Cinema memory: 1930s Britain and beyond – a Symposium

We are delighted to launch a call for interest for what will be a unique symposium, held (virtually) at Lancaster University on 22 and 23 January 2021. As part of the Cinema Memory and the Digital Archive research project, the symposium will offer an opportunity for a small number of scholars to engage with a sample collection of holdings from our archive. An exclusive pre-launch portal will be set up, containing a range of ethnographic participant data and other relevant artefacts, and we invite speakers to incorporate these materials into their papers. Of course, how this material is integrated is up to you – we anticipate that some may base their entire paper on the collection, whilst others may use the materials to complement or contrast their existing work and findings.

Speakers at the Cinema Memory: 1930s Britain and Beyond symposium will be amongst the first to have digital access to material that Annette Kuhn, a co-investigator on this project, collected and curated during her landmark Cinema Culture in 1930s Britain project, ahead of our roll-out launches over the coming year. A small example of such material can be found on our Twitter account – @cinema_memory – or on our current work-in-progress website – https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/cmda.

Once interest is registered, we will in due course provide access to the password-protected portal and ask interested parties to provide a brief abstract for their paper.

To register interest, please contact Jamie Terrill – j.terrill@lancaster.ac.uk

Richard, Annette, Sarah, and Jamie visited the University of Sussex on February 19th, 2020. Taking full advantage of their time, the team explored the Mass Observation archive at The Keep, with Jamie and Sarah taking the opportunity to read through a number 1930s and 40s letters written to Picturegoer Magazine. In the early afternoon, the team met members of The Keep’s archival staff to discuss digitisation and cataloguing processes, This proved to be very helpful, with the staff keen to stay in touch with us and happy to help with further queries.

Following a productive afternoon at The Keep, the team delivered a research seminar, which explored the aims and outputs of the CMDA project, to staff and students of the University’s School of Media, Film and Music. A number of interesting questions were asked by attendees, along with some useful suggestions that the team have taken on board as they move forward with the project.