This paper will explore the role of experience in the history of cinema. It will ask what is entailed with placing experience at the centre of cinema studies and film history and what is at stake in doing so. The paper will argue that we now stand on the other side of a century-long epoch in which the experience of cinema was organized around theatrical and extra-theatrical practices of public moviegoing —practices that included but that were not limited to the viewing of individual films.  By considering these practices, the paper will explore the conceptual, representational, and historiographic issues and challenges involved in the historical study of the experience of cinema through a discussion of Going to the Show, a digital library project that documents and represents the experience of cinema in North Carolina between 1896 and 1930. 

Britain’s Most Popular Film? British Responses to Gone With the Wind During the Second World War

How did a film about the American Civil War come to stand as Britain’s all-time box-office champion? Gone With the Wind was the most popular film of the war years and still stands as the film that has sold more tickets at the UK box-office than any other. This paper investigates the film’s success, seeking to shed light on the meanings and pleasures that it offered wartime audiences. It reviews an array of documents related to its reception, but it also considers the limitations of such evidence, and the challenges that historians confront when seeking to ‘recover the past’ through reception studies. 

The Methods of Economic History and Researching the Film Industry

The various methods, concepts and practices economic historians use, and the perspective they give, on the history of the film industry increase the focus on very long-run changes. Economic history also emphases comparative research on the film industry in different countries and on how film compares with other industries. Economic history also applies quantitative methods to study the film industry and uses new statistical sources and business archives. Drawing on material from the study Entertainment Industrialised: The Emergence of the International Film Industry, 1890–1940, this paper will explore how the methods of economic history can be applied to researching film industries.

Cinema in Context: Disclosing Cultural Heritage

Cinema Context is a website and tool for researching the history of film culture in the Netherlands. It provides basic information about the who, what, where and when of film exhibition and distribution, from its origins to the present. At the same time the site allows researchers to analyze the available data and to study patterns and networks, the DNA of film culture. This paper discusses the purpose and structure of this instrument, and demonstrates its analytical powers with a few examples. It will comment on the impact of digitization on film history and how this can contribute to the sharing of knowledge.

Scrap Books, Soap Dishes, and Screen Dreams: Ephemera, Everyday Life and Cinema History

This paper will explore the value of ephemera and artefacts produced around the moving image as a way of rethinking cinema history. Using examples from the collections at the Bill Douglas Centre, the paper will argue that ephemera can offer a corrective to critical hindsight in reconstructing these histories and be a vital research tool for tracking changes in the understanding of that history by the audience. Ephemera also can illustrate the interaction between producer and consumer and the medium’s role in everyday life. Using these objects to teach cinema history offers new methodologies and interpretations to cinema researchers.

Mohammed and the Virtual Mountain: The Film Researcher and Academic Digital Literacy

Rather like Mohammed journeying to the mountain, a decade ago British newsreel researchers physically travelled to commercial archives to search, order and consult primary and secondary sources. Today around 80% of this content, moving image and production documents, is literally at our fingertips. The mountain it seems has come to Mohammed but its virtual form raises fundamental issues about conducting research in the 21st century. By examining the process of creating the British Universities Newsreel Database (BUND), this paper seeks to develop a critical understanding of what we’re looking at, arguing that as we become increasingly adept at working with databases, academic digital literacy is essential.

The relationship between film and the city is increasingly viewed as the archetypical ground for examining the relationship between visual perception and the moving image. Liverpool provides an exemplary instance of a city in which film culture has played an on-going role in shaping perceptions of its urban landscape. This paper develops from a quantitative analysis of over 1700 film and video recordings made in and about the city between 1897 and 1984, and considers what opportunities these offer for quantitative and in-depth analysis of film and place during periods of rapid change and the redevelopment of the city, identifying the aspirations and interests of specific groups and individuals.

Understanding the Independent Film Producer: Michael Klinger and New Film History

This paper will use the independent British film producer Michael Klinger (active 1960-81) as a specific case study through which to reflect on the practices and procedures of what has been termed the ‘New Film History’ (NFH). It will investigate NFH’s extended sense of what constitutes relevant historical sources and how agency must be understood as multiple and mutable. In considering the implications for the ways in which film history is written, the paper will advance a reconfiguration of film history as part of a more inclusive and uneven cultural history that needs to embrace contingency and incoherence as central concepts.

Beyond the Archive: Where Next for Film History?

Over the course of the past thirty years Film History has pioneered approaches to understanding popular cinema in its social and historical context with valuable recourse to archival sources. To be sure, the archives have yielded considerable riches both in terms of establishing the determinants upon film production, distribution, exhibition and reception, and in considering the broader relationships between cinema and society, and the value of film as social evidence. Necessarily, history is always determined by its sources, and cinema’s written archives are neither comprehensive, nor infinite. Furthermore, whilst documentary evidence has underpinned the seminal accounts of British cinema produced by a number of delegates to this gathering, for some periods in particular the purchase afforded by the archives is comparatively weak. A three-year, AHRC-funded project 1970s British Cinema, Film and Video Art: Mainstream and Counter-Culture at the University of Portsmouth has revealed the inadequacies of written evidence in accounting for the unexpected diversity of film culture in this decade. It has become necessary to ask: ‘What lies beyond the archive?’ This speculative paper offers some ideas arising from our research at Portsmouth which may be useful in considering ways forward for Film History.

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