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FESTIVAL OF SLOVENIAN FILM 2024

Review: The Volta Cinema

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- Martin Turk’s docu-hybrid film chronicles the cinematographic and entrepreneurial endeavours of Irish writer James Joyce and his compatriots, which started with the time he spent in Trieste

Review: The Volta Cinema

Autumn 1909: then-unknown Irish writer and teacher James Joyce meets upholsterers and married couple Antonio and Caterina Machnich, who very quickly saw the potential of the burgeoning medium of cinema. Trieste, at the time the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s most important port city and a prosperous cultural centre, played host to this unlikely crossing of paths, which blossomed into something more: Dublin’s Cinema Volta. Don’t Forget to Breathe [+see also:
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director Martin Turk brings the backstory of this Irish cinema to life through his curious and playful docu-hybrid film, The Volta Cinema, tracing the legacy of James Joyce and his compatriots. The Volta Cinema had its world premiere at the Trieste Film Festival and went on to screen at the Festival of Slovenian Film in Portorož.

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With a script by Turk based on an essay by Drago Jančar, The Volta Cinema presents the lives of Joyce and his business partners in Trieste through a series of reenactments filmed as faux-vintage reels and talking-head interviews with experts, as well as with actors playing the transnational compatriots. Turk begins with actors Danijel Malalan and Nikla Panizon, who play the Machnich couple, before turning to Daniel Grimston as Joyce, and Roisin Browne, who plays Joyce’s partner Nora Barnacle, arriving from Ireland to “audition” for the project, in a meta turn of the narrative.

Along the way, we collect the Machnich’s friends and colleagues Lorenzo Novak (Franko Korošec), Giovanni Rebez (Adriano Giraldi), Giuseppe Caris (Andrea Germani) and Giuseppe Tami (Francesco Godina) as they embark on a new entrepreneurial endeavour: the motion picture cinema. Turk’s story skips between reenactments and an observational documentary style, such as filming Malalan’s intervention at Bloomsday in Dublin, a commemorative holiday dedicated to the life of Joyce. While joyful all the way through, the reenactments don’t bring anything special to the film, although they are an inventive way to fill gaps in the story where archival footage either was not accessible to Turk or does not exist — the question is never answered.

Most of what we learn from The Volta Cinema is that the Dublin cinema was a failed business endeavour and was quickly sold by the Trieste crew. It was later closed in 1948 and demolished in 1960, and a department store now stands in its stead. Turk gives us little empirical content to work off of, although perhaps this story is better told as a half-myth, where the tragic end of a passion project (the cinema was sold in 1921) and a beautiful few years spent in Trieste (where he lived until 1915) coincided with the time when Joyce wrote Dubliners (1914) and Ulysses (1922), leading to the writer’s eventual acclaim.

Turk’s primary accomplishment is bringing a joyous sensibility to Joyce’s time spent in Trieste, even if this energy is wholly constructed for the purposes of the film. A cheerful, bouncy xylophone soundtrack by composer August Braatz gives the work a sprightly quality all the way through. The film’s most delightful image is that of Grimston dancing feverishly as Joyce, whom he interprets after reading a passage written by the now-famed writer’s friends about Joyce’s high-spirited dancing.

The Volta Cinema is a Slovenian-Italian production by Fabula (Slovenia), co-produced by RTV Slovenija and Incipit Film (Slovenia) with co-funding by the Slovenian Film Centre, the Friuli-Venezia-Giulia Film Commission and the Friuli Venezia Giulia Regional Audiovisual Fund.

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