View from the gate to the bus shelter.

The first commercial presentation of the Lumiere Phographie was on 28 December 1895 at the Salon Indien, Grand Café, 14 Boulevard des Capuchins, Paris. The Salon Indien was a small hall located in the basement of the Grand Café, and seated around 100. An invited audience attended the afternoon performance. The ten films believed to have been shown that day were La Sortie de l’Usine Lumiere a Lyon, La Voltige, La Peche aux Poissons Rouges, Le Debarquement du Congres de Photographique a Lyon, Les Forgerons, Le Jardinier, Le Repas, Le Saut a la Couverture, La Place des Cordeliers a Lyon and La Mer. Contrary to what many popular histories assert, this was not the first commercial presentation of projected film, nor did the show feature the celebrated film showing an arrival of a train.

There is no museum, just a few photos in a glass case downstairs in the basement. It’s now a conference centre in the Hotel Scribe. But I managed to get down there and take a look around.

This is a great interview with Joseph Strick (1923-2010) who read Ulysses when he was 16 years old. His 1967 adaptation is one of three filmed versions of Ulysses. I didn’t know that he had been back in Ireland in 2000 when he directed Aristophanes play, Ladies’ Day at the Granary Theatre in Cork. I also didn’t know that Fred Haines, his co-writer on Ulysses had lived here in Dublin for many years and worked with Douglas Kennedy  -  in small theatre company in the late 70′s. Fred Haines

I’m including a little of Doulgas Kennedy’s obituary from 2008 on Haines related to their meeting in Dublin and working together:

‘ “………….It was while living in Dublin that he met another American expatriate – yours truly – who was then running a fringe theatre company called Stage One. Having been a big fan of the films he had written for Joe Strick, I was amazed to discover that Haines was living in a lofty, bohemian perch just beyond the city limits. We became fast friends. And when I proposed that he direct for us a production of Trevor Griffiths’ play, The Party, he accepted on the spot.

The production was a great triumph – especially as Haines found a way to make its intense political didacticism dramatic – and he went on to direct several more productions in Dublin, notably a brilliant staging of John McGrath’s Events While Guarding the Bofors Gun. By this time I was in charge of the Abbey Theatre’s smaller auditorium, The Peacock. And though I proposed Haines as a stage director on several occasion, the then-artistic director would never give him a chance, hinting that he simply didn’t like the man’s sensibility.

Indeed, many people didn’t know how to read Fred Haines. In his standard sartorial outfit – blue workshirt, blue Levi’s, scuffed cowboy boots and a Gitane perpetually screwed between his bearded lips – he could have easily passed as a rancher in Wyoming (though the cigarette would have been an all-American Marlboro). But then he started to talk – and you realised that the Cool Dude from Out West was also the possessor of a very big brain. Fluent in German and French, his knowledge of literature and cinema was, quite simply, vast. And he never stopped being interested in everything around him. He was perhaps the most literate and intellectually engaged individual I’ve ever known.

He was also, without question, a great friend. When I started making my own tentative steps as a writer, he was never less than encouraging. When success finally came my way, he was exceedingly shrewd on the subject of hitting it big, counselling me (and I always remember this) that “success is, at best, a fragile veneer”. When I had problems in my personal and professional life, he was always at the end of a phone line, ready to hear me out, his counsel astute and alive to life’s manifold contradictions.

Then again, he himself knew a thing or two about the contradictory business of a creative career. By 1984 he was broke – and with little further work on offer in Dublin, he and Frances returned to Los Angeles. The marriage finally ended a few years later, and Fred led a very streamlined existence as a writer – the occasional television film and rewrite job, and 10 years as the co-writer of Vincent Bugliosi’s massive revisionist history of the Kennedy assassination, its projected title “Final Verdict” (eventually published as Reclaiming History: the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 2007). At one point – when a third live-in relationship ended – he was actually living in his tiny office on Sunset Boulevard. When I remarked that this set-up was the stuff of a bad detective novel he just shrugged and said: “It doesn’t bother me.”………..’

Marilyn Monroe reading Ulysses - photo taken by the American Photojournalist Eve Arnold on Long Island in 1954.

Starting my M.A. at Bournemouth University last May, our first project was finding an area of debate in the Media and Screen Industries. I decided to investigate James Joyce on film, both in the past – films that have been adapted from his work and the future – what can happen here in Ireland, UK, and Europe when his work comes into the public domain next January. My head has been at it since May. Winding towards the end of the project, I looked up this photo recently- and even though we’ve all seen it before – it had stayed in my mind. I remember reading somewhere that Monroe had the book in her car and when they decided to stop off at the playground to take some photos, she talked about reading Ulysses, she got the book, and they set up the shot. I think Marilyn was certainly trying to make a point about herself by choosing Ulysses to pose with.

In Solitary Pleasures, a book in which women writers select favourite pictures of women reading, Jeanette Winterson writes of this photo:

This is so sexy, precisely because it’s Marilyn reading James Joyce’s Ulysses. She doesn’t have to pose, we don’t even need to see her face, what comes off the photo is absolute concentration, and nothing is sexier than absolute concentration. There she is, the goddess, not needing to please her audience or her man, just living inside the book. The vulnerability is there, but also something we don’t often see in the blonde bombshell; a sense of belonging to herself. It’s not some playboy combination of brains and boobs that is so perfect about this picture; it is that reading is always a private act, is intimate, is lover’s talk, is a place of whispers and sighs, unregulated and usually unobserved. We are the voyeurs, it’s true, but what we’re spying on is not a moment of body, but a moment of mind. For once, we’re not being asked to look at Marilyn, we’re being given a chance to look inside her.