UCC’s Aula Maxima will be transformed into a magical “kingdom of shadows” with glorious silent films and thrilling live music. ‘A Jazz Age Evening’ invites you to step back one hundred years, to enjoy a programme of films made in 1926, including a raucous slapstick comedy written by Stan Laurel (before he joined Hardy!), and a gripping drama of love, betrayal and double standards starring the “Madonna of the Screen”, Alice Joyce and the “IT Girl of the 1920s”, Clara Bow. 

This very special evening will feature live music by one of the world’s leading silent film accompanists, Stephen Horne, making a return visit to UCC. Stephen thrilled a capacity audience at the Aula Maxima back in November 2023 when he played piano, accordion and flute as accompaniment to a screening of The Signal Tower (1924).

This time around, Stephen will be playing some jazzy tunes to accompany the topsy-turvy world of What is the World Coming to? and setting the mood for the emotional highs and lows of Dancing Mothers (1926), a  Jazz Age featuring  flappers, scoundrels and speakeasies.

Our evening will be emceed by Dr Gwenda Young of the Department of Film and Screen Media, who has published widely on silent film and is the author of a critically-acclaimed book on Clarence Brown,  a noted Hollywood director of the 1920s-1940s. Robert Byrne, President of the San Francisco Film Preserve, who leads the international field in film restoration and has facilitated the lending of film prints for the evening, will introduce the programme of films.

Robert Byrne

Robert Byrne is the founder and president of the San Francisco Film Preserve, a non-profit organization with the mission restore, preserve, and provide access to cinematic works of artistic and cultural significance.

As a film preservationist and restorer specializing in early cinema and films of the silent era, he has worked with film archives and collections worldwide and has led restorations and resurrections of more than forty feature films and numerous short subjects. He has lectured at the Library of Congress Washington D.C, University College Cork, Queen’s University Belfast, The Reel Thing Symposium, and numerous AMIA and FIAF technical symposiums. He is co-author of FIAF Image Restoration, Manipulation, Treatment, and Ethics and publishes regularly on the topics of motion picture restoration and preservation. His work appears in the volume Films that Sell: Moving Pictures and Advertising, and he is co-author of Discovering Lost Films of Georges Méliès in fin-de-siècle Flip Books (1896–1901) (John Libbey, 2020), and Tales from the Vaults: Film Technology over the Years and across Continents (FIAF/Technès, 2023).

Rob holds a MA in Presentation and Preservation of the Moving Image from University of Amsterdam. He has served on the boards of the Global Film Initiative, Friends of the Oakland Fox Theatre, and the Castro Theatre Conservancy. For more than twenty years he served as president of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, and currently serves as president of the San Francisco Film Preserve.

 Stephen Horne

One of the leading silent film performers, Stephen Horne is a house musician at London’s BFI Southbank. Although principally a pianist, he often incorporates other instruments into his performances, sometimes simultaneously. He regularly plays internationally and in recent years his accompaniments have met with acclaim at film festivals across Europe, North America and Asia. 

In 2011 and 2012, he was commissioned to compose ensemble scores for the London Film Festival Archive Galas of The First Born and The Manxman. In 2012 his accompaniment for Rotaie won the main prize at the Bonn Sommerkino Festival and he was subsequently invited to repeat the performance at that year's Beethovenfest. For eleven consecutive years, from 2014 to 2025, he has won in one or more categories in Silent London's end-of-year poll. 

 He has been commissioned to record music for several online presentations of silent films, including for the San Francisco Film Preserve. In 2021 he released Silent Sirens, an album of solo piano pieces based on his silent film compositions, and in 2022, completed orchestral scores for Stella Dallas and The Manxman. For twelve consecutive years, from 2014 to 2026, he has won in one or more categories in Silent London's end-of-year poll

https://silentlondon.co.uk/2026/02/04/the-silent-london-poll-of-2025-the-winners/ 

(best online silent film). Stephen has just completed an ensemble score for Hail The Woman, commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York.  

And from the 1920s…

Herbert Brenon

Born in Dun Laoghaire (then Kingstown) Co. Dublin in 1880, Herbert Brenon carved out a highly successful career in the American film industry of the 1910s and 1920s. He was regarded as one of early Hollywood’s most accomplished directors, entrusted with the helming of major film productions such as the first version of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, a wildly successful version of J. M Barrie’s Peter Pan, featuring actress Betty Compson, and a controversial duo of films featuring the Australian swimmer, Annette Kellerman–the sight of Kellerman swimming nude in one of these films, A Daughter of the Gods, sparked outrage in Brenon’s home town!

Brenon’s assurance as a director was often remarked upon by chroniclers of the 1920s: he was variously labelled an “egotist”, a “genius”, a “martinet”  and a “dreamer”. For Modern Screen he was simply the “fiery Irishman”.  Despite Brenon’s high profile and success in the early years of Hollywood, he later struggled to defer to producers and with the coming of sound films, he decamped to Europe where he enjoyed a successful career in the 1930s.

Alice Joyce

Dubbed the “Madonna of the Screen”, Alice Joyce was an important early film star in America in the 1910s and 1920s. Although her performance in Dancing Mothers is less obviously charismatic than co-star Clara Bow’s, her regal presence and understated acting style, nonetheless brings a modern touch to her playing of her character, the much-wronged Ethel.   

Clara Bow

Before Taylor Swift paid tribute to her in song, Clara Bow blazed a trail in early Hollywood becoming the face of America’s Jazz Age. She was the IT Girl that lit up the screen with sparky, witty and charismatic performances, prompted F. Scott Fitzgerald to observe that here was a  woman “to stir every pulse in the nation”,  and served as the inspiration for the cartoon Betty Boop. For Vanity Fair, Bow was “the genus American girl refined, washed, manicured, pedicured,  permanent-waved and exalted herewith” . Discovered when she won an amateur acting contest, Bow was whisked off to Hollywood at the age of 17 and cast in scores of films. She became a firm favourite of cinemagoers across the generations, but particularly to the youth then “runnin’ wild” and savouring new freedoms in America’s Jazz Age. Although Bow had only been in films for four years when she made Our Dancing Mothers, this was her 33^rd film!

Tickets are now available on Eventbrite

This Gala Event is made possible by support from: The Department of Film and Screen Media UCC; The Department of Music, UCC; The Future Humanities Institute, UCC. Film prints have been facilitated by San Francisco Film Preserve.