Preview screenings and the spaces of an emerging local cinema trade in Scotland

Selecting and booking films to make up a programme that suited a particular audience was a crucial skill for exhibitors in the competitive conditions of the early cinema trade in Britain. This article argues that access to trade previews of the films was necessary for this choice to be meaningful, and it studies the emergence and regularisation of trade shows in Glasgow, Scotland, as an indicator of the forms of agency retained by independent cinema managers and renters. By documenting its different local manifestations up to 1920, the trade preview is shown to be a particular reception context, with its own spaces and codes of conduct. Furthermore, in a thriving non-metropolitan film trade, such as the Scottish one, it was an important social routine where informal networks could be nurtured and information shared. Thus, by looking at the micro-cosmos of the private projection room, it is possible to get a glimpse of how the trade functioned on the ground and how it understood its social position during a time of great upheaval, before it conformed to a more centralised, institutional model

The Construction of Popular Taste according to Colombian Filmmakers in the 1940s

This paper aims to understand the notion of the “popular” and the “national”, as it was used during the first period of sound films in Colombia (ten feature films made between 1939 and 1945). It argues that filmmakers attempted to create a national cinema merging conventions of Mexican musical comedy with a constructed definition of Colombian folklore, but never achieved commercial success. These films’ failure as popular cinema can be attributed to their contradictory ideological perspective, attempting to collate an elite “national culture” project with the forms and genres of mass media. The paper explores exhibition practices in Bogotá, presenting cinemas as social spaces where the distance between different audiences was inscribed in the codes of ‘good taste’, thus constructing operative definitions and evaluations of the ‘popular’

Scalarama UK, 1-30 September 2016: A Report

Festival report for Scalarama season, UK, September 2016

Mapping film exhibition in Scotland before permanent cinemas

First paragraph: A central idea in current film historiography is that “the experience of cinema does not exist outside the experience of space” (Allen “The place” 16). This is reflected in the wealth of studies about the places of exhibition which has transformed the once text-centred perspective of film studies, its sources and methodologies, by understanding cinema-going in localized terms, as part of the fabric of everyday life.&nbsp

Critics and Makers

First paragraph: One of the most recalcitrant habits I acquired from my film studies education is the tendency to refer to films as “texts.” That structuralist abstraction has its role, but the work of arranging words and that of assembling images are very different practices. People who write about films and people who make films based on the written word know very well that they are incommensurable. The videographic work that [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Image Studies publishes allows for authors to think “in the original language,” as they say one should do with philosophy. But as this point has been made so much more eloquently before, I focus here on one observation regarding the practice of peer-reviewing videographic work

Kilts, tanks, and aeroplanes: Scotland, cinema, and the First World War

This article charts commercial cinema’s role in promoting the war effort in Scotland during the First World War, outlining three aspects of the relationship between cinema and the war as observed in Scottish non-fiction short films produced between 1914 and 1918. The existing practice of local topical filmmaking, made or commissioned by cinema managers, created a particular form of engagement between cinema and war that was substantially different from the national newsreels or official films. The article offers an analysis of surviving short ‘topicals’ produced and exhibited in Scotland, which combine images of local military marches with kilted soldiers and enthusiastic onlookers and were designed to lure the assembled crowds back into the cinema to see themselves onscreen. Synthesising textual analysis with a historical account of the films’ production context, the article examines the films’ reliance on the romanticised militarism of the Highland soldier and the novelty appeal of mobilisation and armament, sidelining the growing industrial unrest and anti-war activities that led to the birth of the term ‘Red Clydeside’. The article then explores how, following the British state’s embracing of film propaganda post-1916, local cinema companies such as Green’s Film Service produced films in direct support of the war effort, for example Patriotic Porkers (1918, for the Ministry of Food). Through their production and exhibition practice exhibitors mediated the international conflict to present it to local audiences as an appealing spectacle, but also mobilised cinema’s position in Scottish communities to advance ideological and practical aspects of the war effort, including recruitment, refugee support, and fundraising

Scalarama 2016

Scalarama is a strange beast in the odd world of film festivals. Billed as “a celebration of cinema”, its screenings do not necessarily, or mainly, take place in cinemas. There are no awards or limousines, no jury and no star curator. Instead, dozens of autonomous groups and individuals choose films they want to show, organise the logistics of licenses and spaces, and use Scalarama as a framework to make their screenings more visible and more viable. In principle, anyone wanting to show films in the month of September can be part of the Scalarama programme. Given this openness, the spontaneous coherence of the festival speaks of a shared understanding, not always explicit but articulated by the history and networks through which Scalarama connects

Human Rights Film Festivals: Activism in Context

Output Type: Book Revie

Jean Desmet’s dream factory: the adventurous years of film (1907–1916)

Output Type: Book Revie