Eighty-five pieces of Ireland’s advertising legacy now available to view on the IFI Archive Player, as decades-worth of classic Guinness ads have been added to the IFI film archive. Ads from the 50s through to the 90s are on show now in the Guinness Adverts project and the vibes are immaculate across the board. The add are free to view in Ireland and across the world at IFI Archive Player, with a short documentary screening at the Guinness Storehouse, Dublin. We’ve gone through and picked out a few favourites that have left us gumming for a pint of plain.
Partly funded by Coimisiún na Meán, the IFI and Guinness have launched the Guinness Adverts Project, with eighty-five Guinness screen adverts from the 1950s through the 1990s now available to view, with a focus on the creative achievements of those making the ads, and the legacy of Guinness advertising in its original context.
This collaborative project, years in the making, has enabled the painstaking cataloguing, digitisation, restoration, and preservation of a magnificent 548-piece collection of 16mm and 35mm Guinness advertising reels from 1955 to 1995. Digitisation and restoration were undertaken by the world-renowned, London based R3Store Film Restoration Studio, with the close guidance and expertise of the IFI Irish Film Archive team. All 548 reels are now entrusted to the Irish Film Archive, the national repository where the stories of our nation, her people and place, told through moving images, are kept safe and secure for generations to come.
Recognised as an intrinsic part of Ireland’s cultural heritage, regarding the preservation of the nation’s broadcasting and advertising legacy, the Guinness Adverts Project has been part funded by the BAI (Coimisiún na Meán) Archiving Scheme. The body of work is now the largest, publicly accessible brand advertising collection in Ireland and the U.K.
We’ve gone through the impressive selection and picked out a few favourites that have left us gumming for a pint of plain.
Sea Lion
Picnic
Big bags of cans have always existed. This is our heritage.
History of the Cinema
Home Sweet Jail
Journey
The Wall. Brazil. That MacIntosh 1984 advert. Throughout the history of cinema many have tried to capture the drudgery of dystopia, the bleak anti-individualism of our capitalist hellscape lies, that stamp out our free will and send us on an assembly line of lies. But few have captured, as well as this does, the nightmare scenario of not having a lovely pint when you would like a lovely pint, and the heroism, the actualisation, the profoundity and the freedom, of then getting a lovely pint. Utterly 80s in its styling and soundtrack, in 1 minute this all-out effort most certainly does take us on a journey.
There’s plenty more to see, with talking toucans, early work by Ridleyt Scott, a young Bill Nighy and many, many glasses of Guinness.
Guinness and the Irish Film Institute are also calling creatives, filmmakers, content creators and budding advertisers the length and breadth of Ireland to enter the inaugural Guinness Archives Award. They are looking for talent to reinterpret and reimagine their 1970’s creative brief ‘An expression of Irishness’, through the lens of 2024, with a focus on Guinness 0.0.
One award will be granted to individual creatives or creative groups for projects submitted during the application window in 2024 that align best with the reinterpretation of that brief through any content medium including video, social media, out of home, display and or other innovative formats.
The application window for the Guinness Archives Award is now open, and closes on April 5th 2024 at 5pm. The Guinness Storehouse has also launched a short documentary delving into the digitized ads which will be unveiled as part of the cinema room experience on the third floor. For more information, see: www.guinness-storehouse.com/en/discover