The Light House Cinema

Hey everyone,

after having moved to Smithfield a week ago, I'd like to give a recommendation: I've discovered a great cinema right on Smithfield Market: the Light House Cinema!!! Great alternative and foreign-language movies to practice your French, Italian or Spanish...

Check out this link: http://www.lighthousecinema.ie/index.php

For more on the interesting past of the Light House Cinema, read below.

History of the Light House Cinema
The story of Light House Cinema begins in 1988 when Dublin department store Arnotts bought the Curzon Cinema in Middle Abbey Street. Arnotts had long term plans for modernisation and expansion but in the short term, whilst building up its property portfolio, it needed a caretaker for the vacant cinema.

On a shoestring budget, Light House Cinema was created and for eight exciting years we operated two screens in Middle Abbey Street showing films which might never have otherwise been seen in Dublin. Light House became one of the city’s most vibrant and valuable cultural institutions. We broke the rules. We broke down barriers. We defied the commercial marketeers. It was art house with an audience.

Light House’s secret was its ability to deliver a special night out in friendly surroundings. We managed to somehow bridge the gap between culture and acceptability without compromising the integrity of our eclectic programme. While the mainstream screens in the city concentrated on the high profile Hollywood products, Light House championed, as Ciaran Carty put it in The Sunday Tribune, films that were “that bit different, that bit special”, and at the same time found audiences for new, exciting, sometimes unknown directors.

Some of our own proudest moments — the success of Cathal Black’s Korea and Ken Loach’s Land and Freedom, among them — aren’t referred to, but we are proud of Michael Dwyer's succinct summing up of the distinctive character of the original Light House in a piece he wrote for The Irish Times in September 1996, as we were preparing to close.

Since it opened its doors on the site of the former Curzon cinema on Middle Abbey Street, the Light House has carved a rich and distinctive niche for itself and has provided an invaluable contribution to the artistic life of the city. The tone of the programming was set with the very first presentations on November 11th, 1988, when one screen showed the work of a veteran French film-maker — Eric Rohmer's 4 Adventures Of Reinette & Mirabelle — while the other presented the work of a precocious rising talent from Spain — Pedro Almodóvar's The Law Of Desire.

Just as the Light House was the first lrish cinema to put an Almodóvar movie on release, so, too, did it introduce Irish audiences to the work of such diverse talents as Terence Davies, Ang Lee, Vincent Ward, Patrice Leconte, Jane Campion, Zhang Yimou, Denys Arcand, Julio Medem and Jeunet & Caro. One of the cinema's most notable commercial successes was Thaddeus O'Sullivan's first feature film, December Bride.

Reflecting the programming policy established on its opening night, the Light House presented side by side with these emerging talents the work of more established but nonetheless imaginative film-makers as Peter Greenaway, Spike Lee, Bertrand Tavernier, John Sayles, Jacques Rivette, Derek Jarman and the great Krzysztof Kieslowski whose magnificent Three Colours trilogy was one of the unforgettable highlights of the cinema's later years. And the Light House paid tribute to cinema's history with such welcome re-releases as L'Atalante and Smiles Of A Summer Night.

This unique level of ambitious and adventurous programming has been to the forefront of a risk-taking and commendably thoughtful cinema operation, the lack of which the city can ill afford. I am sure that I speak for very many people when I express great regret for the passing of the Light House and great enthusiasm - and great impatience - for its reincarnation.

A new Light House - an old beacon

Although the closure of the original Light House wasn’t a voluntary one, in truth, the old cinema had served its purpose. It was a particular venue that Dublin needed at a particular time. But it was never going to have long-term sustainability.

The last movies we screened in Middle Abbey Street on Saturday, September 27, 1996, were Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man, whichended with Johnny Depp, as William Blake, making a protracted journey into the spirit world, and Ebrahim Forouzesh’s Iranian fable, The Jar, which provided an alternative ending. The Jar is set in a little school where a large urn holding the pupils’ vital drinking water cracks and must be replaced. The schoolteacher threatens to quit, knowing it will take a long time for the government to send a new one. Getting the jar fixed does turn out to be complicated, but, with the support of the community, the beleaguered schoolteacher finally gets the job done.

It has taken Light House Cinema almost twelve year to get our job done. It has been a protracted journey. The challenge was to re-invent what An Taisce described as “a cultural beacon in the north inner-city”; to ensure that the beacon would shine once again — this time in a permanent, custom built 21st century building. The challenge has finally been met with the opening of Light House Smithfield on May 9, 2008.

We got the job done with the support of a lot of people. We were fortunate that David Collins, Managing Director of Samson Films and David Kavanagh, Chief Executive of the Irish Playwrights and Screenwriters Guild, accepted our invitation to join the Light House board as non-executive directors, bringing vital additional experience and skills to pushing forward when things might have fallen by the wayside. Without them, we would not have been able to bring the project to fruition.

The Cultural Cinema Consortium, a strategic partnership of The Arts Council and the Irish Film Board, endorsed the project with a capital grant of €750,000 and the Department of Arts, Sport and Tourism provided the vital additional grant of €1 million, which Light House brought to the negotiation table at which developers Fusano Properties agreed to provide the rest of the investment required to complete the project.

Dublin City Council planners required the creation of a cultural magnet and focal point for Smithfield to accord with the flagship project concept underpinning Fusano’s large-scale urban regeneration project at Smithfield Market, on the west side of Dublin’s largest public plaza.

In December 2006, award-winning architectural practice, DTA Architects, headed up by Derek Tynan, was commissioned to design Light House Cinema as Smithfield’s cultural hub. The brief entailed designing a signature art house cinema with four screens and ancillary spaces, all built to the highest technical standards to ensure the levels of comfort and quality that audiences — and film makers — deserve.

The architectural challenge entailed the creation of an entrance lobby, with box-office and café/bar facilities at ground floor level and the insertion of four cinemas along with social space and meeting facilities into the underground spaces below.

DTA Architects responded with a beautiful, 21st Century vision that makes imaginative use of contrasting materials and voids. “The development involves the insertion of four cinema volumes into the underground voids,” explains project architect Colin Mackay. “The organisation and distribution of screens will allow patrons to walk over, under and around the forms, affording an alternative and dramatic cinema experience. All four destinations will be a counterpoint to the exterior and distinctly different to each other in size, scale, finish and detail, offering a range of experience from the intimate 68 seat screen to a spacious 277 seat screen."

Finally, we have built it. A new chapter in the history of Light House Cinema begins. We hope you will come up sometime and see us.

Neil Connolly, Maretta Dillon, May 2008

- quoted from http://www.lighthousecinema.ie/about/history.html -