In the picture – Ray Burke on Yeats, film and censorship

One hundred years before Ireland’s unprecedented haul of 14 nominations for the Oscar Academy film awards ceremony in Los Angeles next month, William Butler Yeats declared filmmaking an “inferior” form of art.

During a Seanad debate on the Censorship of Films Bill, 1923, Yeats said: “We see only the evil effect, greatly exaggerated in the papers, of these rather inferior forms of art which we are now discussing, but we have no means of reducing to statistics their other effects.”

Yeats indicated that he was opposed to censorship by adding, “I think you can leave the arts, superior or inferior, to the general conscience of mankind”, but he worried that filmmaking was creating dangerous new opportunities for life to imitate art.

He was speaking after a Cumann na nGaedheal senator, James MacKean, blamed “cinema houses” for the ongoing “irregularism and trouble” in the country because young people “put into practice what they saw on the films.”

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Yeats sought to comfort Senator MacKean by pointing out that “artists and writers for a very long time have been troubled” about inciting copycat behaviour because “the arts do lend themselves to our imitative faculties”.

He said that he and his former Abbey Theatre fellow-director John Millington Synge had been “considerably troubled” when a man who had drowned himself in the river Liffey was found to have had in his pocket a copy of Synge’s play Riders to the Sea, which deals with drowning. He added that the German writer Goethe had similarly been greatly troubled when another man who had drowned himself had a copy of a Goethe novel in his pocket.

The new Free State government introduced the Censorship of Films Bill in May 1923 because it wanted to appoint a national film censor to fix uniform standards and replace the existing practice where each local authority was responsible for censorship in its own area. This meant, as Independent Senator Jane Wyse Power pointed out, that “when a film was passed in Dublin and it got as far as Dún Laoghaire, another Committee would take it up there and they said what suited Dublin would not suit Dún Laoghaire, and they cut it again.”

Introducing the Bill in the Seanad, the minister for local government, Ernest Blythe, said the government wanted this legislation passed without delay even though it had a great deal of urgent business before it. The Bill passed all stages in the Dáil in four days in May and in two days in the Seanad in June.

Blythe brought the Bill to the Seanad in the absence of the minister for home affairs, Kevin O’Higgins, who had tabled it in the Dáil. Blythe said: “I believe that we will be able by the device in the Bill to get the censorship done in a broadminded way, and that it will not be a finicky, restricted, or puritanical censorship, but one in which due care will be taken of public morals, and that there will not be any attempt to carry the thing too far, or deal with it in what would be called a grandmotherly way”.

The Bill, “to provide for the Official Censoring of Cinematograph Pictures and for other matters connected therewith”, was signed into law in July 1923, some four years before silent films began to be supplanted by “talkies”. But that was also nearly 14 years after Ireland’s first cinema, the Volta, had been opened on Mary Street, Dublin, by a struggling young writer, James Joyce, whose work was championed by Yeats.

Ernest Blythe told the Seanad that the legislation had been lobbied for by the film trade and by “very large and representative bodies”.

He acknowledged another impetus thus: “Quite recently the Minister for Home Affairs had a deputation which included people such as Father John Flanagan and Father Lawrence, of the Priests’ Social Guild, Rev. Dr. Denham Osborne, of the Social Reform Committee of the Presbyterian Church, the Rev. J. W. Drury, Professor of Pastoral Theology, Trinity College; Father Tomkins, S. J., Milltown Park, etc., who asked that a Bill might be promoted establishing a National Film Censor.”

The churchmen’s knowledge of contemporary cinema was not matched by all members of the Oireachtas.

When National University of Ireland TD William Magennis, an English literature professor, was opining in the Dáil about the difficulty of setting a censorship standard for diverse Irish audiences who would be familiar with Dante’s Inferno and with Charlie Chaplin, Darrell Figgis interrupted him to ask aloud: “Who is Charlie Chaplin?”