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-19000<\/em>OE103<\/em>]. It broaches some\u00a0issues that were to become foundational for all\u00a0subsequent explorations of cinema memory in the research projects Cinema Culture in 1930s Britain and Cinema Memory and the Digital Archive.<\/p>\n *<\/p>\n When people talk about their memories, they tell stories, they narrate.\u00a0 The idea of story is often associated with fiction, i.e. something not actual, not ‘true’, ‘made up’.\u00a0 I don’t use ‘story’ in these senses.\u00a0 It’s my contention rather that all stories, even conscious ‘lies’, carry truths of some sort, and that these are readable\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n A certain pattern emerges in the sorts of things that they recollect–in the immediate themes\u00a0 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,\u00a0 with a question about the\u00a0first remembered visit to the cinema. This would lead naturally into recollections of related issues: cinema buildings, cinema programmes, getting in to the cinema, films.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n There is a\u00a0 pattern, too, in how informants organise the narration of\u00a0 their memory-stories.\u00a0Throughout the interviews memory talk observably breaks down into three main types:<\/p>\n Firstly, anecdotal memory<\/strong>: first-person narration of a one-off story in which the narrator is involved in the recollected events.<\/p>\n …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<\/em>. [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!” \u00a0<\/em>Helen Smeaton<\/a>, Glasgow, 23 January 1995. HS-92-036AT001<\/em><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n