Cinema Memory and the Digital Archive: 1930s Britain and Beyond

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

CINEMA MEMORY AND THE DIGITAL ARCHIVE is about expanding our knowledge and understanding of how audiences relate to and remember the experience of cinemagoing. How is 'going to the pictures' remembered? How may these remembered experiences be expressed? In speech? In writing? Through a range of creative practices? What can such expressions tell us about how our memories of films figure in our daily lives? Engaging in 21st-century developments in digital communication and research, this project will expand academic and public knowledge of these elements of the cinema experience.The project will produce a freely available website composed of a range of historical materials related to cinemagoing in Britain. What specific materials will be available on the website? The project's starting point is the materials gathered in the course of 'Cinema Culture in 1930s Britain' (CCINTB), a large-scale inquiry, conducted in the 1990s, into cinema audiences and filmgoing in the 1930s. Deposited in Special Collections at Lancaster University Library, the CCINTB collection includes:a) Over 250 hours of in-depth interviews with 1930s cinemagoers living in four areas of mainland Britainb) Some 200 questionnaires completed by 1930s cinemagoers from across the UKc) Over 200 letters, essays and written memoirs received from interviewees and questionnaire respondentsd) Over 150 items of cinemagoing memorabilia and artefacts from the 1930s (diaries, postcard collections, scrapbooks, cinema programmes, posters, magazines), mostly donated by informants.This valuable resource is currently hidden from public view. The production of a dedicated website and the digitisation of the entire collection will mean that all of the CCINTB materials will be made available in digital form to members of the general public as well as academic researchers.In the period since the CCINTB collection was assembled, research on historical film reception has expanded considerably, and is now an important subfield within film studies. It is also a topic that attracts considerable public interest. The time is ripe to bring this material on 1930s cinemagoing and cinema memory into conversation with more recent inquiries, by drawing on and developing digital tools now available to scholars in the humanities and social sciences.Alongside the physical management and digital updating, archiving and cataloguing of the collection, programmes of new research and public-facing activities will be conducted. These will include a new theatre production inspired by the CCINTB collection and a range of film screening events featuring readings and recordings of extracts from informants' interviews.The project's research phase will aim to introduce substantial new findings on the cinema experience and cinema memory, while also sharing these insights with the research community via international workshops, conferences, and publications. Public engagement events are scheduled throughout the duration of the project so that many of the project's findings can be shared with the general public. A programme of archive-based activities, including residencies for creative artists, will be launched early on in the project, with a view not only to publicising it but also with an eye to the possibility that visitors' work may feed, in perhaps unanticipated ways, into the project's research design and/or the construction of its web interface.