9. The Wind that Shakes the Barley (Ken Loach, 2006). From the earliest days of the cinema, sport was one of the most pop- ular subjects of representation. Indeed, the first successful attempts to capture motion in photography, in the work of Eadweard Muybridge in the early 1870s, were focused on sport, from a horse galloping to ‘how pitchers throw the baseball, how batters hit it, and how athletes move their bodies in record-breaking contests’. 2 As film developed as an enterprise, ‘the first flickering, commercial motion picture’ was the depiction of a prize fight between ‘Battling Barnet’ and ‘Young Griffo’, a four-minute film shot by Woodville Latham and his two sons and shown to an audience in 1895. 3 This was pre- ceded the year before by Thomas Edison’s filming of a boxing exhi- bition match between Mike Leonard and Jack Cushing, fought in Edison’s Black Maria, the first recorded motion picture use of ‘actors’. 4 Unsurprisingly, when film arrived in Ireland, Irish sport, including Gaelic games, would soon feature. The earliest record we have of the 111 Gaelic Games and ‘the Movies’ 1 SEÁN CROSSON 8 Cronin08.qxd 27/02/2009 14:48 Page 111