Acknowledgements 2000; Archaeology of tlie Moving Image, UIMP Valencia, 1996; Moving Images, Culture and the Mind, University of Copenhagen, 1997; Historical Reception Studies, University of Bergen, 1992. Enthusiastic comments and additional 'evidence' from audiences outside academe have also been offered at talks given at the Forum, Heversham, Cumbria; the Storey Institute, Lancaster; and Glasgow Film Theatre. In the course of the research, numerous libraries and archives have been consulted: these are listed in full in the Appendix. I am enormously grateful for the efficiency and helpfulness of their response to what must sometimes have seemed obscure requests. The research could not have been undertaken without funding support from: the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland, the Economic and Social Research Council (project number Rooo 23 5385), the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at the University of Glasgow, and Lancaster University's Faculty of Social Sciences. Picture acknowledgements: Cover - still from The Long Day Closes, directed by Terence Davies, reproduction courtesy of BFI/FilmFour and the Ronald Grant Archive. Frontispiece -photograph by Humphrey Spender, Bolton Museums, Art Gallery and Aquarium, Bolton Metropolitan Borough Council; p.86 Boris Karloff in The Mask of Fu Manchu, BFI Film Stills, Posters and Designs; p.i 14 Peggy Kent with friends, collection of Peggy Kent; p.i 19 Deanna Durbin in Three Smart Girls, BFI Film Stills, Posters and Designs; p.122 Sheila McWhinnic and colleagues, collection of Sheila McWhinnie; p.142 The Astoria, Finsbury Park, courtesy Cinema Theatre Association; p. 159 Lili Damita, collection of Denis Houlston; p.160 Madeleine Carroll, collection of Denis Houlston; p. 163 Marlene Dietrich in Blue Angel, courtesy the Ronald Grant Archive; p.199 Maytime publicity, courtesy Half Brick Images. Extracts from Crown-copyright records in the Public Record Office appear by permission of Her Majesty's Stationery Office. Last, but absolutely not least, I owe an enormous debt of thanks to all the 1930 cinemagoers who so generously shared their memories of 'the pictures' in interviews, questionnaires and letters; and to the staff who worked on and sustained the project between 1994 and 1996, without whose skill and dedication successful completion of the ethnographic research would have been impossible. Joan Simpson, the project's secretary, transcribed hundreds of hours of interviews; and Research Fellow Valentina Bold travelled many hundreds of miles to 1 1 Cinema Memory as Cultural Memory TIMS book traces a path through soc^_hjstory jmd_the history of cjncnia^thi'ough ideas about popular culture and its place in people's /everyday lives, through memories, life stages and life narratives. The journey begins wherejicrsonal and collective memory meet in stories about cinema and cineju.ngoj.ng_.autral-)CHit wTľat these meant, and still mean, in the lives of the first movie-made generation1 - those men and women who grew up in the 1930s, when 'going to the pictures' was Britain's favourite spare-time activity. The stories, memories and histories in the chapters which follow emerge from a wide-ranging ethn^Hstori-. cal inquiry into 1930s cincma^culture, conducted over a periodof some £en_years. f. In the 1930s, Britain boasted the highest annual per capita cinema j attendance in the world; and cinema's popularity and ubiquity increased ■.steadily throughout the decade, with admissions rising from 903 million in r934 (the first year for which reliable figures are available) to 1027 million in 1940 and a concurrent increase in the number of cinema scats per head of population. It has been estimated that some 40 per cent of the British population went to the pictures once a week with a further 25 per cent going twice weekly or more. II this is accurate, .something like two-thirds of the population were regular and frequent cinemagoers: ballroom dancing was the only pastime that came anywhere close to 2 Cinema Memory as Cultural Memory In _his authoritative study of cinema and British society in the 1930s, The Age of the Dream Palace.,~Y^i^T^^^^^^^"o^~^'c^i^s^f^' overview of contemporary data on patterns of cinema attendance, concluding that 'while a large proportion of the population at large went to the cinema occasionally, the enthusiasts were^oung,wí^ing^cj^ss^ja^an., ^ás°J£ofcen female thajn^njaleJZRichards also notes that as the decade Pí^EH^i £Ĺnen:}a_yÍ^ene4 lls„ aPRe?lc9A%Hý^i?^!a-?^s—This process of embourgeoisement went hand-ín-hand with The economy's recovery from the recession of the early 1930s, the development of middle-class suburbs on the fringes of British cities and a boom in the building of 'supercinemas' in these new suburbs and in existing town and city centres. Often at the leading edge of architecture and design, supercinemas offered - aside from respectability - a luxurious entertainment experience, bringing a taste of the modern and 'essentially democratic' England of J.B. Priestley's by-passes, suburban villas and cocktail bars to the less affluent parts of Britain.4 And yet cinema was not really a democratising force in these years. Social distinctions within the audience persisted everywhere, ,ma,n j resting^ themselves in different types of cinema, from the 'ffeapits' at tnerľottom of the scale to the supercinemas at the top. They are evident, too, in the rigoroudy^sjratified organisation oLauditorium space reflected in ticket prices, which even within one cinema might range from as little as 3d (just over ip) right up to 2/6d I (12'/^). Nonetheless, it is certainly true that for the British population j at large, 'the pictures' was as familiar and taken-for-granted a part of I daily life as television is today. By r93°> Hollywood hadJjC^ge^aWjshed its dominance over Britain's cinema^creens. Even though screenings of British pictures exceeded the legally imposed quota and locally-made films were booked for longer periods than foreign ones, throughout the 1930s som^thijagJikeLsev:en--in every^ejxfiJhnÄ^ho^mhi Britain were American.5 Given this state of affaifs;^^^]^^^.^^!^^" wasJ^Hrom'^yfí^jô^us^wi^^itish cinema. If thelřtfluenče oFHollywood on British filmgocrs' tastes in fílrníand stars was apparent, however, British tastes were highly distinctive.6 Films aside, a cinema culture is in any case shaped by the contexts and the manner in which films arc consumed, and by the people wJwjXMi>;u_me_& range of activities, circumstances and experiences peculiar to people's daily lives, and the cinema culture - or cultures - of 1930s Britain was -i_____J1....1. Cinema Memory as Cultural Memory We know abom^th^dcmognu^TJcs of British cinemagoing in the 1930s,K and we know broadly who the kccncsTconsiTmc^^rTnms wercTW^ also have some icíčTälSoíít British cincmagoers' (listinctiycj^rcŕcj^ccs^ íňTTÍrnTäiuiTtars, and which kii^rorfn'im'wcrc'rriost popular in Britain ' during trie 1930s. And yet in an important sense we hardly know these people at all. The picturegoing heyday of the 1930s generation lies within living memory, but the cinemagoers' own stories remain largely unrecorded. This state of affairs is in some measure attributable to a condescending attitude towards the 'ordinary' cinemagoer; for in the 1930s, certainly, the stereotypical portrait of the film fan was far from complimentary. She (for the fan is always assumed to be female) is a silly, empty-headed teenager, thoroughly duped by the cheap dreams purveyed by the picture palaces.7 It is hardly likely that filmgoers would have pictured themselves in such an unflattering light: this is clearly the tone of voice of the 'concerned' social commentator. What^then^idBritish film lovers of the 1930s, male and female, bring^to^thcjrj^ did thcTtaTce^way from it? Hpjä^d'gping to the pictures fit in withjjtner a^£e£t£ofjdiejrdaj^^ courtship ? In what ways was this generation formed by^cinema? How was cinema ^SiHInESly^^ tJŽEJJLlľiL generation? This book is not just about British cinema culture, nor is it only about people who went to the pictures in a past that may now seem distant. The questions that arise as soon as 'ordinary' media users are taken into account as makers of cultural history arc more fundamental, touching on ways of thinking about films, cinemas, and cinema cultures of all kinds, past and present. Pivotal here is the point at which people come into contact with cinema - the moment, that is, of the reception and consumption of films. How do films and their consumers interact? And w^iaÍiÍlaJiyi!l'i}^can wc ';now a.k?ut; this interaction if it has taken place in^the_pa,sj2;_ These questions ma^bj:..arApjr.aachcdi^^ methodoj-ogical angles. A hum^njties-bas^dJtud^pf cinema, for example, will take fiÍrnjs._aj!i_.tf^stnrtinK consumejj^eÍ^ionship.._As.a dtsc^HnCj film suidiesniodels itself largely • on literary studies, and to this extent is predominantly;text-centred: films as texts are its primary.o.bjccts.of inquiryrand textual analysis its method —.....ÍC....." . Cinema Memory as Cultural Memory , of spectatorship in the cinema are predominantly about a spectator addressed or constructed by the film text - the 'spectator-in-the text'.9 The film text remains central, then, and the question at issue is how a film 'speaks to' its spectators, how the meanings implicit in its textual operations may be brought to light. This has nothing at all to do with ijhow the people watching a film might respond to it. Some confusion arises here because in everyday usage the terms spectator, viewer and audience are more-or-less interchangeable. It is i therefore worth restating the distinction between the implied spectator y(of text-based criticism, the spectator-in-the-tcxt, and the 'social' ^audience, the flesh and blood human beings who go to cinemas to see ífilmsíCThe social audience^s the province ofjocial sdejxtifi^jnauir^p^ media audience research!ínH~šímifar types of investigation. However, while one~br two sociologists made forays into the study of cinema and its audiences during its heyday as a popular entertainment medium in the 1940s, there is little interest in this area of inquiry among today's media sociologists, for whom contemporary mass media like television are the main focus of attention.10 These diverse objects of inquiry - texts and audiences - produce distinctive conceptualisations, meTn^HologíeTanSTescarch pŕôl^urcs. To-the extent tKat filnTstuHiěš" privileges thVfilm text", for example, it will downplay not only the reception of films by social audiences but also the social-historical milieux^rjHTnHlJstTráTal^mstitutional settings in whichj^ilmfan^ Mias been called into question by crmcTwho find its preoccupation with subtexts and hidden meanings antithetical to the spirit of a popular entertainment medium, irrelevant to the experience of the 'average' fcinemagoer, or overweening in its assumption that a spcctatorial engagement is somehow built into a film's textual organ i sat i on .^-"However, if I film analysis is sometimes conducted as if films were not produced and consumed by people at particular times and places, social science-based studies of media and their audiences routinely sideline media texts, treating them as mere epiphenomena of their social, cultural, or industrial conditions of existence. This division of labour produces a conceptual and methodological dualism ojn^cxtjuj^ divorcing of film texts from their iriclustrial, cultural and historical contexts, and yic.e.versa,.ancf this weakens studies of cinema and other media by ensuring that accounts Cinema Memory as Cultural Memory One way of tackling the texx-context dualism is to treat texts and contexts alike as "discursive practices: thus film texts may be conceptualised as discourses caught.up. in.and informing contexts,...aadvice vers.a- This approach is applicable equally to contemporary and to historical studies of media reception.13 As a counterweight to text-centred approaches to film spectatorship, Janet Staiger, for example, has proposed that the historical study of film reception could productively adopt a dialectical and 'context-activated' approach: the reception studies I seek would be historical, would recognise the dialectics of evidence and theory, and would take up a critical distance on the relations between spectators and texts. It would not interpret texts but would attempt a historical explanation of the event of interpreting a text.'"1 For evidence, Staiger favours a range of historical sources of information / on responses to films, most notably contemporary reviews; and these j are then treated as discourses shaping the reception of films. This method ! offers insight into the discursjvejeatures of^aJ^.m'sJiÍstorÍcal_m ' which indeed is what Staiger understands by the context of a film's reception. Rather than the film text proposing the manner of its reception, the film's discursive context performs this work. However, while rightly emphasising the contextual aspects of film consumption, this approach offers no access to the historical social audience. \ If neither text-centred nor context-activated approaches to the study of film reception admit the present-day or the historical social audience, and if media audience research admits little else, how might the cinema-goer's experience be investigated in its interaction with films and reception contexts? Media audience research takes a variety of forms, ranging from large-scale investigations based.around structj^u^djnter--... views or pre-coded questionnaires through focus groyps to_$rjaaH-scale. studies involving deptJi^tejryJ£wj^^ mtomediauseconducted within acu]tjinU_studiesre^muTnvariably adopt research methods at the^ujaHudy^Mfňí^^ spectrum, Bor^^^^^^^IHIlEuj^ü^vMhr^ology, research of this type caTIsTtseff /ťmnpgraphic^* Ä"dictionary definition of ethnography is 'the scientific description of nations or races of men, their customs, habits and differences'. The -~.....~..J u—~ . -'--1 ,-.,.,..->.-,(■,,-,n' rim ni-pciimrninn Kpmffthnr prhnopTaohic 6 Cinema Memory as Cultural Memory description can be conducted 'scientifically' only if the researcher has been fully immersed in the culture under observation. In its 'description of races and nations' sense, ethnographic inquiry today retains little of its former raison-ä'etre in a post-imperial context, and postmodernity forces issues around cultural otherness, intcrsubjectivity and the fragmentation of identities to the top of the ethnographer's agenda. A postmodern, post-imperial ethnography must necessarily engage with the dialogic and discursive aspects of ethnographic inquiry, and also accept I that it produces new meanings alongside its 'thick description* and interpretation of the 'flow of social discourse'.15 Furthermore, while holding to these tenets, it must: refr.ame^ corrtcjidsjjuyjiewj^^^ and wnrino- ahi^m-/'"!*••■-" *---------- ' / ,........_ ..___.-a.-..^.r_____^-li7.ijjiwiwu}ja liiee.s.anq nations', then, I but^jlnorj;; and mcreas^ Cultural studies of contemporary media use have taken on board some of these protocols, notably a commitment to qualitative research and to giving serious attention to informants' accounts of their own worlds. To the extent that it is more catholic in its research methods than cultural anthropology and less self-conscious about the dialogic and discursive , nature of ethnographic inquiry, though, cultural studies practices an 1 attenuated version of ethnography.17 As to its objects, with very rare j exceptions, cultural studies ethnography concerns itself with contem-(porary life and contemporary, usually domestic, media. Among the \ exceptions, Jackie Stacey's study of the written memories of female cinemagoejS-öFtr^ fans of the novel and the film Gone With Th ^Wiwih^ebroug^ cultural consumpUíärjJ^This work may be described as hist£ncjü_et^m^grapjiy; V or, to appropriate another term from cultural anthropology, '^thjio^ ^Vhistoryl^------^ rEmnoÍHStoryÄmerged as^-dLstijaGtJ[ield^>f4nquiry4n thc.x9.4ps, .its o"5e^rtefegmémštoncal study of non-literate cultures. This area had been neglected not only by cultural anthropology, which tends not to _J^noEyrrijjs^£ÄÍdxbÍsj^ h rcco rd s |in these cultures, byjiistorians as w^U. Jstjinojustory deployed ethno- jgraphic description and interpretation alongsicj^_gj^ynT^t^ncal inquiry land the historian's traditional source materials, in this instance documents Cinema Memory as Cultural Memory which are of greatest relevance to an historical study of film reception and consumption are, firstly, the use of oral accounts as a research resource and, secondly, the deployment of sources and research protocols of several different kinds. An ethnohistorical s^dy^f^fílmj^ecerjtion^ will aim to keep^seye^aLb.alls.iiXpJsy^r.tiUp^hig Staiger, it will ideally adopt a dialectical, discursive, and context-aware approach to its source materials" arid"dauTT^lowfng Clifford and Geertz, it will respect informants as collaborators, ana1 yet make no presumptions as to the transparency of their accounts. In the quest to transcend the text-context dualism, it will aim for inclusivity, bringing together issues around film texts and spectatorial engagements with questions relating to the social audience and the contexts of reception. /The stories, histories and memories in this book are the product of a ' over some ten years anuinvolving three parallel sets of inquiries. These inquiries draw on the historian's traditional source materials, content-jfporary records of various kmcls^on etm^g£apmc^s^Te inquiries lünÖ7ig~ j surviving cinemagoers or the 1930s; and on readings or selected 1930s "1 turns. Although historical, ethnographic ana hlm-basea mvestigations are normally conducted in separate disciplinary and methodological universes, the objective here is to follow the precepts of methodological triangulation, whereby more than one method is brought to bear on a single research problem. The three sets of inquiries have been conducted in parallel with the aim of producing an ethnohistorical account which encompasses all the various objects: the research design is set out in the Appendix. Taken on its own, ejich4nrj;ujry_prgd^ story; and while each story may-be-informative i nits, own right, and even off er_ new knowledge, it will fill in only a fraction of j:he picture. For a nuanced and integrated understanding of how cinema works historically, culturally and experientially, it is essential to work at the point where sllkí^íi^äk^lkD^SíäEi? icjmdtocfAiíuLí^ xTheethnographic elemem\>f this investigation consists of a .ground^ brealtíng^^ioTe^oÝTHeluxh^mose aim is to enter imaginatively into the "woTÍdlífT]?3^^ closely involved, the cinemagoers themselves; and as such it raises con- ^cegtuaJ and methodological issues germane to tKe entire etRnoEIštoríčai ___:—* \v/i,:i„*u„ „:.,_______>.. „*-„j_»:„*_-- :;':.rr:.:i::'L';":.'-rr.::;;;i'r:.: _. 8 Cinema Memory as Cultural Memory of particular films and stars, say), feiL-JUXillHlOiP^ihi^Jj^ c'lc experience of cinemagolng^must be the core and the raison-d'etrcTTn' consequence, cinemagoers are invorvedlíuKěTěséarcK proceŠTaTinfonYi^" aňtš, and tHeiFaccounts cönsulÜTe^ of investigation! Ethnographic inquiry depends upon direct contact between researchers and informants, on building a relationship between them, and on researchers treating informants and their stories with respect. If the ideal type of this relationship is participant observation, less sustained qifálitäťivej^cscj}_rch encoimters-in-dcp_^ " involve jygrying de_grees_of collaboration andshared productions of knowledge. As far as the principle of collaboration in a non-participant observation context is concerned, ^a]Jisjpj;y^texyJ£S^ offer a good _-Cás.eJň..point.19 But even at the other end of the qualitative spectrum, where researchers and informants do not necessarily meet but make contact in other ways, a dialogic process is still at work, and the research encounter will still combine elements of collaboration and maieusis: for in all degrees of ethnographic inquiry, besides actively listening the researcher acts as midwife to the informant's stones. In ethnographic investigations in which informants are asked to recollect events from the past, their stories may acquire additional value as~c^TtriÍnitŤôiisí to"historical record. As cultural historian Alison Hgln observes, an^n^rstän^ing^ôí^any period might have new things to yield if it acknowledged other perspectives and positions i n the cu lture'.20 Addingjthe.accounts of marginalised people to the historical record is an entirely worthwhile objective, and indeed is one of the aims of the present inquiry. But it is not its sole nor even its primary purpose; and in any case historical records groundedJjT^ciTiembmn^liay^ A^^a+t-oí^c^roa'derethnohistoricaí investigation, ethnographic inquiry was undertaken in full recognition of the fact that, in dealing ___.-„L _________ -f ŕ_ i f • c Cinema Memory as Cultural Memory t memory texts, or recorded acts of remembering, and that particular questions arise concerning the evidential status of accounts which rely on remeinbcring^-aiidlhus ajspon forgetting, selective memory and hindsight. However, memory is regarded here as neither providing access I°iil^?^LeJP!íí^?ÍÍ£?&J:beJ)ast 'asÍt was'i íh?P^?í?X5!dl^^sjaJter^to_be mediated, indeed pr_odu_cedij,n the activity^of remembering. When informants tell stories about their youthful filmgoing, they are producing In other words, they arc doing^ memory work: staging their memories, performing ihcjn. Informants' accounts arc consequently treated not only as data but__ [JŽ&'čťis^ofrfS^ is as muenwith. ^ow^sopictajkabout thcix_youthful picturegojjig^^wjdi^ernory , discourse^ as with what they say about it^memo r v content-. For an urríderstanding of cultural memory, it is important to attend to the_ways in wJňcfynemoryJsDro^ced in the actiykyjoft^Hm^ _2as_tx£ej^ojialor^aredito the construction and narration of these memory stories; and in ^ej^esejit.rnstance^p^he^^y^n which cineim_ ^figures in and sJxap„cs.dicjjCjuejLiVQj:Les^ material is thus conducted on two levels: firstly^it is treatedjasHalla^hich generate insights into the place of cincmagoing and cinernacj —..„.- *-„. ~^^" . , i "vir ■ r*----- i- - * — re m peoples 'evefyUajQřves ín tluM^ox; andj>i^n^|^ Jig^tit sheds on the nature and workings of cinema memory. ThSmquirVj in other wordsfis as much about memory as it is about cinema. It is about the interweaving ofThctwo as cinema memory. This is not a predictive or a deductive processľ~Xs~C!Ífford Geertz observes, ethnography's thick description and interpretation are continuous with one another, the ethnographer's 'double task' being to uncover the conceptual structures that inform our subjects' acts, the 'said' of social discourse, and to construct a system of analysis in whose terms what is generic to those structures, what belongs to them because they arc what they are, will stand out against the other determinants of human behaviour.21 One of the central aims of the present inquiry is to observe the cjá^racteristic tropes of merno?jjs)f cinema memory, as theypresent thümscrvcstTTlTffürT^ these rich and diverse testimonies yield a limited, but recurrent and pervasive, '" '" ' ■ - - '''<.....-'t -i,-ii ..«11 -.....,;,.;„„ in,^m!1i 10 Cinema Memory as Cultural Memory impersonal and past/present. They differ from each other most markedly in the degree or the manner in which the informant implicates herself or himself in the story and/or its narration. <^rripérsonaí discourse,, for example, is characteristically delivered in I the thTř^pin^oiváistatTCŤng the informant from both the content of the account and its narration. This is the register of a witness momentarily 1 standing aside from 'what happened' ('what stupid teenagers we were!'); \ or, where deployed throughout a testimony, it marks an informant's i self-presentation as an expert witness or social commentator rather than as an involved partic^ajitJ^HolIywood was a dream factory'). At the opposite extreri^, anecdotal discpurse^'depjoys first-person narration QfjU5_p5CJii.c_c^cnt or occasion, with the informant constructing herself or himself as a protagonist - more oft^n thann^ _in thěstory ('I rem^m^r^ietime...'). In rgrjétítíve memory^ iš coTarse>. the most frequently occjjj-ringjype, the teTTm^also implicates tKe informant in events, but both the eventsj:hemselyes and the narrator's ~ involvement in them are represented as habitual ('I always went with my mother5]; ähH offé7raŠ"coTlě^ve''(*weliseďto hang arquj^^aütsiHe^; 'you wanted to impress the girls'). ^PrTepast/p resent register) is about the way in which time is organised in memory discourse, ana may embrace a range of relationships between""" nai^^itm^stor^^n^ji^jr^ £ t h jsjropc_ is asjmple comparison betweenj^ast and present, between things as they wejre long ago and as they are today: this often takes the form or apparently detached observation, and is always firmly rooted in the present, tHFmoment of narration ('the řilm stars used to be so elegant tKsn^tKcy^aré all so scruffy now'). This register also incorporates accounts showing greater profundity of engagement on the informant's part with the activity of remembering and with the detail of what is J remembered. Often observed in orally transmitted life stories, this :i discursive register marks accounts in which informants, usually unaware f.! of doing so, shift or 'shuttle' back and forth between past and present : standpoints.22 Informants' testimonies acquire their idiosyncratic qualities from the degree to which eacH type of memory discoursejs de^l^yejd^in^tHe ma n'ňěr "in" whiíli^h^ifTsnbe^eW^ľ^c^ r s i ve registers „arp-.negati.aLcíl. I Although observations on these points should be regarded as suggestive i rather than conclusive, gender, social class and regional differences in Cinema Memory as Cultural Memory example, marks a number of the middle-class male informants' accounts. Testimonies characterised by anecdote, often assumed to be the mark of iPgood' storyteller, come across as particularly vivid. Anecdote is relatively rare and does not appear to be the preserve of any one social group, but one commentator has noted that this variant of memory discourse may have a specific function in working-class autobiography, acting as 'a way of mediating between rawer, unformulated experience and more general or formulated truths; it does so by turning such truths into narrative and character'.23 H memory stories are not, in the usual sense of the word, fictions, they can certainly be treated asjT.a.rrn.tiiv.c.s. Considered thus, memory stories share a number of formal attributes, prominent among wrnčlíTs a "distinc£ tive organisation oftime. Tíme is rarely continuous or sequential in memory-stories, which are often narrated as a montage of vignettes, anecdotes, fragments, 'snapshots', flashes. Memory texts often display a metaphorical - as opposed to an analogical - quality, and as such have more in common with poetry than with the classical narratiyewith its linearity, causality and closure. To borrow ihe terminology of Formalist literary theory, themem ory text^s_tress es plot oyer story, and its formalAtructure and organisation arc typically as salient as its content, if not more so. Often, too, memory texts will deliver abrupt and vertiginous shifts of sjĚííiíigilBd/or^nar^^^ ......._.... The formal attributes of memory texts, too, often be tr aya c ollec ti ve imagination as well as embodying truths or a more personal salience: ■^^Í^Ťe^grEr^pIr^s^Čě oPTormalľs^éq materials" like proverbs, songs, " formuUicJajnguage, stereotypes,' suggests the oral historian Alessandro Portelli, 'can be a measure of the degree of presence of "collective view-$pwtŽ^-M Thus memory_iex_ts.may create, rewOr^rrěpHTaňHlřěcolř" tcxtualise the stories people tell each other about the kinds of lives they .have led; and these memory-stories can assume" a"timeless, even a mythic,. quality which may be enhanced with every retelling. Such everyday —myjdlii;njiking^^^ levels ofbothp^rjioj^^^ ancjjlkejMnj^ memory, of shared identities. The philosoper EHwarc^Cäsey^uses the word 'commemoration' to describe communal actsof memory: with its sense ofj^ublicspace of j^mory, this form of remembering clearly has a rimaljcjuality,26 In this project's ethnographic inquiry, interpretation of informants' 12 Cinema Memory as Cultural Memory starting-point, and interpretations arise from the material itself rather than from any hypotheses or a priori assumptions. This approach has the benefit of giving priority to what people say about their cincmagoing experiences and memories; and, sinceHstoricaland film textual materials aj£jike^jsej:r-CAEej^^ a point of tri angulation between the three sets of inquiries, as well as a common methodological grounding for the ethnohistorical investigation as a whole. The chapters which follow trace a trajectory from the earliest memories and cinema's place in them, through to what for the majority of the 1930s generation is a significant endpoint, the close of a chapter: 1939, and the rapid coming of age brought on by the outbreak of war. The landscapes of memory are populated by friends and family, long gone; and from this lost everyday world many brief excursions into the out-of-thc-ordinary world of the pictures arc ventured in memory. Cutting across narratives of formation we witness moments of intensity - images, fragments, vignettes - recollected as if out of time: daydreams of romance, keen longings for life to be somehow better; bodily memories of movement and activity - running, dancing; even out-of-body sensations. The story starts out from the places of memory, the places of childhood: the paths that lead back into a past that is remembered as a landscape across which cinemas arc dotted like beacons in the night, and where all journeys begin and end at home. Notes 1. This phrase is from the title of Henry James Forman's digest of the findings of the 1930s Payne Fund Studies of the cinema audience in the USA, Our Movie-Made Children (New York: Macmillan, 1933)- 2. H.E. Browning and A.A. Sorrcll, 'Cinemas and cinema-going in Great Britain', Journal of'the Royal Statistical Society, vol. 117, no. 2(1954), pp. 133-168; this revises the figures in Simon Rowson, 'A statistical survey of the cinema industry in Great Britain in 1934') Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, vol. 99, no. 1 (1936), pp. 67-129. Sec also Rowson, The Social and Political Influences of Films, (London: British (Cinematograph Society, 1939). 3. Richards, The Age of the Dream Palace: Cinema and Society in Britain, 1930-39 (London: Routlcdgc and Kegan Paul, 1984), p. 15. Sec also Andrew Davies, Leisure, Gender and Poverty: Working-class Culture in Salford and Manchester, 1900-1939 (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1992); Stephen G. Jones, Workers at Play: A Social find Economic History of Leisure, 191S-1939 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986); Cinema Memory as Cultural Memory 13 1930s', Journal of Popular British Cinema, no. 2 (1999), pp. 39-53. For contemporary data, sec, for example, E. Wight Bakkc, The Unemployed Man: A Social Study (London: Nisbctand Co Lid, 1933); A.P. Jqilicoii, Girls Growing Up (London: Fabcrand Fabcr, 1942); London School of Economics and Political Scicncet The New Survey of London Life and Labour, Volix: Life and Leisure (London: P.S. King and Son Ltd, 1935); John MacKic, The Edinburgh Cinema Enquiry: Being an Investigation Conducted into the Influence of the Film on Schoolchildren and Adolescents in the City (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Cinema Enquiry Committee, 1933); T.M. Middleton, 'An Enquiry into the Use of Leisure Amongst the Working Classes of Liverpool* (MA, University of Liverpool, 1931). 4. J.B. Priestley, English Journey (London: William Hcincmann Ltd, 1934), p. 401. For a social history of the period, sec C.L. Mowat, Britain Between the Wars, 1918-1940 (London: Methuen, 1955). 5. Kristin Thompson has calculated that in 1930 US films took a 75 per cent share of the UK market and that the proportion remained similar throughout the decade: Thompson, Exporting Entertainment: America in the World Film Market, 1907-34 (London: BFI Publishing, 1985) p. 219. At 69.5 per cent in 1930, 72.6 per cent in 1931 and 70 per cent in 1932, Margaret Dickinson and Sarah Street's figures arc close to Thompson's: sec Dickinson and Street, Cinema and State: The Film Industry and Government, í^jjpT^lToTičImTrB^rn"^^ see Tony Aldgatc, 'Comedy, class and containment: the British domestic cinema of the 1930s', in British Cinema History, (eds) James Curran and Vincent Porter (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1983), pp. 257-271; Stephen Craig Shafer, 'Enter the Dream House: the British Film Industry and the Working Classes in Depression England, 1929-1939' (PhD, University of Illinois, 1982). 6. For details, see Appendix; and Annette Kuhn, 'Cinema culture and femininity in the 1930s', in Nationalising Femininity, (eds) Christine Gledhill and Gillian Swanson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), pp. 180-2. See also John Sedgwick, Popular Filmgoing in 1930s Britain (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2000). Although a distinctively national set of tastes is observable, there are regional variations within this overall profile: see 'Census tells what film stars Britain prefers', Daily Express, 14 November 1933, p. 8; 'Conflicting tastes of British film-goers', World Film News, February 1937, pp. 6-7. 7. See Kuhn, 'Cinema culture and femininity in the 1930s', p. 177-8, in which it is argued that the stereotype undergoes a change towards the end of the 1930s. 8. Jackie Stacey, 'Textual obsessions: method, memory and researching female spectatorship', Screen, vol. 34, no. 3 (1993), pp. 260-274. 9. These debates originated within feminist film studies, and are rehearsed in the special issue on 'The Spectatrix' of Camera Obscura, nos. 20-21 (1989). 10. For an informative discussion of cinema audience studies, see Jostein Gripsrud, / 'Film audiences', in The Oxford Guide to Film Studies, (cd.) John Hill and Pamela ChurchJ'N Gibson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). 11. Kuhn, 'Women's genres', Screen, vol. 25, no. 1 (1984), pp. 18-28. 12. For an interesting debate on this question, see Janet Staiger and Martin Barker, 'Traces of interpretations: Janet Staiger and Martin Barker in conversation', in Framework, no. 42 (2000), http://www.frameworkonlinc.com/42jsmb.htm (17 August 2001). 13. Annette Kuhn, Cinema, Censorship and Sexuality, 1909-1925 (London: Rotttledge, 1988), pp. 9-10; Jostein Gripsrud, 'Moving images, moving identities: texts and contexts in the reception history of film and television' (Los Angeles: Society for Cinema Studies 14 Cinema Memory as Cultural Memory 14. Janet Staiger, Interpreting Films; Studies in the Historical Reception of American Cinema {Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 81 (emphasis in original). See also Staiger, 'The handmaiden of villainy: methods and problems in studying the historical reception of film', Wide Angle, vol. 8, no. 1 (1986), pp. 19-28; Robert C. Allen, 'From exhibition to reception: reflections on the audience in film history', m Screen Histories: A Screen Reader, (eds) Annette Kuhn and Jackie Stacey (Oxford: Oxford University Press,. 1998), pp. 13-21; Staiger, 'The perversity of spectators: expanding the history of classical I lolly wood cinema', in Moving Images, Culture and the M'mú% (ed.) lb Bondcbjerg (Luton: University of Luton Press, 2000J, pp. iy-30; Staiger, 'Writing the history of American film reception', in Hollywood Spectatorship: Changing Perceptions of Cinema Audiences, (eds) Melvyn Stokes and Richard Maltby (London: British Film Institute, 2001). 15. Clifford Gccrtz, The interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), pp. 6, 20. 16. James Clifford, The Predkamant of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 9. See also Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (eds) James Clifford and George E. Marcus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 198tí). 17. See, for example, David Morley, Family Television: Cultural Power and Domestic Leisure (London: Comedia, 1986); James Lull, Inside Family Viewing: Ethnographic Research on Television's Audiences (London: Comedia, 1990); John Tulloch, Watching Television Audiences: Cultural Theories and Methods (London: Edward Arnold, 2000); Jostein Gripsrud, 'Film audiences'. 18. Jackie Stacey, Star Gazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female Spectatorship (London: Routledge, 1994); Helen Taylor, Scarlett's Women: Gone With The Wind and its Female Fans (London: Virago Press, 1989). See also Richard de Cordova, 'Ethnography and exhibition: the child audience, the Hays Office and Saturday matinees', Camera Ohscura, no. 23 (1990), pp. 91-106. 19. On the oral history interview, see Karl Figlio, 'Oral history and the Unconscious', History Workshop, no. 26 (1988), pp. 120-132; Luisa Passerini, 'Memory', History Workshop, no. 15 (1983), pp. 195—196; Alessandro Portclli, 'The peculiarites of oral history', History Workshop, no. 12 (1981), pp. 96-107; Paul Thompson, 'Believe it or not: rethinking the historical interpretation of memory", in Memory and History: Essays on Recalling and Interpreting Experience, (eds) Jaclyn ■ Jeffrey and Glenace Edwall (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1994), pp. 1 —13. See also Michael Agar, 'Stories, background knowledge and themes: problems in the analysis of life history narrative', American Ethnologist, vol. 7, no. 2 (1980), pp. 223-239; Mark Freeman, Rewriting the Self: History, Memory, Narrative (London: Routledge, 1993). 20. Alison Light, Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism Between the Wars (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 6. 21. Gccrtz, The interpretation of Cultures, p. 27. 22. Alessandro Portelli, '"The time of my life": functions of time in oral history', in The Death of Lmgi Trastulli and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1991), pp. 59-76. 23. Simon Dentith, 'Contemporary working-class autobiography: politics of form, politics of content', in Modern Selves: Essays on Modern British and American Autobiography, (ed.) Philip Dodd (London: Frank Cass, 1986), pp. 60-80. The quotation is from p. 71. Cinema Memory as Cultural Memory 15 memory', in Memory and Methodology, (cd.) Susannah Radstone (Oxford: Berg, 2000), . ^ pp. 179-9- -------^= -=s= -^—«=====rrrzrzi^ZIZ^ 25. Portelli, 'The peculiarites of oral history', p. 99. ^s1— 26. Edward S. Casey, Remembering: A Phcnomenological Study (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University, 1987), p. 216.