Four artists working across a range of media have been appointed Cinema Memory and the Digital Archive artists in residence with a remit to produce work inspired by materials gathered during the 1990s for Cinema Culture in 1930s Britain, which were premiered in April 2022 at the CMDA Conference ‘From Cinema Culture to Cinema Memory’.

Catherine Grant
Catherine Grant is Honorary Research Fellow at Birkbeck, University of London, and Senior Research Fellow at the University of Reading, UK. She carries out her film and moving image studies research mostly in the form of remix-based video essays. Her short film for the Cinema Memory and the Digital Archive, CINEMATIC ORGANISMS: Memories and Memorialisation, is the first part of a three-part videographic study of the figure of the cinematic organist. It uses excerpts evoking that figure from oral history interviews conducted in the mid 1990s as part of the Cinema Culture in 1930s Britain project and aims at extending the findings of the original research through its own creative and interdisciplinary memory work, historiographic, and videographic methods. Catherine also kindly donated some items of memorabilia to the project relating to memories of cinema organs and organists.

Marissa Keating
Marissa Keating is a Glasgow-based filmmaker, and lens-based editor specialising in creative documentary and museum installation films. She has a specialism in and a passion for film, photography, and audio archives. Her short film for Cinema Memory and the Digital Archive is about Glaswegian artist and projectionist Thomas McGoran, who took part in the original Cinema Culture in 1930s Britain project in the 1990s, and is inspired by audio recordings of his CCINTB interviews. The film focuses on Thomas making detailed artworks of former cinemas in Glasgow and his reflections on his working life in cinema as a boy of fourteen in the 1930s.

Louise Welsh
Louise Welsh, Professor of Creative Writing at University of Glasgow, is the award-winning author of nine novels, most recently The Second Cut (Canongate Books); and has a ten-year practice in opera with composer Stuart MacRae. In the 1980s she was an usherette at Glasgow’s Salon Cinema. The text La Scala Sauchiehall Street is inspired by Cinema Memory and the Digital Archive, notably by the interviews given in the 1990s by Sheila McWhinnie, who worked as an usherette in various Glasgow cinemas during the 1930s. La Scala Sauchiehall Street weaves together these actual memories with a Hollywood noir dreamscape, flitting through time and through the lens.