Call for Papers: ‘From Cinema Culture to Cinema Memory’

Call for Papers: ‘From Cinema Culture to Cinema Memory’
6 – 9 April, 2022
Lancaster University, UK 

Keynote Speakers:
Professor Annette Kuhn (Queen Mary University of London)
Professor Daniela Treveri Gennari (Oxford Brookes University)

‘From Cinema Culture to Cinema Memory’ is a three-day conference that invites speakers to discuss a range of themes relating to cinema culture and cinema memory from across the world. The conference will mark the climax of a 3-year AHRC-funded project, ‘Cinema Memory and the Digital Archive: 1930s Britain and Beyond’ (CMDA). The project gathers together a range of material relating to cinema memory in a comprehensive digital archive, a vast amount of which has been made available to view freely online for the first time. Information on this project can be found here: www.lancs.ac.uk/cmda. The relationship between cinema culture and cinema memory is explored in ‘From Cinema Culture to Cinema Memory: a Conceptual and Methodological trajectory’ (Kuhn, upcoming)

Key themes to explored at the conference are:

  • What is cinema memory?
  • In what ways can memory studies contribute to film studies?
  • What methodologies are there for researching cinema memory?
  • What is the relationship between audience research and cinema memory?
  • What aspects of cinema culture are related to cinema memory?
  • What is the place of the film text within cinema memory studies?
  • To what extent can creative outputs benefit the study of cinema memory?
  • What is the relationship between cinema history and cinema memory?
  • What options are there for storing material relating to cinema memory?
  • How do archives assist in projects related to cinema memory?
  • Gender, race, class, sexuality and cinema memory
  • Space, place, and cinema memory

The conference seeks above all to reflect the spirit of CMDA’s remit to revisit and re-assess archival and primary source materials collected as part of the pioneering ESRC funded project, ‘Cinema Culture in 1930s Britain’ (1994-97). That project and its methods, approaches and outputs were formative influences on the creation of what we now consider to be the New Cinema History, with CMDA now drawing influence from the outputs, project and methods that have been carried out under the banner in the intervening twenty-five or so years. As such, ‘From Cinema Culture to Cinema Memory’ welcomes submissions that share in this sense of revisionism and development for the study of cinema culture, cinema memory and a desire to test the boundaries of our methods and approaches.

We invite proposals for twenty-minute papers and anticipate the event being in person, but will be planning for the inclusion of virtual attendance should it be necessary. Whilst not obligatory, we would welcome papers that in some manner reflect upon the materials and findings hosted within our bespoke website/digital archive, which is continually being updated with new items from the archive. You can find out more about the research design of our interview holdings here:  https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/fass/projects/cmda/index.php/history/research-design/. A more detailed discussion of the methods and approaches from ‘Cinema Culture in 1930s Britain’ can be found in the appendixes of An Everyday Magic (Kuhn, 2002: 240-54).

We will make available bursaries (to contribute to costs of UK travel, conference fee and accommodation) for up to four post-graduate applicants. Please note in your application if you wish to be considered for a bursary.

Please submit abstracts of no more than 500 words along with a brief (150-word maximum) biography to CMDA@Lancaster.ac.uk by 30th November 2021.

If possible, please also indicate if you would plan to attend the conference in person or via online remote delivery. Your answer at this stage is not definitive and is only to aid our planning.

Keynote speaker biographies:

Annette Kuhn is Professor and Research Fellow in Film Studies at Queen Mary University of London and a Fellow of the British Academy. Publications include Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination; An Everyday Magic: Cinema and Cultural Memory; Little Madnesses: Winnicott, Transitional Phenomena and Cultural Experience; and, with Guy Westwell, Oxford Dictionary of Film Studies. She was Director of the ESRC project ‘Cinema Culture in 1930s Britain’ and is currently Co-Investigator of ‘Cinema Memory and the Digital Archive (AHRC).

Daniela Treveri Gennari is Professor of Cinema Studies at Oxford Brookes University with a research interest in audiences, memories, film exhibition and programming. Daniela is currently leading the AHRC-funded project European Cinema Audiences: Entangled Histories and Shared Memories. Amongst her recent publications, the jointly authored monograph Italian Cinema Audiences. Histories and Memories of Cinema-going in Post-war Italy (Bloomsbury: London/New York, 2020). Daniela is also a member of the Steering Committee for the AHRC funded project Cinema Memory and the Digital Archive: 1930s Britain and Beyond.

Cited Works:

Kuhn, A. (2002) An Everyday Magic: Cinema and Cultural Memory. London and New York: I. B. Tauris

Kuhn, A. (upcoming). ‘From Cinema Culture to Cinema Memory: a Conceptual and Methodological trajectory’. In: Egan, K., Smith, M., and Terrill, J. Researching Past Screen Audiences, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Click here to access this call for papers as a Word document

Annette Kuhn discusses CCINTB’s 1995 questionnaire survey

Last Autumn I posted an explanation of how the interviews conducted as part of Cinema Culture in 1930s Britain were planned and managed (‘Annette Kuhn talks about a key aspect of CCINTB’s research design’, 23 October 2020). The other significant element in the project’s memory work with 1930s cinemagoers was a questionnaire survey. The survey was not part of the original plan, but came about as a result of the overwhelming response received to calls for potential interviewees. Hundreds of letters, enquiries, and offers of information poured in from all over Britain, and it became apparent that the project had generated much more interest than could be accommodated through interviews alone. Our funder, the Economic and Social Research Council, agreed to the plan to invite those correspondents who were not selected for interview to take part in a postal questionnaire survey.

The questionnaire was kept short and simple, and designed–through the choice, framing and ordering of questions–to stimulate recall of events and experiences of more than sixty years earlier. Questionnaires were sent out in two batches: 129 in May 1995 and 97 in December 1995. Of these 226 questionnaires, a total of 186 were returned, representing an encouraging response rate of over 82 per cent. Questionnaires were processed using SPSS, a software package widely used in the social sciences for quantitative data analysis.

Left: May 1995 (Deanna Durbin pictured) Right: December 1995 (Edward G. Robinson pictured)

Three-quarters of the respondents found out about the project through announcements in a local newspaper or a specialist publication for the elderly (Table 1, below). Although no gender balance was planned or intended, respondents divided themselves more or less equally as to gender: of the 186, 91 (49 per cent) were male and 95 (51 per cent) female. Some six in ten were born between 1915 and 1924, the median year of birth being 1922 (Table 2). Nearly one-third of all respondents had lived in the southeast of England during the thirties (Table 3), and the majority lived in larger towns and cities as opposed to small towns and rural areas.

Just over half of the respondents finished their full-time education at the age of fourteen or below: that is, at the minimum school-leaving age for their generation, for whom education beyond elementary school was a minority experience. The women, however, were rather more likely than the men to have received a secondary education. At the end of their full-time education, the largest single group of men and women entered jobs classified as skilled: these included secretarial and clerical occupations (accounting for more than 27 per cent of all respondents) as well as certain types of administrative and craft jobs. A substantial additional group found work in sales occupations, and another group in agriculture and other primary occupations. In general, as might be expected of a self-selected sample, the people taking part in this survey appear to have had slightly more formal education, and to have worked in jobs requiring greater skill and/or more training, than would be expected in their age group as a whole.

The completed questionnaires are in the process of being scanned, and a number are currently viewable on the CMDA website via the home pages of selected CCINTB participants [example – Myra Schneiderman].

For a copy of the questionnaire and a report of the findings of the survey, see Annette Kuhn, ‘Cinemagoing in Britain in the 1930s: report of a questionnaire survey’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, vol. 19, no. 4 (1999), pp. 531-543.

Tables:

Table 1 – Mode of Contact

n %
Personal contact 13 (7.1)
Local radio 4 (2.2)
Newspaper (e g Manchester Evening News) 75 (41.2)
Specialist press (e g Mature Tymes) 62 (34.1)
Local history/film society 4 (2.2)
Unknown 24 (13.2)

 

Table 2 – Year of Birth

  Male

n (%)

 Female

n (%)

 All

n (%)
1903-1914 6 (7.0) 10 (10.5) 16  (8.6)
1915-1924 51 (56.0) 59 (62.1) 110 (59.1)
1925-1934 34 (37.0) 26 (27.4) 60 (32.3)
Median y.o.b 1923 1922 1922
Range 1906-32 1903-34 1903-34

 

Table 3 – Region of Domicile in the 1930s

n (%)
Southwest England 14 (17.5)
Southeast England 61 (32.8)
East Anglia 34 (18.3)
Midlands 12 (6.5)
Yorkshire/Humberside 9 (4.8)
Northwest England 22 (11.8)
North England 5 (2.7)
Scotland 11 (5.9)
Northern Ireland 1 (0.5)
Wales 15 (8.1)
Unknown 2 (1.1)