British Cinemagoing from the 1930s to the present
Friday 1st March 2024, 6-8:30pm
BFI Southbank ‘Blue Room’
An evening of reflections, presentations and discussions of the cinemagoing experience, with a focus on memories of ‘going to the pictures’ in Britain during the 1930s.
This is a FREE EVENT, but you need to register here on Eventbrite.
Programme
6:00pm Introduction followed by:
- Annette Kuhn on Cinema Culture in 1930s Britain
- Richard Rushton on The Cinema Memory Website, with a focus on interviews with cinemagoers from the London suburb of Harrow
- Andrew Quick on ‘Seeing in the Dark’ by imitating the dog theatre company
- Dalila Missero on Cinema Memory, Belonging and the Immigrant Experience in the 1930s
— Intermission —
7:30pm
- Cinematic Organisms: Memories and Memorialisation, a Videographic Essay by Catherine Grant
- Thomas McGoran, a Film by Marissa Keating
The Cinema Memory website
The ‘Seeing in the Dark’ viewing boxes
BFI Event Flyer
The Organisers
Photo by Jon Brooks
Annette Kuhn is an author, cultural historian and educator. She is Emeritus Professor in Film Studies at Queen Mary University of London, was Director of ‘Cinema Culture in 1930s Britain’ and is Co-Investigator of ‘Cinema Memory and the Digital Archive’. She writes on film history, on object-relations psychoanalysis and film theory, and on cultural memory in relation to photography and cinema. Publications include An Everyday Magic: Cinema and Cultural Memory (2002); Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination (2002); Locating Memory: Photographic Acts (2006, co-edited with Kirsten Emiko McAllister); and Exploring Cinema Memory (2023). She is co-author, with Guy Westwell, of the Oxford Dictionary of Film Studies, (2nd ed 2020).
Richard Rushton in Professor in Film Studies at Lancaster University, UK, and is Principal Investigator of the ‘Cinema Memory and the Digital Archive’ project, funded by the AHRC. He is author of several books, including Modern European Cinema and Love (Manchester University Press, 2023), Deleuze and Lola Montès (Bloomsbury, 2021), and The Politics of Hollywood Cinema (Palgrave, 2013).
Photo by Marissa Keating
Sarah Neely is a writer, producer and researcher, working primarily in the areas of artists’ moving image and film archives. She is a Professor in Film and Visual Culture at the University of Glasgow. Book publications include Between Categories: The Films of Margaret Tait – Portraits, Poetry, Sound and Place (Peter Lang, 2016), Margaret Tait: Personae (as editor) (LUX, 2020), Margaret Tait: Poems, Stories and Writings (as editor) (Carcanet, 2012), and Reel to Rattling Reel: Stories and Poems About Memories of Cinema-Going (as editor) (Cranachan, 2018). She is a co-investigator of the ‘Cinema Memory and the Digital Archive’ project.
Dalila Missero is Lecturer in Film Studies at Lancaster University, where she teaches Cinema History. Her research interests include feminist cinema history, audience studies, popular and transnational cinema. In 2022, she published her first monograph Women, Feminism and Italian Cinema. Archives from a Film Culture for Edinburgh University Press.