Robert Flaherty's Oidhche Sheanchais: The First Film in Irish
The year 2015 will mark eighty years of Irish language film. Although many in the field of Irish Studies are aware of George Morrison's Mise Eire (1959) Bob Quinn's Poitin (1978) and Tom Collins's Kings (2007) there has been little detailed discussion in English language scholarly publications of the first Irishlanguage film, Robert J. Flaherty's Oidhche Sheanchais (1935) largely because the film was long thought to have been lost. When the Irish government announced its intention to commission such a film two years before the premiere, newspapers reported that the title would be "The Seanachie." Oidhche Sheanchais means "a night of storytelling" and under current orthographic practice would be spelled as "Oiche Sheanchais." Other English language versions of the title have included "Storyteller's Night," "Night of the Storyteller," and "The Story Teller." For many years, the film's whereabouts were uncertain, at best; those few researchers who have made brief references to it over the years generally refrained from commenting on the film's availability. After the turn of the present century, Nollaig Mac Congail (2003) Brian O Cathain (2004) and Brian Winston (2010) each clearly indicated what was suspected for decades, that the film was nowhere to be found in any public archive. The presumption that the film was lost was dramatically unsettled in 2012, however, when Harvard University library staff created a Library of Congress MARC record for Oidhche Sheanchais that enabled library patrons and researchers to query the holding in the online catalogue. The MARC record was added on December 11, 2012. Once appearing online, the record could also be viewed in the international WorldCat listing of available media. The fact that Harvard University had a copy did not come as a great surprise,