Annette Kuhn embarks on an exercise in cultural memory

As the first in an occasional series of blogs showcasing assets in the Cinema Memory Archive relating to project planning, conduct and outreach, what follows is the text of a brief talk given as part of a panel discussion on ‘Children and Cinema’ at the Society for Cinema Studies Annual Meeting in Chicago in March 2000. [SCS Conference Talk 2000 Folder, CC-19000OE103]. It broaches some issues that were to become foundational for all subsequent explorations of cinema memory in the research projects Cinema Culture in 1930s Britain and Cinema Memory and the Digital Archive.

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When people talk about their memories, they tell stories, they narrate.  The idea of story is often associated with fiction, i.e. something not actual, not ‘true’, ‘made up’.  I don’t use ‘story’ in these senses.  It’s my contention rather that all stories, even conscious ‘lies’, carry truths of some sort, and that these are readable  both in the stories people tell about their own lives and in the ways they tell them. They are evidence, they contain clues, and they can be mined for cultural and historical insights.

My talk today draws on memory-stories of youthful cinemagoing; and I shall draw out some of the implications of these stories for an understanding of ‘cinema memory’ as a distinctive variant of cultural memory.

The stories are taken from material gathered for an ongoing research project, Cinema Culture in 1930s Britain, in the course of which depth interviews were conducted some years ago with over eighty mostly volunteer interviewees living in various parts of Britain who were asked about their recollections of ‘going to the pictures’ in the 1930s. Most of these men and women were children or adolescents during the thirties.

A certain pattern emerges in the sorts of things that they recollect–in the immediate themes  of their memory-stories, that is. These themes are in some degree shaped by the interview schedule. Although interviews were open and non-directive, they usually opened, as a means of getting informants into thinking about their past,  with a question about the first remembered visit to the cinema. This would lead naturally into recollections of related issues: cinema buildings, cinema programmes, getting in to the cinema, films.

While the interview material does not lend itself to quantitative analysis, it is very apparent that some of these issues are recollected more regularly, at greater length, or more vividly, than others.

There is a  pattern, too, in how informants organise the narration of  their memory-stories. Throughout the interviews memory talk observably breaks down into three main types:

Firstly, anecdotal memory: first-person narration of a one-off story in which the narrator is involved in the recollected events.

…The first film I ever remember was going to a cinema in Maryhill Road called the Blythswood. And I had pleaded with my parents to let me go, and I must have been about nine and I was told I could go and it was called The Four Sons. [laughs] And we went, I went to the cinema on my own, and I was allowed to go to the first showing at 2 o’clock. And I went with a friend to the first showing and in these days you just sat right on. There was no change of, no going out. You just went any, in the middle, or any time you walked in, if you paid your fare. So at the end of that my friend said– “I have to go, Helen.” And it just, as I say, went on again. I said “I think I’ll watch it again.” So I sat on and watched it again and I got out, got up to come out and was passing a friend with her parents and she said “Aw, come on, sit beside me. Don’t go out, Helen. Just sit with me.” [laughs] So I sat through it again! And as the end of it her parents were going and she said to her parents, “Could I sit through this again?’ and they said ‘Well, if Helen’ll stay.” [laughs] I sat through that film four times. [laughing] And it was a very sad film. I must have been, if I’d saved my tears, I could probably have swum out of there. And when I got out, my father was waiting, absolutely in a terrible state and didn’t know what had happened to me. They’d gone round all my friends and looking for me and the people at the cinema said, no they couldn’t interrupt the show, they’d just have to wait till I came out. And my dad was, he was so glad to see me, [laughs] he couldn’t make up his mind whether to murder me or welcome me. So, my mum welcomed me home but said “If you ever do that again, you’ll never get back to the cinema again!”  Helen Smeaton, Glasgow, 23 January 1995. HS-92-036AT001

Secondly, individual repetitive memory: regular events in which the narrator is involved (‘I often’, ‘my mother and I used to’, etc).

Erm, yes. Well we had maids in those days and erm, and they were very often more eh, not more important. They were, they were good girls. And they used to, on their days off, sometimes take me to the cinema. Beatrice Cooper, Harrow, 20 July 1995. BC-95-208AT001

Thirdly, collective or distanced repetitive memory: similar to individual repetitive memory, but incorporating a sense of distance: unspecified protagonists are identified as  ‘they’ or ‘we’.

You know, they were joyous occasions. We went and we came out and we thoroughly enjoyed it. Mind you, with the old silents, we came out terrified. As I said, the children’s matinee was on a Saturday afternoon and we used to go and  see these silent films with black and white with the piano playing. Denis Houlston, Manchester, 26 April 1995. DH-95-034AT001

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I want now to examine three case studies of memories of childhood cinemagoing. These represent intersections of specific themes and discourses that emerge insistently across informants’ accounts. They centre firstly on the location of cinemas that informants recollect going to as children, secondly on ways of getting in to the cinema, and thirdly on the films themselves.

These three groups of memory-stories follow, as it were, a journey from home towards and then into a cinema or cinemas. But it is noteworthy that while every informant’s account contains elements of at least one of the abovementioned groups, all three rarely if ever emerge with equal weight, or indeed at all, in any single account.

• Location: memories of particular cinemas and their place in local topographies, in relation to home, etc.  This references a more general observation about cinema memory–that in their memory-stories informants navigate mental maps of their childhood neighbourhoods, maps on which they are remarkably keen to pinpoint the precise locations of ‘their’ cinemas.  This is associated with a spatial and embodied quality to the narration, which inscribes a bodily memory of walking familiar streets between home and the cinema.  While as a rule this tends to be associated with repetitive memory discourse, in cases where informants are recalling their very earliest cinema visits it may be accompanied by an anecdotal memory.

The first time I ever mind [remember] being to a cinema was the old Annfield cinema in the Gallowgate. Now, I don’t know if you know that area. […] But there’s a hotel down there, it’s used as a working men’s club nowadays, you know. But it used to, it was the Bellgrove Hotel. Now, on that side, where the Bellgrove Hotel stood, was the old Annfield cinema. And that was the first picturehouse that I was ever in. That I can remember. My dad took me to it.  Thomas McGoran, Glasgow, 30 November 1994. TM-92-009AT001

• Getting in: many informants have something to say about price of admission to the cinema.

When mum got her wages on a Friday she would splash out and take us to the Astoria on Possil Road, it cost sixpence for adults and threepence for kids.  Beside the pictures there was a wee shop that sold homemade sweets.  Never since then have I tasted sweets like those.  I used to press my face against the window and drool, candy balls, humbugs, macaroon, pink and white tablet, yum!  Mary McCusker, Glasgow, ‘Going to the Pictures’. MM-92-008AR001

Mrs McCusker’s words, which are characterised by repetitive enunciation, touch on a topic that arises frequently: splashing out on a trip to the pictures when you have to watch the pennies.  It is part of a wider theme running through many informants’ stories–memories of resourcefully  ‘making do’ or ‘getting by’ which sometimes involve acts of improvisation.

We used to have a cinema that was called The Cinema. That all us kids used to queue up to get in there about two o’clock. And if you didn’t have enough money to pay, I think it was a penny or tuppence to get in in them days.. […] You could take a jam jar or a rabbit skin. Phyllis Bennett, Norwich, 27 October 1995. PB-95-222AT001

As in Mrs Bennett’s account most, perhaps all, versions of the ‘jam jar story’ are marked by a distanced version of repetitive enunciation: generally speaking there is relatively little concrete detail of where, what and with whom (‘all us kids’).  This observation sheds light on  how memory material might be evaluated and on the sorts of evidence (historical? cultural?) it constitutes.  Are ‘jam jar stories’ similar in their discursive structure to urban myths?

• Films: informants are far less likely to remember individual films or details from films than  to recall other aspects of their early cinemagoing. While memories of particular films are rare, memories that do come up are without exception anecdotal: they arise in stories in which the informant/narrator is at the centre of events and in which the events themselves always have to do with their own remembered response to the film.  For example,  a number of informants  report having nightmares after seeing horrific scenes in films (interestingly, during the 1930s frightening films were a prominent focus of public concerns about the effects of cinema on children).

And I can remember, eh, this particular film, Dr Fu Manchu . And that night I came home and had a nightmare about Dr Fu Manchu. The Chinese man, with the big long nail. And my mother vowed, that was the last picture I was ever to see. I was never to get back again. Both [parents] were up all night with me with this nightmare of Dr Fu Manchu. I could see him walking through the kitchen. Mary McCusker, Glasgow, 22 November 1994. MM-92-008AT001

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What do these findings about the themes and discourses of  childhood memories of cinemagoing suggest about cinema memory as a variant of cultural memory?  I have some tentative suggestions to offer.

• While this is probably not associated exclusively with cinema memory, it is perhaps worth noting the insistence, in informants’ accounts of their youthful cinemagoing, on  subverting adult restrictions or transcending the limitations imposed by poverty. What, however, are we to make of the oft-recollected example  of ‘getting by’ which is specific to cinemagoing–and which has entered the common currency of cinema memory–namely,  the ‘jam jar story’ and its variants?

• More specifically, the insistence on spatiality in cinema memory is interesting; not only in that for many informants memories of cinemagoing have more to do with recollected topographies of childhood neighbourhoods than with particular films, but more significantly in that these familiar spaces are often  (re)constructed and negotiated through informants’ memory-talk.

• Some accounts link discursive spatiality with embodied practices of memory. These are apparent not only in accounts which discursively re-enact informants’ journeys on foot through familiar streets to get to a cinema; but also with remembered images from films and responses associated with these usually isolated, disassociated, images.

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The CMA assets cited above can be accessed via links on the CMDA website or consulted in both physical and digital form in the Cinema Memory Archive at Lancaster University, by appointment with Special Collections and Archives. 

If you wish to cite and/or re-use any CMA materials, please consult  the CMDA website for information on copyright and using the materials from the collection and for a citation referencing guide.

 

Post-2000 explorations of cinema memory include:

• Annette Kuhn, An Everyday Magic: Cinema and Cultural Memory. London: Bloomsbury, 2002, pp.9-12; Chapter 2.
• Annette Kuhn, Daniel Biltereyst and Philippe Meers, ‘Memories of cinemagoing and film experience: an introduction’. Memory Studies, vol.10, no.1 (2017), pp.3-16.
• Annette Kuhn, Exploring Cinema Memory. Edinburgh: Argyll Publishing, 2023.

 

Annette Kuhn

The last blog, “Terrible waste of a brain”, looked at Cinema Culture in 1930s Britain (CCINTB) interviewees’ memories of their schooldays. Although interviewees were not expressly asked about their schooling, the issue sometimes came up when they talked about their early cinemagoing. It also arose on occasion when they were asked  how old they were when their full-time education came to an end—about their terminal education age, to use the jargon. Along with a few mentions of school trips to the cinema, there are memories of playground gossip with schoolfriends about films they had seen and of swapping film star photos with friends.

More conspicuous in references to schooling, however, is a thread of memory talk that hints at education having been thwarted or curtailed—mentions of missing out on schooling or being prevented by their circumstances (poverty, a father’s absence or joblessness, say) from taking up educational opportunities. In these instances there is usually an underlying class and/or gender dimension. Very often it is the requirement of a school uniform that is recalled as the principal bar to getting into a “good school”, even where a free place was on offer.

Emerging from some of these accounts, though, is a sense of making the best of what was available to them by way of basic schooling. Also noticeable is a theme, apparent in some female participants’ memories, concerning the channelling of their talents and aspirations into other areas of life. What one participant calls the “clothing aspect” is prominent in these stories.

The clothing aspect is, of course, already present in the school uniform topos. In “Terrible Waste of a Brain”, Glasgow interviewee Nancie Miller’s repeated allusions  to schooling and education are touched on. It seems that, although Mrs Miller left school at the earliest possible opportunity, she had not only received some post-elementary education (“I went up to my big school”), but had also, with her mother’s assistance, managed to surmount the challenge posed by the school uniform rule:

I had to get a trench coat.  I had to get a gym tunic, I had to get a white blouse, I had to get a school tie, I had to get a badge, sewn on to the tunic. And we couldn’t afford any of these things. And my mother, I think it would’ve been her own, navy blue set of skirt, opened it up all up, washed it, turned it and made me a tunic, a very nice tunic. So much so, that the teacher asked me where my mother had bought it. She was very clever with her hands. […]. Very clever. It was a lovely tunic and for ages I used it as a skirt. The blouse wasn’t just white, it was kind of creamy and I didn’t like to tell her. The tie should’ve been a silk tie, but the colours were right, but it was a kind of… you’ve maybe seen them in the men’s ties, kind of knitted, silk knitted. […]. Erm I had a velour hat, which we’d to wear, so you see they were so particular, really so particular.^[1]

Another kind of uniform-related challenge is remembered by an interviewee who had worked as an usherette and cashier in cinemas in Glasgow during the 1930s, when it was commonplace for public-facing staff to wear uniform. Sheila McWhinnie recalls that although a uniform was a requirement of the job, she had to meet most of its cost out of her wages:

At seventeen and sixpence was what you got for a wage, you’d to buy your own black dress, and what they supplied for a uniform was collars out of Woolworths, and say for six or seven usherettes, [the cinema manager] would send someone for seven collars let’s say, and you’d put them on your black dress and that was it! ^[2]

It is clear from Mrs McWhinnie’s account—she mentions several times in the course of her interview that she was obliged to foot the bill for most of her uniform—that, like the school uniform rule, this was experienced as an imposition.

This feeling surrounding school and workplace uniforms–as an obstacle or an unwarranted expense–stands in the starkest contrast to the ways in which the “clothing aspect” figures in memories of what was to be seen on the cinema screen.

Quoted in “Terrible waste of a brain” is Manchester interviewee  Ellen Casey’s memory of being impressed by the “marvellous dresses” worn by local celebrity Gracie Fields in Queen of Hearts, a film Mrs Casey remembers seeing on a school trip. When talking about her subsequent cinemagoing, she evokes something of the intensity of feeling that films inspired in her:

That’s when I felt on top of the world because I’d see them beautiful dresses and smart clothes! And I used to be, I really, I was absolutely obsessed with it. […] Even them days, the actresses you know. And you see eh Betty Grable and eh, you know, all that were going them days. And the beautiful, they had [shoulder] pads, they had their pads then you know, they had their padding on. They were tight, you know. And erm Bette Davis, and all these beautiful– Aw that was, to me, it was something to see you know. And eh a really erm tch, oh, how can I say? I was, I was really obsessed with it.^[3]

The obsession this participant evokes is, in a way, its own pleasure. She knew she could enjoy such loveliness at any time–albeit vicariously–simply by going to the pictures. This  feeling clearly goes beyond “beautiful dresses and smart clothes”, though. Such things, as Mrs Casey tells it, clearly stand in for all things “lovely”. She notes that she “would often wonder if, you know, will I be like that, will things get better you know. And you always had visions of being like [people in the films]. You know, seeing them. It was just lovely.” As she speaks, decades on, it is clear that this feeling remains very much alive for her.

I lie in bed now sometimes of a night thinking how thrilled I used to be. And how envious,  when I seen all these lovely things and all that. And I thought, I wonder if I ever, you know. I wonder if I ever will get better and sorted out.^[4]

These statements are expressions of a longing that is deeper and wider than films or cinema or clothes: a wish that all things “will get better”. The  emotional force of these memories  of gazing at the “beautiful dresses and smart clothes” in films carries a yearning, and perhaps  a hope, for life’s imperfections and troubles to be soothed away

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For other participants, admiration for the beautiful dresses and smart outfits in films could be parlayed into a practical kind of “making do”. Making do is an essentially creative activity, which Michel de Certeau defines as a form of counter-hegemonic production, an art of “using” by “poaching” from the “rationalised, expansionist, centralised, spectacular and clamorous production” with which people are faced.^[5]

Glasgow interviewee Mary McCusker recalls a specific act of film-inspired “making do”, citing her mother’s role in bringing a sartorial dream to life. Recollecting The Dolly Sisters, a 1945 Technicolor film starring June Haver and Betty Grable, she exclaims:

Oh! The clothes in it were oh, lovely. And being young, you know, you’re saying, “Oh!” So, I was growing out of this coat. And eh, my mother thought she’d be very practical. And they [Haver and Grable] had come out in this picture with beautiful pale-blue coats with fur. Grey fur muffs, grey fur hats and a big band of grey fur on the bottom of their coat. So here I had this wine-coloured coat and it had black fur on the collar, black fur on the cuffs. And my mother thought, practically, to get another month or two out of the coat, she would buy black fur and put it on the bottom. And I felt like, whoa! [claps and laughs] Whole cheese, right enough!  Felt good! ^[6]

Mickie Rivers of Needham Market in Suffolk is among the CCINTB interviewees who say they were unable to continue their education because of the cost of a school uniform. Talking about her cinemagoing as a young woman, she echoes Ellen Casey’s and Mary McCusker’s sentiments about “the clothing aspect” and shares their eye for details of dress and fashion. Leafing through a 1930s film annual, Mrs Rivers exclaims, “Oh but look at the gowns they wore. Wonderful full skirts. Aw!” ^[7]

She contrasts the plenty (“full skirts”) of the fashions she saw in films with what was available to her as one of five children. “We had so little”, she says. “And like I said before, I had to be taken away from grammar school because my mum couldn’t afford a replacement uniform.” Watching films, she adds, she would “drool and dream”.

. . . But  then she would turn daydream into action:

I wonder if I could do that to my old dress? I could do that. You’d see them with a dark dress and a different coloured sash. And you’d got about half a yard of taffeta. And spend all night making a sash. And, do a little bit of trimming somewhere else on the dress, to pick it up. You know. That was all inspirational, weren’t it?

Her mother helped, too:

My mum used to go to jumble sales and come home with a dress, outsize dress, and fit me out of it. Had to. Hadn’t got the money. I used to earn, when I first went to work, I earned seven and sixpence. I had to pay my mother seven shillings a week and buy my stockings out of the sixpence. The cheapest stockings you could buy were ninepence a pair. And they were lisle stockings with an artificial silk covering. And of course you got to want a pair of silk stockings. You went up to one and nine, one and elevenpence [for those].

[…] And then when I got a rise and I went up to ten shillings a week, I had to give my mother eight and buy all my clothes. The fact that my mother had seven shillings a week off me meant she’d go to a jumble sale as I say and buy something. I’d bring it home, unpick it, wash it, turn it, if it was turnable, and remake it. Had to, to have anything to wear.

She recalls that later on,

I got about a dozen sets of underwear, ready, for when I got married. But they’d all been made with bits that I’d cadged ’cause I’d worked in the factory of the… I worked in the office of the factory in Ipswich. And I was friends with Bob the storeman. And he used to give me oddments. […]. And I had to do a panel on a pair of French knickers. Or perhaps I’d go to a sale and there’d be a half a yard of what we called Sparva material. And that would make one half of a pair of pants. And you’d go and buy the other half yard at full price and you’d got, you know, things for next to nothing.^[8]

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Ellen Casey’s, Mary McCusker’s and Mickie Rivers’s memory talk embodies a train of thought prompted by, and leading back to, the idea (or rather the feeling-memory) of earnestly desiring something that is beyond your reach.^[9]

In Mrs Rivers’s account, especially, cinema comes across as rather more accommodating than the education system as far as “the clothing aspect” (and, in this topos, aspiration) was concerned. Her memory talk–the precise recollection of her wage rises, the careful recording of the pre-decimal cost of different sorts of stockings, the specificity in the naming of fabrics—all suggest that aspirations, longings, inspired by films could succumb to a certain amount of ‘making do’; that, drawing on her own skills and creativity, a young woman could create something stylish and desirable by, and for, herself using whatever materials came to hand–jumble sale castoffs, factory remnants, a scrap of taffeta.

The vividly remembered details are extraordinarily telling in terms of the emotional investment in, the craving to grasp, something more perfect, something over and above the mundane, something that transcends the ordinary, the everyday. They are revealing, too, of pleasure and pride in remembering the resourcefulness of channelling one’s skills and creativity into surmounting obstacles: here by fashioning, through ingeniously upcycling what was available, a stylish outfit out of not very much.

Women like Ellen Casey, Mary McCusker and Mickie Rivers would surely concur with Linda Grant’s dictum that “the only thing worse than being skint is looking as if you’re skint.”^[10] “I could do that”, they declare; claiming, perhaps, that this, unlike getting a decent education, was one thing that a smart girl^[11] could manage for herself.

 

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The interviews quoted from can be accessed via links on the CMDA website. All Cinema Memory Archive (CMA) items referred to may also be consulted in both physical and digital form in the CMA at Lancaster University, by appointment with Special Collections. 

If you wish to cite and/or re-use any of CMA materials, please consult  the CMDA website for information on copyright and using the materials from the collection and for a citation referencing guide.

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^[1] Nancie Miller, Glasgow, 17 February 1995. NM-92-014AT001. Cinema Memory Archive.

^[2] Sheila McWhinnie, Glasgow, 21 November 1994. SM-92-004AT001. Cinema Memory Archive.

^[3] Ellen Casey, Manchester, 31 May 1995. EC-95-182AT001. Cinema Memory Archive.

^[4] Ellen Casey, Manchester, 31 May 1995. EC-95-182AT001. Cinema Memory Archive.

^[5] Michel de Certeau (1984). The Practice of Everyday Life, trans Stephen Rendall (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press): 31; cited in Annette Kuhn (2002). An Everyday Magic: Cinema and Cultural Memory (London: I.B. Tauris): 123.

^[6] Mary McCusker, Glasgow, 22 November 1994. MM-92-008AT001. Cinema Memory Archive.

^[7] Mickie Rivers, Suffolk, 8 November 1995. MR-95-210AT002. Cinema Memory Archive.

^[8] Mickie Rivers, Suffolk, 8 November 1995. MR-95-210AT002. Cinema Memory Archive.

^[9] On feeling-memory, see Annette Kuhn (2023). Exploring Cinema Memory (Edinburgh: Argyll Publishing): 101-104.

^[10] Linda Grant (2009). The Thoughtful Dresser (London: Virago Press).

^[11] Annette Kuhn (2000). ‘Smart girls: growing up with cinema in the 1930s’. In Ib Bondebjerg (ed.), Moving Images, Culture and the Mind. Luton: University of Luton Press): 31-42.