Cinema Memory Archive

Records of the Cinema Culture in 1930s Britain Project. The collection contains: Over 170 hours of in-depth interviews with 1930s cinemagoers living in four areas of mainland Britain; 315 questionnaires completed by 1930s cinemagoers from across the UK; Over 500 letters, essays and written memoirs received from interviewees and questionnaire respondents;Over 200 items of cinemagoing memorabilia and artefacts from the 1930s (diaries, postcard collections, scrapbooks, cinema programmes, posters, magazines), mostly donated by informants.

The collection is still being arranged by the project team.

• <corpname>Cinema Memory and the Digital Archive Project</corpname>
• <corpname>Cinema Culture in 1930s Britain: Ethnohistory of a Popular Cultural Practice Project</corpname>
• <corpname>Cinema Culture in 1930s Britain Project</corpname>
• <corpname>Lancaster University</corpname>

The collection can be accessed in the Archives Research Centre at Lancaster University by appointment.

The initial materials from the project were transferred by Annette Kuhn to the Special Collections and Archives in 2006. Further work is being carried out on the materials to make them available for research.

• <span class="wrapper"><p>The collection is currently being listed by the project team. Digital version of materials in the collection are available on the</p></span>
• <span class="wrapper"><a class="extref" href="https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/fass/projects/cmda/">project website</a>. A selection of materials are accessible through the</span>
• <span class="wrapper"><a class="extref" href="https://digitalcollections.lancaster.ac.uk/collections/cmda">Lancaster Digital Collections Platform</a>.</span>

The Cinema Culture in 1930s Britain Project (CCINTB), was a pioneering and unique nationwide inquiry into cinemagoing and everyday life in the interwar years that was conducted by Annette Kuhn, Professor and Research Fellow in Film Studies at Queen Mary University of London. Funded by Carnegie Trust in 1991, the project initially examined the ?Constructs of femininity in British and Hollywood feature films of the 1930s?.

In 1994, the project team secured further funding from the ESRC for a two-year project: ?Cinema Culture in 1930s Britain: Ethnohistory of a Popular Cultural Practice?. The project aimed to expand the knowledge and understanding of the nature of film fan culture in 1930s Britain. Focusing on Glasgow, Manchester and Harrow, the project questioned and interviewed people in those localities about their experience of cinema at the time. As a consequence of the research, participant started to donate memorabilia and other related materials to the research project. One of the project?s aims was to create an archive of materials to further research into the subject.

In 1998 Annette Kuhn moved to Lancaster University and to collect resources for the project. In 2004 further funded was awarded to start the digitization of the oral history recordings created in the 1990s. In 2006, the physical records from the project were transferred to the Special Collections at Lancaster University.

In 2018, the project team secured funding from the AHRC to fund the ?Cinema Memory and the Digital Archive: 1930s Britain and Beyond? to digitize remaining materials from the project and make them accessible online. This led to the creation of the Cinema Memory and the Digital Archive (CMDA) website.