Lucia Joyce in Paris, 1929.
This is such a great photo that the cinetrix was casting about for any excuse to post it. Then I remembered this fun fact:
On December 20, 1909, Ireland got its first full-time movie theater when the Volta cinema opened on Mary Street in central Dublin. The venue's mastermind and chief programmer was an impecunious writer named James Joyce. Returning to Ireland from his self-imposed exile in Trieste, Joyce thought he had hit on a surefire moneymaking scheme, and he came with the backing of four continental investors. Alas (or not), the pot of gold at the end of his cinematic rainbow never materialized. Some blamed the rain, others faulted Joyce's programming, but the venture was short-lived. Joyce soon returned to poverty, and writing, on the shores of the Adriatic.As an augury of the future of Ireland and cinema, this anecdote cuts in two directions. From one angle, it's a gloomy parable of ill omen and failure: bad timing, bad weather, bad judgment, financial collapse. From the reverse angle, that same sign could not be more auspicious: What other national cinema can claim to have been birthed at the hands, not of some addled inventor or carnival huckster, but of that nation's most celebrated artist--in Ireland's case, the paradigmatic auteur of the 20th century? [from Indyweek]
If you ever find yourself at the James Joyce museum inside the Martello tower in Sandycove, be sure to linger long over the hideously clashing tie and waistcoat donated by Samuel Beckett [once Lucia Joyce's intended]. He sent them along with a note that mischieveously suggested Joyce actually wore the two items in combination.
Well, the cinetrix thought it was pretty funny, but then she's been known to stay in on a Saturday night to watch a Beckett documentary she stumbled across on the second-tier local PBS station. The stuff for German TV? Not my cup of tea. But this lovely filmic exercise in the panopticon, starring Buster Keaton, is pretty good stuff.
