. For this scene, Stow used paper horns which inflate.
The goat man then goes on the rampage, butting everything in sight. He knocks down a tree, a wall and a horse-drawn omnibus.
This reminds me of Finnegans Wake, whose hero, HCE, is called 'Hircus Civis Eblanensis' (215.27), which means 'Goat Citizen of Eblana' (Dublin). Explaining the name to C.K.Ogden, Joyce said, "The first man of Dublin was a he goat".
After waking up at his own wake, Tim Finnegan, told to stay lying in his coffin, is promised funerary offerings, including "some goat's milk, like the maid used to bring you" (25.08). This doesn't seem like a good way to make him lie down!
Joyce loved goats which caper through the pages of all his novels. In 1919, he even grew a goatee beard ‘on his megageg chin’ (FW 169.11). See my previous post, James Joyce was a Goat Lover.
It struck me that Joyce might have brought along some real Old Irish Goats from Howth Head to the cinema as a misguided publicity stunt. He didn't think about the goats' reactions when they saw the flowers on the ladies' hats.
Joyce is also holding a manuscript of Dubliners, which he believed would shortly be published by Maunsell and Roberts of Dublin.
Sadly, the Volta was a commercial failure (due to the goats running amok?) and Joyce didn't make any money. Maunsell didn't publish Dubliners either.
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| Lisa and I made a Popeye diorama too |
Factsticklers may cavil that Joyce had returned to Trieste by the time the film was shown. So the Volta diorama is presented as a scene from a projected biopic by Karl Strager, a fellow goat lover.
If you visit Dublin today, you can see a plaque commemorating the Volta on the wall of Penney's Clothes Shop.
Visitors to this year's International James Joyce Symposium in Glasgow will be able to see A Glass Goat's Milk on 15 June, when it's part of 'An Evening at the Volta' at the Glasgow Film Theatre. This is open to the public, and there's a ticket link here.
