Congregation Leaving St Mary's Dominican Church in Cork (1902)

1902
Silent
1m

A well-dressed church congregation gathers on the elegant portico.

Churchgoers mill around St Mary's elegant fluted columns in this neatly composed and strikingly well preserved film, which presents us with a good cross-section of a prosperous early 20th Century Cork community. The slow camera pan captures a row of liveried servants in carriages waiting in line. The film was commissioned by showman George Green and shown at the Cork Exhibition in May 1902.

St Mary's Dominican church (opened in 1839) is located at Cork's Pope's Quay, beside the river Lee.

The Victorian World

Vivid portraits of everyday Victorian life, thanks to the first generation of filmmakers to take to Britain’s streets.

Some of the most fascinating of early films are those which are content to watch the world go by. Numerous filmmakers parked their cameras on street corners, in parks, on seaside promenades or outside workplaces or churches to capture fleeting moments of everyday life.

In their own day, these films held a mirror up to Victorian society. Today, these images of our ancestors – relaxed, smiling and laughing, gazing at us through the camera lens - are a gift of moving history. The offer us extraordinary insights into a lost world, more vivid than any still photograph or written account.