In the 1990s hundreds of men and women from all over Britain told researchers about their past cinemagoing lives in interviews, questionnaires, letters, and essays. They regarded themselves not as film buffs, but as ordinary people who grew up between the wars as members of a generation for whom ‘going to the pictures’ was a readily available, affordable way of spending some of their leisure time. Cinemagoing was something virtually everybody in their age group did. They were generous in sharing their memories, sixty years on, with researchers investigating, for a project called Cinema Culture in 1930s Britain, how films and cinemagoing figured in the daily lives of people throughout the nation. These precious memories, gathered and carefully recorded three decades ago, can now be consulted by anyone interested in cinema history, in past cinema audiences, in twentieth-century youth cultures and leisure activities, or simply in how their grandparents passed the time with friends and family in younger days.

The memories are at once commonplace and special. Games of cowboys and Indians inspired by the children’s Saturday matinee, cunning ruses for getting in to the pictures without paying, the excruciating cliffhanger at the end of each weekly serial: such tales will be familiar to many. Looked at more closely, though, there is also something rather extraordinary about the timbre of the recollections, about just how this generation talks about its youthful cinemagoing. This is cinema memory, a unique expression of cultural memory.

Exploring Cinema Memory dives deep into the testimonies gathered for Cinema Culture in 1930s Britain and surfaces with some intriguing and culturally significant discoveries about the nature, and perhaps the future, of cinema memory.

With a Foreword by Daniel Biltereyst, Director of the Centre for Cinema and Media Studies, Ghent University.

Annette Kuhn is Emeritus Professor in Film Studies at Queen Mary University of London, a Fellow of the British Academy, and a Member of the European Academy. She was Director of Cinema Culture in 1930s Britain and has published widely in the areas of cultural theory, film history, and cultural memory.