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Hurling on the big screen
THE connection between Hollywood and hurling is being examined in an event during this year's Kilkenny Arts Festival.
Presented by the IFI Irish Film Archive, ‘Ireland’s Athletic Assault and Battery?: Hollywood and Hurling’ will be presented in Langton’s Set Theatre on August 9 at 7pm.
In the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s, the GAA organised annual tours to the US to promote hurling and Gaelic football. The visits, often covered by newsreels, inspired several major studios to make short films about both sports, but Hollywood’s depiction of Irish sport and culture was not always welcomed back home.
In this Arts Festival event, Dr Sen Crosson of NUI Galway will present a series of Warner Bros, MGM and Paramount films, some only recently acquired by the IFI Irish Film Archive and shown here for the first time in Ireland since the 1930s. From the 1936 film Hurling, which prompted a deputation from the GAA to demand cuts from the Irish censor, to the Oscar-nominated Three Kisses – a film featuring the legendary Cork hurling team of the 1950s – Dr Crosson will examine how Irish sports were represented in Hollywood and trace the evolution of Irish identity onscreen.
The evening will include footage from Ted Husing’s Sport Slants (1931) Episode 4, Ted Husing’s Sport Thrills (1932) Episode 5, Hurling (1936), Three Kisses (1955) and Foreign Sports in the US (1959).
Dr Sen Crosson is programme director of the MA/PGDip in Film Studies at the Huston School of Film and Digital Media in NUI Galway. His current research project, examining the representation of sport in film, is the subject of several recent publications and a monograph, Sport and Film, to be published by Routledge in 2011.
Tickets to ‘Ireland’s Athletic Assault and Battery?: Hollywood And Hurling’ are 13 euro/ 11 euro and are available from the Arts Festival box office at 3 Bateman Quay, 056 7752175 and www.kilkennyarts.ie. A special offer is also available for tickets to both this event and ‘The County Sessions’, taking place in the same venue that night at 9pm, for 27 euro in total.
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Weather for Kilkenny
Tuesday 07 February 2012
Today
Sunny spells
Temperature: 4 C to 8 C
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