Bolex Boys capture lost practices of rural Kerry life for the screen on 16mm film
Sweeney Mulcahy Michael Picture: To Filmmakers John Noel Lynch (left And Right)
It was 1978, and filmmaker John Lynch knew that he only had one shot at getting what he had come to Kissane’s farm to film.
A gaggle of wide-eyed children stood in the gateway, and a nodding patch of crimson primroses were an ominous harbinger of the blood that would soon flow onto the concrete farmyard.
The assembled adults made preparations: scrubbing tools, weighing out salt, and sharpening the knife. On the back of the trailer, the oblivious pig awaited his fate.
Today, in an era when meat comes in chilled plastic-wrapped portions on supermarket shelves, John’s short 16mm film of the killing and butchering of a pig in North Kerry would make for difficult viewing for many.
The camera is unflinching and everything is captured: the pig restrained and subdued, and then the quick, skilled incision into his carotid artery, the torrent of his life’s blood ebbing away into a salted pan for the black pudding.
John, then 43, had come to Kissanes not with gore in mind: no Tarantino, he was not attracted to the violence of the moment that he so faithfully captured.
Himself from a farming background, John was drawn to document the scene because he knew that this was the last time that such a slaughter would take place in the area. He wanted to record a thing that marked the end of a way of life as much as it marked the end of the pig’s life.
“That was something that I hated altogether, that killing of the pig,” John, now 89, says.
Like John, many country people were upset by the annual or bi-annual pig kill, and regarded it as a necessary evil for one of their only sources of meat, in a diet that was actually far lower in meat than that we eat today: in the 1930s, Irish people only ate 133g of meat per day, according to Eurostat. Today, we eat more than double that at 271g per day, according to the CSO.
“But I’d say that was the last pig to be killed on any farm in North Kerry, and I heard about it, and I said I’d better do something about that, before it was too late,” John says.
John had worked as a projectionist and managed a cinema in Kilkee, Co Clare, in the 1960s, before buying his first film camera in 1971. Two years later, Ireland joined the EU, then called the ECC: the times were a-changing.
The pace of modernisation was rapid: tractors and chemical fertilisers were intensifying farming, and the use of horses for work like ploughing was already nearly a thing of the past. There were over a quarter of a million draught horses working on Irish farms in the early 1950s, more than a decade after the introduction of the tractor, but by 1975, only 4,000 working horses remained.
Working as a creamery manager in Listowel, having studied Dairy Science in UCC, John knew the sights and practices that he saw on farms were going to become a thing of the past in short order, and he set out to ensure that a record of them remained.
Most home movie fanatics at the time shot on 8mm film, but John, keenly aware of the power of good quality film, had invested in a 16mm Bolex camera.
“They were simple cameras,” he recalls. “You had to wind up the camera, and you only got 16 seconds in a full winding of the motor.” Even so, the 16mm camera was considered industry standard: it what was used for RTÉ reporting of the day.
Michael Mulcahy, a young radio and TV technician hailing from Templeglantine in West Limerick had bought himself an 8mm camera in the mid-60s, and built a home audio studio a few years later. He was a few years younger than John, but after they met at a screening of John’s film , which was shot over the course of a year with fellow film enthusiast John Pearce in Listowel, they became lifelong friends.
“I was impressed with the quality of the picture and so I spoke to John after, and we became great friends and we worked together for the next 50 years,” Michael, now 82, says.
“John was a great cameraman, but he didn’t have experience with sound. I had built a small home studio and I was recording some local musicians and I was very interested in recording traditional music and singing. I built a purpose-built sound studio in 1977, it grew from there.”
With the magic mix of film and audio in place, John and Michael formed Scannáin Dúchais with the express intention of documenting ways of life and skills that were disappearing. Often these would be in North Kerry, but occasionally closer to Michael’s home in Co Limerick.
“We did a film in Newcastle West in 1979 of the trades of Maiden Street,” Michael recalls. “We started one morning at Fitzgerald’s bakery, which was about to close. Then we moved down the street and we filmed a harness-maker, a shoe-maker, a blacksmith, a tinsmith and a coopers. All of those trades were gone from Newcastle within three years.”
Changing technologies and skillsets would also catch up with the Bolex Boys. In 1980, they joined the rush to VHS and switched to a professional quality video recorder: now they could make copies of their films cheaply and distribute them for viewers to take home and watch.
Before this, they had arranged screenings of their documentaries in community and parish halls near where the films had been made, bringing a projector with them. But, as John explains, when you show film in this manner, it gradually deteriorates. Bits of dust and dirt get in and when the film is run through the projector it accumulates little scratches: the very act of watching the film is slowly destroying it.
The Bolex Boys had made about 12 documentaries on 16mm film between 1973 and 1980 before switching to video.
One of the best-regarded of their 16mm films is a perfect marriage of the respective skills of the two men: The Way I Remember is probably one of their best known: filmed by John and again focusing on disappearing farming skills, it was a silent film until Michael recorded actor and broadcaster Eamon Keane performing an original long-form poem that he had devised while watching it.
Keane was brother to famous Listowel playwright John B Keane and the audio, still an impressive quality recording to this day, tapped into the strong literary tradition in the area in which it was filmed.
In fact, County Kerry also has very strong connections to filmmaking, both amateur and professional. was based on a story by Maurice Walsh, who came from Ballydonoghue, between Ballybunion and Listowel.
In the early 1910s, the New York Kalen Film Company used the stunning scenery around Killarney as a backdrop for 28 short films, and Ireland’s very first independent feature film, , shot between 1933 and 1936, was directed by Killarney entrepreneur Thomas G Cooper.
But it wasn’t all professional: Michael says there was someone in “almost every parish” dabbling in home movie making. John himself estimates that he has an accumulated 300 hours of viewing time of traditions past, over 16mm and video, although he was never a “professional” filmmaker in the sense that he always worked for the creamery and made films in his spare time.
In Listowel, a man called Jack McKenna had been an early adopter who forged a path for other film enthusiasts and purchased his own first camera in 1929.
Ciarán Walsh is the curator who dubbed John Lynch and Michael Mulcahy the Bolex Boys. He says collections of old film are indeed more common than most people would realise, and that in North Kerry alone, there are around 15 other collections that are the work of non-professional camera enthusiasts.
Home movies and films by non-professional filmmakers bring a rich representation of communities whose voices would otherwise go unheard in the high-gloss world of professional film, he believes.
“This kind of community filmmaking brings the perspective of people who, mostly for economic reasons, had limited access to media-making and therefore their voices were not audible,” Ciarán says. “What it brings is a very strong rural community perspective, and that’s what fascinates me. Within that perspective is a whole lot of social history, and it’s from the ground up.”
Ciarán had worked as visual arts director of the National Folk Theatre in Tralee, which is where he first encountered John and Michael’s . He realised that the work of Scannáin Dúchais was part of a treasure trove of community filmmaking that was in danger of being lost.
Now, as Film & Digital Media Curator at Kerry Writer’s Museum in Listowel, Ciarán is set on preserving the work not only of the Bolex Boys but other filmmakers in the area including Leo Finucane and Tom Dylan, by digitising their collections and making them accessible to the public.
The clock is ticking on this work, especially for physical 8mm and 16mm film, which can suffer from something called Vinegar Syndrome, in which the film’s acetate base deteriorates, giving off an odour of acetic acid.
“When you smell that vinegary smell, you know the film is deteriorating,” Ciarán says. “And a lot of the filmmakers have now gotten to a certain age.
Digitising film is expensive and time-consuming, but the end result means that a digital version of the film can be viewed by many, shared with ease, and also allows researchers to look at a film over and over again without running the physical film through a projector or VHS player and risking damaging it.
Ciarán’s Bolex Boys exhibition in Kerry Writer’s Museum in 2023 featured a restored version of John and Michael’s , digitised by Super 8 film specialist Julien Dorgere. As part of Heritage Week 2024, John Lynch’s was taken right back to Kissane’s farmyard where it was originally shot, for a special screening of a digitised version of it.
For him, the work of the Bolex Boys is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the need to preserve the heritage and social history found in the film and video collections in the area.
“It matters because there’s a younger generation that are very interested in home movies because it gives them an insight into the lives of their grandparents or even great-grandparents in some cases,” he says.
“The rural Ireland they grew up in is now a different country. The changes have been phenomenal. They get this insight into another way of life, often that existed within the same parish.”
For Bolex Boys Michael Mulcahy and John Lynch, still firm friends after so many years, they recognise the urgency of this need to digitise and preserve their work too. And while their films are currently available in the National Folklore Collection in UCD, having a full collection available in Listowel, surrounded by the places that appear in the films, is the dream.
“In UCD in Dublin, anyone who wants to look up a certain subject can come in out of the college or off the street and they can tell the person behind the desk what they are interested in seeing and they’ll get it out for them,” John says.
“But Ciarán asked me if I wanted them to be kept in Kerry Writers Museum, and I said, ‘that’s the place for them'. That’s where I want them to be, because that was the base I was working from: most of the films were made in North Kerry and the people should be able to see them there.”