Cinema Memory and the Digital Archive

In December 1992, Norman MacDonald attended a screening and discussion on 1930s popular cinema in the 1930s at Glasgow Film Theatre, and filled in a short questionnaire which he later delivered to Annette Kuhn along with a list of films that he saw during the 1930s. He was born in Glasgow's West End in 1915; an only child, his father was a local government officer and his mother a dressmaker who ran her own business. He studied Law at the University of Glasgow and pursued a lifetime career as a solicitor, interrupted only by war service with the Army in India and Burma. He was interviewed at his home in Glasgow on 17 November and 7 December 1994.

In his first interview, Mr MacDonald talks about the first picture house he remembers attending and describes this and various other cinemas in Glasgow that he went to as a boy. He recounts an early memory of screaming with laughter at a Charlie Chaplin film and being threatened with ejection from the cinema, and notes the generally rowdy behaviour of child audiences. His fondest recollections are of seeing "foreign"--especially Russian--films, while insisting that he also enjoyed "big, American films". The conversation ranges over the representation of Scotland in films, the value for money offered by a typical cinema programme, and the opportunity to sit through more than one screening of a film that continuous programming offered. He lists his other youthful leisure pursuits and mentions the "real atmosphere" pervading well-appointed cinemas. He laments the relatively high cost of going to the pictures today, and finally recollects his visits to cinemas in India and Burma during WW2, which offered an escape from the heat.

Mr MacDonald's second interview opens with recollections of his parents' occasional visits to the cinema and the theatre. He then produces his journal, 'My Kind of Thirties', covering the years 1935 and 1936, and including details of his cinema visits in those years. He talks about his parents' families with their tradition of independent women, and about his own internationalism--the friendships he made through membership of the University's International Club, his interest in Indian cinema, and the documentary films he saw during the 1930s. He muses on the films he saw as a child, with their simple moral codes and stereotypical characters: this leads to some reflections on racism in films. He remembers seeing Jessie Matthews perform live at a ballroom in Glasgow, dressing up to go to Friday night dances at the University, seeing Deanna Durbin in a film when he was in India, and going to a cinema in Moscow during a visit to the USSR in the 1970s. The interview concludes with Mr MacDonald offering to loan his 1930s journal to the project.

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