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broadcasting. Silvey’s research revealed the popular preference for variety (93%), theatre and cinema organs (82%), military bands (72%), musical comedy (69%), dance music (68%), plays (68%), and light music (65%). Apart from plays, the survey reveals the overwhelming desire for variety and music. At the other end of the scale, came grand opera (21%), violin recitals (19%), serial readings (12%) and chamber music (8%). 9 The listening figures certainly
In the 1930s the cinema interior was seen as a place of escape … The architecture provided a fantasy a world apart from the unemployment and slums without … Just as the Gothic cathedral was seen as a kind of foretaste of heaven for the illiterate masses of medieval Europe, a trailer for the forthcoming attraction, so the cinema
3 The Projection of England and documentary cinema The pioneers of public relations in Britain imaginatively utilised a range of new technologies to illuminate and interpret the nation’s approach to the commercial, bureaucratic and scientific challenges of the age. The EMB Film Unit established in 1928 was crucial to the development of this radical function of public relations. Working with a young technology encouraged Tallents to indulge in, and experiment with, new approaches to both the method and manner of communication. Specific insights provided by the
Volunteer field days, at exhibitions, tattoos, royal tournaments, and eventually in the cinema. Melodrama was gone by the early 1920s, surviving only in opera and burlesque. 2 In fact it had taken up residence elsewhere, on film. Above all, the old patriotic and imperialist music hall died with the First World War, and for many commentators its passing marks the end of popular cultural imperialism. 3 But again, popular imperialism
– the hub of Pakistan’s film industry, known as Lollywood. He described the city as a vibrant and energetic scene of artists, intellectuals and filmmakers who increasingly watched and took inspiration from foreign films, largely because Indian cinema was banned in Pakistan at the time. The café where we sat that afternoon was on a bustling street in an older part of the city and, as a Lahore native, the
The importance of films in the cultural and social life of both Britain and the United States has long been recognized. Although radio survived in Britain more or less intact, by 1960 it too had taken second place to television as the prime domestic medium. This book begins by analysing the very different relationships between cinema and radio that emerged in Britain and the United States. It moves on to examine the ways in which cinema adapted radio programmes in the fields of comedy and detective fiction and then how radio dramatized films. When radio first took off in the United States in the late 1920s, it was regarded by the film industry as a rival, something to keep people at home and away from the cinema. But during the 1930s, Hollywood began to appreciate the value of radio in publicizing and promoting its films. The British broadcasting service was set up in 1922 with a monopoly and finance from a licence fee following negotiations between the Post Office, which controlled the air waves, and the radio industry, which manufactured the equipment. Radio in wartime was informational and inspirational. It provided news, entertainment, and propaganda. The book concludes with a look in detail at the ways in which the two media have dealt with three popular fictional characters, the
Woman on train : ‘Fancy coming to the cinema tonight?’ Man on train (looking at his iPod) : ‘The what?’ (Cartoon in Sight and Sound ) 1 The cinema and the home Part of this book has been concerned with interrogating the simple view that the case for cinema as a site of
The utility dream palace is a cultural history of cinemagoing and the cinema exhibition industry in Britain during the Second World War, a period of massive audiences in which vast swathes of the British population went to the pictures on a regular basis. Yet for all that wartime films have received a great deal of academic attention, and have been discussed in terms of the escapist pleasures they offered, the experiential pleasures offered by the cinemas in which such films were watched were inextricably connected to the places and times in which they operated. British cinemas – and the people who worked in, owned and visited them – were acutely sensitive to their spatial and temporal locations, unable to escape the war and intimately bound up in and contributing to the public’s experience of it. Combining oral history, extensive archival research, and a wealth of material gathered from contemporary trade papers, fan magazines and newspapers, this book is the first to provide a comprehensive analysis of both the cinema’s position in wartime society, and the impact that the war had on the cinema as a social practice. Dealing with subjects as diverse as the blackout, the blitz, evacuation, advertising, staffing and conscription, Entertainments Tax, showmanship and clothes rationing, The utility dream palace asserts that the cinema was, for many people, a central feature of wartime life, and argues that the history of British cinemas and cinemagoing between 1939 and 1945 is, in many ways, the history of wartime Britain.
The exhibition of films has developed from a lowly fairground attraction in the 1890s to the multi-million pound industry of today. This book charts the development of cinema exhibition and cinema-going in Britain from the first public film screening in February 1896 through to the opening of 30-screen 'megaplexes'. It recounts the beginnings of cinema and in particular its rapid development, by the eve of the Great War, as the pre-eminent mass entertainment. The book considers developments of cinema as an independent entertainment, the positioning of cinemas within the burgeoning metropolitan spaces, the associated search for artistic respectability, the coming of sound and a large-scale audience. The period from 1913 to 1930 was one in which the cinema industry underwent dramatic restructuring, new chains, and when Hollywood substantially increased its presence in British cinemas. Cinema-going is then critically analysed in the context of two powerful myths; the 'Golden Age' and the 'universal audience'. The book also considers the state of cinema exhibition in Britain in the post-war period, and the terminal decline of cinema-going from the 1960s until 1984. It looks at the development of the multiplex in the United States from the 1960s and examines the importance of the shopping mall and the suburb as the main focus for these cinema developments. Finally, the book discusses the extent to which the multiplex 'experience' accounts for the increase in overall attendance; and how developments in the marketing of films have run in tandem with developments in the cinema.
This book examines the relationship between class and culture in 1930s Britain. Focusing on the reading and cinema-going tastes of the working classes, it combines historical analysis with a close textual reading of visual and written sources to appraise the role of popular leisure in this decade. Drawing on original research, the book adds to our knowledge of working-class leisure pursuits in this contentious period.