Cinema Memory and the Archive

Brings together reflections on cinemagoing from Australia, Belgium, Italy, Japan, Turkey, the United Kingdom and elsewhere.

In the 1990s, hundreds of men and women from all over Britain recorded their memories of cinemagoing during the 1930s—a decade when ‘going to the pictures’ was everybody’s favourite spare time activity. From these carefully gathered and systematically recorded testimonies, ‘cinema memory’ emerges as a distinctive expression of cultural memory, a discovery that continues to inspire new studies of the remembered cinema experience. This collection presents current research on cinema memory across a range of historical and national contexts, including Australia, Britain, Italy, Japan and Turkey. It features reflections on how best to record and preserve cinemagoing memories and make them accessible, with a particular focus on issues around digital archiving and research websites.