Emma Bowell and Eddie Noonan: Capturing the city of Cork on film for three decades
Emma Bowell and Eddie Noonan of Cork Community Television at Cork Community Media Hub at Hollyhill. Picture: Larry Cummins
Filmmakers Emma Bowell and Eddie Noonan have been telling the stories of Cork for almost three decades, forging connections with communities around the city through their work with Framework Films and Cork Community Television.
The couple are driven by a passion to document the social and cultural history of the city for future generations and have also built up a substantial archive of material which they have filmed or acquired from donations.
Their dream to build on this work and bring it all under one roof was realised last November with the opening of the Cork Community Media Hub, a social enterprise based at Hollyhill.
The hub offers training in film, video production and podcasting and enables community organisations to make content for broadcast on Cork Community TV or for use on social media platforms.
Tucked away in a small industrial estate in the Northside suburb, it is a suitably welcoming space stuffed with equipment, film and archive material, and a small studio for filming. When I visit, there are two film students in situ, benefiting from the expertise and experience of Bowell and Noonan.
The establishment of the social enterprise has allowed the couple to streamline their activities, and they are now winding down the operation of Frameworks Films and the Cork Community TV company — the channel itself will still exist within the hub.
Bowell and Noonan are delighted to see the hub already being used by community organisations. “We just had a group from Shine, the mental health organisation, and there were some wheelchair-users here yesterday doing a programme. People are beginning to use the place now, and that’s what it is all about, communities using it to get their voices out, to tell their stories,” says Noonan.
Originally from Farranree, Noonan is a self-taught filmmaker who left school at 15 to become a messenger boy with CIE, going on to work as a bus conductor.
“I always loved film. My mother used to take me to all the films in the Pavilion, the Palace, all of those old cinemas. Then CIE were introducing the one-man buses and it was either go driving or take redundancy. So I took the money and I bought a video camera. It was the '80s and to study film at that time, you had to leave to go to Dublin or elsewhere.
"But I stayed in Cork. I just kept at it, you name it, I videotaped it. I was on a scheme in Triskel Art Centre, doing video work and projectionist work and four lads approached me from the YMCA, they wanted to do a documentary about unemployment in Cork. So we ended up making that, which got me more interested in social issues.”
Noonan also taught filmmaking in UCC, which is where he met Bowell, who was doing a masters there. They both started working on an oral history project on the village of Blackpool, which was a year-long project.
“That was around 94/95, a lot of the older residents were moving on and we wanted to capture something of that life,” says Bowell. “I'm so glad we did do it, because after that, they built the road through the village.”
He and Bowell were unusual in combining their love for film and social justice issues. Noonan later went to college and was among the first intake to complete the degree in youth and community work in UCC.
“They asked me, ‘What do you want to be after doing the degree, a community worker, a youth worker? I said, ‘Community filmmaker'. And they said, ‘What's that?’.”
Bowell, who later completed a masters in film production, says this mixture of filmmaking plus community development has been at the heart of what they do, and led to them setting up Frameworks Films in the late 90s.
“More groups were starting to use video, or sometimes they might have had got a camera and done a bit of filming, but had nowhere to edit it. We could see there was a need for an organisation to work with communities and the different types of ways they wanted to communicate their message from short campaign video to full-length documentary. But at the core is access to the medium of filmmaking.”
Noonan in particular is passionate about bringing people from all communities and walks of life together through filmmaking. “It doesn't matter where they come from. It took me a while as someone who was working class to call myself a filmmaker because I thought people would say, ‘look at him, who does he think he is?”
The studio space at the hub has also given a new lease of life to Cork Community TV, which was established in 2000 with the aim of informing people about what was going on in the city, particularly in the community and voluntary sector.
“It could take a year to do one documentary, for an hour of content, whereas with the community TV programmes, we're able to produce a lot more content with groups. But it's still that ethos of enabling people to tell their stories through film or television,” says Bowell.
While there is no shortage of visual content on social media platforms, Bowell says community TV plays an important role in bringing people together a time when society is becoming increasingly atomised.
“Sometimes people say to us, ‘why do you need a community TV channel now, there's YouTube’. But for us, it's about people coming together to make stuff, rather than one person with a camera in their bedroom. People still crave that idea of working together, sparking ideas, projects evolving that hadn't been thought of before. All of that happens in that collective space.”
The hub will also facilitate the couple’s ongoing work in media literacy. “Part of what we’re trying to do is getting people to create their own media, not to be passive receivers of information,” says Bowell.
“We build it into all of the projects, just talking to people about media, about how it's made, the messages, subtext, all of that, it's really just getting people to think about what they’re consuming.”
Given the wide range of community work that the hub engages in, it is quite surprising to hear the enterprise operates without core funding. It relies on piecemeal grants from various organisations, while Bowell and Noonan work from project to project to pay rent, rates and bills.
“We don’t do commercial work but we document things that are happening in the city, like the Lifelong Learning Festival,” says Bowell. “So it’s a mixture of those projects and grant funding. You have to apply for funding constantly. It’s important work but I don't know how long we can keep it going. We got it to this point, but we think it could be bigger and better.”
Bowell and Noonan are also seeking funding to help them further their ongoing archiving project. They have donated all the films and unedited footage from Frameworks Films to the hub, and are working towards developing a digital archive accessible to all.
Over the years, Noonan has acquired footage covering historic events in Cork, including the visit of John F Kennedy and early editions of the Cork Film Festival, as well as documenting the work of artistic institutions including the late lamented theatre company Corcadorca, Cork City Ballet and Cork Opera House.
When Cork actor Cillian Murphy won an Oscar last year, there was much demand for footage captured by Noonan of Murphy and Eileen Walsh in rehearsals for the Corcadorca play Disco Pigs at the Granary Theatre in 1996. While such clips capture the attention, the stories of everyday life which they have catalogued are just as valuable to the couple.
“That is what will be important in years to come, if people are wondering what ordinary life was like in Cork in the late 20th, early 21st century, things like the footage we shot in Barrack Street and the people there talking about the small shops, the apple markets, the potato markets, the games they used to play on the streets,” says Bowell.
“We believe passionately that this has to be preserved. A lot of what's on that those tapes, Eddie and I are the only ones that can contextualise it. We just want to make sure that it is all properly catalogued and digitised for when we’re not here.”
If the global upheaval of recent years has taught us anything, it is that technology cannot always be trusted in terms of preservation.
“Storage is a problem for us, it's expensive to keep, we've got stuff on tapes and lots on hard drive as well,” says Bowell. “People ask why we don’t just put it all up in the cloud but our gut feeling is that you still need to have the physical copies and the originals.”
Bowell and Noonan’s passion shows no signs of dimming but it takes a lot of energy to keep all the plates spinning. What keeps them going?
“We want to leave some kind of legacy, to know that it was worth doing, that it will continue,” says Noonan.
“The belief in the whole idea of it, the potential for it and the people we meet keeps us going,” adds Bowell. “We feel there should be a community media hub in every city and county. This didn’t exist before.
"People would ask us, are you arts, are you community, are you media? If somebody could say, ‘I'm going to become a community media practitioner,’ that would be good.”
screened at the IndieCork film festival in 2021,is the story of the legendary Cork institution, founded in 1982, which became a beacon of social, political and cultural change and a spiritual home to those who worked to make Ireland a more progressive society.
explores the life and career of the late Cork sculptor Seamus Murphy and his relationship with the community in which he worked.
(Barrack St for the uninitiated) is a series delving into the history and heritage of the famous Cork street from its foundation in the 6th century to more recent times.
profiles another legendary Cork thoroughfare steeped in history, Shandon Street on the northside of the city, and the changes it has experienced through the years.
Making a short film we did about the Sunbeam Wolsey factory [one of the biggest employers on the northside of Cork City throughout much of the 20th century] because both my parents feature in it. They both worked there, that’s where they met. My four sisters worked there. I remember sitting up on the top of my terrace, waiting for all the Sunbeam girls to come out of work, they would give us elastic bands for our catapults.
The Mother Jones film [ about Mary Harris from Cork, Ireland who went on to become ‘the most dangerous woman in America’ for her work in the labour movement] was a great project. Like a lot of people, I hadn't known who she was until we were asked to document the first festival in her honour, and I found out more about this amazing woman and what she achieved.
