Institutional cinema did not arrive fully formed to the city of Cork, Ireland, but was constituted there in the 1910s through the actions of picture-house proprietors, city councillors, clergy and the many ordinary people who make up the audience. Although this transformation in the city’s popular culture formed part of the internationally occurring “second birth” of cinema after 1910, cinema became an institution in Cork by integrating into the local culture defined by Cork’s unique institutional constellation. An account of the processes involved in the institutionalisation of cinema in Cork illuminates the growth of audiences and venues, how other entertainments were altered or displaced, and both local and regional conditions that encouraged, regulated and offered resistance to the new medium.