We are delighted that Luke Gibbons, author of Cinema and Ireland and Transformations in Irish Culture, will introduce our series with a lecture and film clips. "One of the striking features of Irish cinema since its inception has been a blurring of the boundaries between fact and fiction, narrative and history. From the earliest period, actuality footage has been interwoven with imaginative storytelling, thus giving rise to a distinctive, digressive form of narration akin to oral performance, or the modalities of the voice. These vernacular visions, ranging from Ireland a Nation (1916-21) to Michael Collins (1996) and The Butcher Boy (1998), represent some of the most considerable achievements of Irish cinema, and show how it is still possible for the camera to cast an idiomatic eye in the most global of all cultural forms."-Luke Gibbons