Cinema Beyond the City: Small-Town and Rural Film Culture in Europe 9781911239949, 9781844578481

Table of contents :
Cover
Series Page
Title
Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgments
Notes on Contributors
Introduction: A New Approach to European Cinema History
Local Dynamics
Regional Paterns
Alternative Exhibition Practices
Contemporary Trends In Historical Perspective
Notes
PART I: LOCAL DYNAMICS
1 Small-Town Cinema in Scotland: The Particularity of Place
Bo’ness
Lerwick
The Particularity Of Place
Notes
2 Film Culture and the Catholic Milieu in the Münsterland: B illerbeck and Telgte in the 1950s
Catholic Smal Towns In The Münsterland Region
The Cinemas In Bilerbeck And Telgte
Films As A Threat To Catholic Beliefs
The Cinema As A Vehicle For Catholic Beliefs
A Local Initiative Becomes Regional: Catholic Film Discussion E Venings In The Diocese Of Münster
Catholic Film Culture In Münster
Conclusion: The Catholic Influence On Small-town Film Culture
Notes
3 Where the Exceptional and Everyday Meet: Post-War Cinema Culture in British Seaside Towns
‘oh I Do Like To Be Beside The Seaside’: Cinema Culture Along The ‘golden Mile’
‘roll Up! Roll Up!’: Programming For Great Yarmouth’s Summer Season And Winter Trade
Tea And Sympathy: Midlebrow Distinctions Met Everyday Concerns At Gorleston’s ‘coli’
Conclusion
Notes
PART II: REGIONAL PATTERNS
4 Cinemagoing in Sweden in the 1940s: Civil Society Organisations and the Expansion of Rural Film Exhibition
Maping Cinema In 1944–5: Urban And Rural Features
Institutions Of Rural Cinema: The People’s Cinema And Ordenshusens Riksförening
Cinema In The Rural County Of Jämtland
Film Programmes At Jämtland Cinemas
Cinema And The Civil Movements As Agents Of Modernity
Notes
5 Film Consumers in the Country: The Culture and Business of Small-Town and Rural Cinemagoing in the Netherlands
The Early Evolution Of The Dutch Film Market
The Post-war Cinema Boom And The Modernisation Of The Countryside
Dutch Film Culture And The Forces Of Pilarisation
Beyond Pilarisation: Class
Smal-town Cinemas In Eastern Groningen
Weekend-cinemas And Traveling Exhibition
Conclusion
Notes
6 Cinema and Social Life in the Rural Gironde: Insights from an Oral History Project
Ambulant Cinema In The Vilages
Permanent Cinemas: Marketing Modernity In Smal Towns
Pop-up Cinemas
Film Programmes And Other Entertainments
A Window On The World
Audiences And Atendance Paterns
Notes
7 Far from Swinging London: Memories of Non-Urban Cinemagoing in 1960s Britain
Accessible And Inacessible Cinema
Film Preferences And The Rural ‘real’
The Experience Of Smal-town Cinemagoing
Conclusion
Notes
PART III: ALTERNATIVE EXHIBITION PRACTICES
8 Corporate Film Shows and the Initiation of Rural Audiences to Film and Consumer Culture in Switzerland
Ambulant Cinema And Non-theatrical Film Culture
Training And Entertaining Rural Consumers: Maggi Food Corporation
Attracting Rural Audiences With Homeland Portrayals
Film Socialisation Through Corporate Road Shows
The Dominance And Decline Of Traveling Corporate Film Shows
Alternative Cinemagoing Experiences, ‘other’ Cinema Histories
Notes
9 ‘Coming up This Weekend’: Ambulant Film Exhibition in the Netherlands
Classical Traveling Cinema Versus Modern Ambulant Cinema
Diverging Business Interests
Ambulant Cinema After World War Ii: Regulation Of The Trade
Figures And Paterns
Exhibition And Programming Practices: The Example Of Jac Miedema
Conclusion
Notes
10 Catholic Cinephilia in the Countryside: The Jeunesse Agricole Chrétienne and the Formation of Rural Audiences in 1950s France
Catholic Film Exhibition As A Social Force
The
And The Cinema In The Interwar Years
Cinema As A Vehicle For Catholic Emancipation
The Country Girl And The Cinema
What Eugène Has Seen For You
From Criticism To Screenings: Film Education In The Village36
Notes
11 Alternative Cinema in the Youth Centre Movement in G ermany in the 1970s and 1980s
The Youth Centre Movement
Commercial And Non-commercial Cinema In The Countryside
Film Screnings In Youth Centres
Programming Practices And Film Production
Audiences And Reception
Continuity And Discontinuity
Notes
PART IV: CONTEMPORARY TRENDS IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE
12 Film Education, Technology and Popular Culture: Community Cinema in Rural Areas of the United Kingdom
Theorising Comunity Cinema
First-wave Comunity Cinemas
Second-wave Comunity Cinema
Conclusion
Notes
13 Le Pestel in Die (Drôme): Quality Cinema in a Semi-Rural Setting
A Short History Of Le Pestel
A Neighbourhood Cinema
Programming Strategies And Market Constraints
Le Pestel And The
Future Perspectives
Notes
14 Cinema in the ‘Fog City’: Film Exhibition and Sociogeography in Flanders
Belgian Film Exhibition Market: Historical Developments And Structural Changes
Contemporary Flemish Cinema Culture
Flanders As One Metropolitan Area
Concerning Geography
Cinema, Urbanity And Rurality
Cinema, The ‘fog City’ And The Flemish ‘diamond’
Urban Areas, Functional Hierarchies And Cinema
Conclusions
Notes
15 ‘Town Centres First’: The Relocation of the Cinema from O ut-of-Town to the Town Centre in Britain
The Multiplex And The Move Out Of The Town
The Resurgence Of The Town: The Cinema Moves Back
Case Study: Corby – A Post-industrial Town
The Importance Of Local Cinema
Case Study: Melton Mowbray – A Rural Market Town
Looking Ahead
Notes
Index

Citation preview

CULTURAL HISTORIES OF CINEMA This new book series examines the relationship between cinema and culture. It will feature interdisciplinary scholarship that focuses on the national and transnational trajectories of cinema as a network of institutions, representations, practices and technologies. Of primary concern is analysing cinema’s expansive role in the complex social, economic and political dynamics of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. SERIES EDITORS Lee Grieveson and Haidee Wasson ALSO PUBLISHED Arab Cinema Travels: Transnational Syria, Palestine, Dubai and Beyond, Kay ­Dickinson Cinema Beyond Territory: Inflight Entertainment and Atmospheres of ­Globalisation, Stephen Groening Empire and Film, edited by Lee Grieveson and Colin MacCabe Film and the End of Empire, edited by Lee Grieveson and Colin MacCabe Films That Sell: Moving Pictures and Advertising, edited by Bo Florin, Nico de Klerk and Patrick Vonderau George Kleine and American Cinema: The Movie Business and Film Culture in the Silent Era, Joel Frykholm Global Mexican Cinema: Its Golden Age, Robert McKee Irwin and Maricruz Castro Ricalde (with Mónica Szurmuk, Inmaculada Álvarez and Dubravka Suznjevic) The Grierson Effect: Tracing Documentary’s International Movement, edited by Zoë Druick and Deane Williams Making Movies into Art: Picture Craft from the Magic Lantern to Early Hollywood, Kaveh Askari Shadow Economies of Cinema: Mapping Informal Film Distribution, Ramon Lobato Spanish Film Cultures: The Making and Unmaking of Spanish Cinema, Nuria Triana-Toribio



Cinema Beyond the City Small-Town and Rural Film Culture in Europe Edited by Judith Thissen and Clemens Zimmermann

THE BRITISH FILM INSTITUTE Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY is a trademark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain by Palgrave in 2016 Reprinted by Bloomsbury in 2018 on behalf of the British Film Institute 21 Stephen Street, London W1T 1LN www.bfi.org.uk

The BFI is the lead organisation for film in the UK and the distributor of Lottery funds for film. Our mission is to ensure that film is central to our cultural life, in particular by supporting and nurturing the next generation of filmmakers and audiences. We serve a public role which covers the cultural, creative and economic aspects of film in the UK. This collection © British Film Institute, 2016 Editorial arrangement © Judith Thissen and Clemens Zimmermann, 2016 Individual essays © their respective authors, 2016 The authors have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as authors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. vii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Alex Connock Cover images: Postcard Mourmelon-le-Grand, Tivoli Cinéma et Salle des Fêtes, around 1928.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN:

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Series: Cultural Histories of Cinema Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt., Pondicherry, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents

Acknowledgments ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ vii Notes on Contributors����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� viii Introduction: A New Approach to European Cinema History�������������������������������������������� 1 Judith Thissen PART I: LOCAL DYNAMICS 1 Small-Town Cinema in Scotland: The Particularity of Place���������������������������������������� 23 John Caughie 2 Film Culture and the Catholic Milieu in the Münsterland: Billerbeck and Telgte in the 1950s������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ 38 Dörthe Gruttmann 3 Where the Exceptional and Everyday Meet: Post-War Cinema Culture in British Seaside Towns�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 52 Tim Snelson PART II: REGIONAL PATTERNS 4 Cinemagoing in Sweden in the 1940s: Civil Society Organisations and the Expansion of Rural Film Exhibition�������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 67 Åsa Jernudd and Mats Lundmark 5 Film Consumers in the Country: The Culture and Business of Cinemagoing in the Netherlands������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ 87 Judith Thissen 6 Cinema and Social Life in the Rural Gironde: Insights from an Oral History Project��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 105 Corinne Marache 7 Far from Swinging London: Memories of Non-Urban Cinemagoing in 1960s Britain ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 117 Matthew Jones

Contents

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PART III: ALTERNATIVE EXHIBITION PRACTICES 8 Corporate Film Shows and the Initiation of Rural Audiences to Film and Consumer Culture in Switzerland ����������������������������������������������������������������������� 133 Yvonne Zimmermann 9 ‘Coming up This Weekend’: Ambulant Film Exhibition in the Netherlands ��������� 149 Thunnis van Oort 10 Catholic Cinephilia in the Countryside: The Jeunesse Agricole Chrétienne and the Formation of Rural Audiences in 1950s France ������������������������������������������������� 165 Mélisande Leventopoulos 11 Alternative Cinema in the Youth Centre Movement in Germany in the 1970s and 1980s ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 181 Gunter Mahlerwein PART IV: CONTEMPORARY TRENDS IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE 12 Film Education, Technology and Popular Culture: Community Cinema in Rural Areas of the United Kingdom ����������������������������������������������������������������������� 197 Karina Aveyard 13 Le Pestel in Die (Drôme): Quality Cinema in a Semi-Rural Setting ����������������������� 213 Kristian Feigelson 14 Cinema in the ‘Fog City’: Film Exhibition and Sociogeography in Flanders ��������� 223 Daniel Biltereyst and Lies Van de Vijver 15 ‘Town Centres First’: The Relocation of the Cinema from Out-of-Town to the Town Centre in Britain��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 237 Stuart Hanson Index��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 249

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Contents

Acknowledgments

This volume brings together some of the most innovative scholarship in the historical study of European film culture. It has its origins in an international workshop in Comparative Cinema History held in Saarbrücken in September 2013. The editors wish to thank the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), Saarland University and Utrecht University for their generous support as well as the local staff who helped to organise the event. They also want to acknowledge that the workshop and this volume would not have been possible without the inspiration of the HoMER network, which unites scholars who are interested in the History of Moviegoing, Exhibition and Reception. Many of the authors are HoMER members and all are engaged in the new research field that explores the social, cultural and economic relevance of film exhibition and consumption. As editors, we hope that their work will serve readers as a kind of benchmark for current thinking on this most lively topic. Finally, we would like to warmly thank series editors Lee Grieveson and Haidee Wasson, the anonymous reviewers and the editorial staff at BFI Publishing/Palgrave for supporting this book project. Judith Thissen and Clemens Zimmermann

Acknowledgments

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Notes on Contributors

KARINA AVEYARD is Lecturer at the University of East Anglia (UK) and Research Fellow in the Department of Media and Communications at the University of Sydney. Her books include The Lure of the Big Screen: Cinema in Rural Australia (2015) and Watching Films: New Perspectives on Movie-going, Exhibition and Reception (2013, ­co-edited with Albert Moran). Prior to undertaking her PhD studies, she worked as senior researcher at the Australian Film Commission/Screen Australia. Her current research project focuses on contemporary film viewing practices from the multiplex to digital media. DANIEL BILTEREYST is Professor in Film and Media Studies in the Department of Communication Studies at Ghent University (Belgium), where he leads the Centre for Cinema and Media Studies. His work deals with historical media reception, ­controversy, discipline and the public sphere, and is published in journals like Cultural Studies, Screen, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, and Media, Culture & ­Society. He recently co-edited Explorations in New Cinema History (2011), Cinema, ­Audiences and Modernity (2012), Silencing Cinema (2013) and Moralizing Cinema (2015). JOHN CAUGHIE is Emeritus Professor and Honorary Research Professor of Film & Television Studies at Glasgow University. His books include Theories of Authorship (1981, editor) and Television Drama: Realism, Modernism and British Culture (2000) and a short monograph on Edge of Darkness (2007). He was the Principal Investigator on the research project ‘Early Scottish Cinema, 1896–1927’, which was funded by an AHRC grant. KRISTIAN FEIGELSON is a sociologist who works as Associated Professor in the Cinema Department at the Sorbonne Nouvelle (Paris 3). He is also Visiting ­Professor at Keio University (Japan). His research covers a wide range of interests and has been published in many journals including Théorème, Les temps modernes, Positif and Kinokultura, as well as in numerous edited collections. His most recent book is La ­fabrique filmique: Métiers et professions (2011). DÖRTHE GRUTTMANN is currently completing her PhD dissertation in ­comparative urban history at the University of Münster (Germany). Her research focuses on the representation and identity of Billerbeck and Telgte in the twentieth century. v iii

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She contributed to the Geschichte der Stadt Billerbeck (2012) with a chapter on the town’s relation to modernity and worked as a researcher at the Historical Commission for Westphalia. STUART HANSON is Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication at De Montfort University in Leicester (UK). His main research interests are in the area of film ­exhibition history and in particular the development of multiplex cinemas. He is the author of From Silent Screen to Multi-screen: A History of Cinema Exhibition in Britain since 1896 (2007) and has published several articles on the multiplex boom in the UK, including in the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television (2013) and the anthology Watching Films: New Perspectives on Movie-going, Exhibition and Reception (2013). He is now working on a book about the global history of the multiplex. ÅSA JERNUDD is a Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication Studies at Örebro University (Sweden). Most of her research concerns the history of film exhibition and ­cinemagoing in Sweden. Her work has been published in several international ­anthologies including Northern Lights: Film and Media Studies Yearbook (2013), Cinema, Audiences and Modernity: New Perspectives on European Cinema History (2012) and Regional Aesthetics: Locating Swedish Media (2010), as well as in Film History (2005). MATTHEW JONES is a Senior Lecturer in Cinema and Television History at De Montfort University (UK) and a specialist on mid-twentieth-century British cinema and audiences. He has collaborated with Melvyn Stokes (University College London) on the AHRC-funded research programme ‘Cultural Memories and British ­Cinema-going of the 1960s’ and is currently working on a project about memories of cinemas in Leicester. He recently edited Time Travel in Popular Media: Essays on Films, Television, Literature and Video Games (2015) and published several articles on the reception of 1950s science-fiction films in Britain. MÉLISANDE LEVENTOPOULOS teaches Film Studies and History at the University Paris 8, where she completed her PhD dissertation in history in 2013. She is the author of Les catholiques et le cinéma: La construction d’un regard critique (1895–1958) (2015) and several articles exploring the relation between the Catholic Church and the media in France, including a chapter in Moralizing Cinema: Film, Catholicism and Power (2015). She is a board member of the Association française de recherche sur l’histoire du cinéma, which publishes the journal 1895. MATS LUNDMARK is Professor of Human Geography at Örebro University (Sweden) and is affiliated to its multidisciplinary Centre for Urban and Regional Studies. His research interests are primarily in the field of economic geography. His ­publications deal with local and regional developments, location analysis, regional policy and changing labour markets. He is currently working on post-industrial transformation in Bergslagen, a mining district in Central Sweden. GUNTER MAHLERWEIN works as Assistant Professor at Saarland University and as a freelance historian. His recent research deals with the cultural history of rural Notes on Contributors 

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society in Germany from the 1950s to the 1970s. He has published several books and many a­ rticles in the fields of rural history, urban history, regional history and the social history of music. His key publications are Die Herren im Dorf. Bäuerliche Oberschicht und ländliche Elitenbildung in Rheinhessen 1700–1850 (2001), Aufbruch im Dorf. S­ trukturwandel im ländlichen Raum Baden-Württembergs nach 1950 (2008) and Grundzüge der Agrargeschichte: Die Moderne (1880–2010) (2016). CORINNE MARACHE is Associate Professor in Contemporary History at the ­University Bordeaux-Montaigne and a specialist in rural history. Her main research concerns the transformation of the French countryside in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She also publishes on production and consumption of regional food products. Her books include Les métamorphoses du rural. L’exemple de la Double en Périgord (1830–1939) (2006) and the edited volumes Les élites et la terre (2010), L’univers du vin: Hommes, paysages, territoires (2014) and Les produits des terroirs. L’empreinte de la ville (2015). THUNNIS VAN OORT is Assistant Professor of Media History at University College Roosevelt in Middelburg (Netherlands). For several years, he taught Film History at Utrecht University, where he completed his PhD thesis (2007) on film exhibition in the Catholic South of the Netherlands. In 2014–15, he was Marie Curie Pegasus Research Fellow at the University of Antwerp. His research has been published both nationally and internationally in film history journals and edited volumes, including in Cinema, Audiences and Modernity: New Perspectives on European Cinema History (2012) and ­Moralizing Cinema: Film, Catholics and Power (2015). TIM SNELSON is a Lecturer in Media History at the University of East Anglia (UK). His research addresses the relationship between media, cultural and social ­history, focusing particularly on popular film and television genres. He has published articles in journals including Media History, Cultural Studies and New Review of Film and T ­ elevision Studies, and in edited collections including Explorations in New Cinema ­History: Approaches and Case Studies (2011). He has written a monograph titled Phantom Ladies: ­Hollywood Horror and the Home Front (2014). JUDITH THISSEN is Associate Professor of Film History at Utrecht University (­Netherlands). She is a specialist of Jewish-American film culture and the New York Yiddish theatre in the early twentieth century. Her work in this field has been widely published in anthologies and journals such as Film History, Theatre Survey, Kintop and Cinema Journal. Over the past few years, the focus of her research has shifted towards the social history of film exhibition and reception in Europe. In 2010, she initiated a series of topical workshops in Comparative Cinema History to ­stimulate ­trans-­European exchange and collaboration. With Kitty Zijlmans and Robert ­Zwijnenberg, she edited Contemporary Culture: New Directions in Arts and Humanities Research (2013), a volume that came out of a large-scale research programme funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO).

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LIES VAN DE VIJVER is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Centre for Cinema and Media Studies of Ghent University (Belgium), where she has worked since 2005 on several research programmes investigating the history of film culture in Flanders. Her current project deals with contemporary (post)-cinemagoing practices. She has published her research in several edited collections and international journals, including the European Journal of Cultural Studies and the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television. She is co-coordinator of the HoMER and the Digital Cinema Studies (DICIS) networks. CLEMENS ZIMMERMANN is Professor of Cultural and Media History at the Saarland University, Saarbrücken (Germany). He has published extensively on rural–urban relations, the European metropolis and media history. He is the author of Die Zeit der Metropolen: Urbanisierung und Großstadtentwicklung (2000/2015) and Medien im ­Nationalsozialismus. Deutschland 1933–1945, Italien 1922–1943, Spanien 1936–1951 (2007). His edited books include Industrial Cities: History and Future (2013), K ­ leinstadt ­ oderne (2003) and Creative Urban Milieus: Historical Perspectives on Culture, Econin der M omy and the City (2008, with Martina Heßler). He is a member of the e­ ditorial boards of ­Informationen zur modernen Stadtgeschichte (IMS), Zeitschrift für Agrargeschichte und Agrarsoziologie and Beiträge zur Stadtgeschichte und U ­ rbanisierungsforschung. YVONNE ZIMMERMANN is Professor of Media Studies at Philipps-University ­Marburg (Germany). After receiving her PhD from the University of Zurich, she taught at the Sorbonne Nouvelle (Paris 3) and was a visiting scholar at New York University, where she researched Hans Richter’s Swiss exile (1937–1941) and the ­transatlantic exchange of film culture. Her books include Bergführer Lorenz: ­Karriere eines ­missglückten Films (2005) and the edited collection Schaufenster Schweiz: ­Dokumentarische Gebrauchsfilme 1896–1964 (2011). She has published widely on ­industrial film, useful cinema and non-theatrical film culture.

Notes on Contributors 

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Ch no

Introduction: A New Approach to European Cinema History Title Judith AuthorThissen

Cinema Beyond the City is the first book to look at the dynamics and diversity of film culture in small-town and rural Europe. Since the early days of Lumière’s cinematograph, film exhibitors have brought moving pictures to towns, villages and farming communities in the countryside. Across Europe, these consumers constitute a considerable percentage of cinema’s potential audience, today as well as in the past. Yet we know remarkably little about their experience of the film medium. In the historiography as well as in the public mind, the cinema is equated with urban modernity and typically conceived as a quintessential metropolitan medium: an entertainment product of the big city and for the big city. The emphasis on ‘cinema and the city’ in film scholarship is understandable. The medium has its roots in the metropolitan mass culture of the late nineteenth ­century, and many later innovations in film production, distribution and e­ xhibition came from major urban centres like Paris, London, Berlin, New York and Los ­Angeles. At the same time, this monolithic focus has not only obscured the history of ­moviegoing in the hinterlands, but also moulded our understanding of cinema’s ­relation to modern life.1 A ‘crude city–rural dichotomy’ structures much of the industry and academic discourse on non-urban film culture, whereby the country is usually represented as ‘backward and disconnected from the current trends’, Karina Aveyard observes.2 Explicitly or implicitly the metropolitan experience of the cinema is often (not always) taken as the norm. Hence, as Robert C. Allen points out, ‘it has been ­difficult to see regional or demographic differences as anything other than aberrations or the result of a lag in the pace of modernization’.3 A few years after its invention, the cinema itself had already set the tone. In The Countryman and the Cinematograph (1901), a short movie directed by the British filmmaker Robert William Paul, the main character is portrayed as the archetypal rube who does not understand the modern world. Even the most uneducated urban spectators of Paul’s film were invited to laugh at his behaviour which implies a misconception of what the cinema is about. The catalogue describes the countryman as ‘a yokel in the audience’ who becomes overexcited by what he sees on the screen. He climbs upon the stage to try to dance with the ballerina in the film, runs off into the wings when he sees an express train and, in the final scene, in which he makes love to a dairy maid, ‘becomes so enraged that he tears down the screen, disclosing the projector and the operator, whom he severely handles’.4 The Countryman and the Cinematograph and Edison’s remake Uncle Josh at the Picture Show (1902) are usually interpreted as humorous exaggerations of how early audiences reacted to the novelty of the movies. Yet these short comedies also suggest an essential difference between the urban and the rural Introduction: A New Approach to European Cinema History

1

experience of the cinema, a notion that was reiterated time and again by contemporary observers and later scholars.5 Let me take the example of Christian Metz, one of the most prominent film theorists of his generation. In Le signifiant imaginaire (The Imaginary Signifier), Metz differentiates between two modes of affective participation with the cinema, each of which is defined by a particular filmic-viewer relationship and type of audience behaviour.6 These are not just structural archetypes, as he assigns them to specific places and spaces, and by doing so turns them into stereotypes of urban and rural c­ inemagoers. On the one hand, Metz positions ‘the spectator who, as our society prescribes, is immobile and silent’ and who belongs to the ‘big city and its anonymous and silent cinemas’.7 On the other, he defines a filmic state and mode of behaviour that he associates with ‘the audience of children, the rural audience, the community audience where everybody knows everybody else, [and] the audience with little schooling’, and which he geographically situates in the countryside: those film shows (some still exist, for example in villages or small towns of countries like France or Italy) where one can see the spectators, often young children, sometimes adults, rise from their seats, gesticulate, shout encouragement to the hero of the story, and insult the ‘bad guy’.8

Like The Countryman and the Cinematograph, Metz not only considers the rural spectator ‘exuberant’ and ‘unselfconscious’, but also looks down upon these country people: they are uneducated and behave like children in the cinema, ‘confusing film and reality’.9 As Frank Kessler points out, in Metz’s theory of spectatorship the metropolitan audience sets the standard and represents the normative viewer. More precisely, it is the audience of the Parisian cinemas that Metz frequented himself, the movie theatres of the Grands Boulevards where he saw the latest Hollywood pictures, the art houses of the Quartier Latin and, last but not least, the Cinémathèque Française.10 The Imaginary Signifier exemplifies how the fixation with a certain type of metropolitan audience leads to biased conceptualisations of the cinematic experience. We find a similar tendency to broad generalisations and reductive conclusions in the field of film historiography. For the past twenty years, Robert Allen has criticised the ‘­Gothamcentrism’ and ‘Manhattan myopia’ in historical narratives of moviegoing and social life in the United States and called for a ‘decentering of historical audience studies’.11 As he points out, ‘we cannot map big-city exhibition patterns upon the quite different situations to be found in smaller cities and towns’.12 And, one might add, neither can we map American patterns upon the quite different situations found in Europe. A recent and particularly relevant issue in this respect is the debate around ‘cinema’s second birth’, a term introduced by André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion to describe the institutionalisation of the film medium during the 1910s, that is the constitution of the cinema as a set of clearly demarcated production, exhibition and viewing practices that defines its autonomy and identity vis-à-vis other media.13 According to Paul Moore, their thesis ‘consolidates several historiographical claims’, but is it also valid for Europe? 14 In the United States and Canada, mainstream film culture was strongly regulated and homogenised by the Hollywood studio system – both in the major urban centres and small-town contexts.15 However, when we observe cinema’s development from a European angle and through empirical studies of 2

Cinema Beyond the City

film circulation in its hinterlands, we discover a much greater and enduring diversity of exhibition practices, distribution strategies and cinematic experiences.16 This volume, then, takes up the challenge to draw the contours of an alternative, more inclusive and nuanced historical account of cinema’s development as a social, cultural and economic institution. Individually and together, the chapters explore the distinctive qualities of film culture in the European countryside, but also provide insight into what binds metropolitan, small-town and rural audiences. Moreover, despite different backgrounds, research questions and approaches, the contributors share a common interest in understanding the place that the cinema occupied in the lives of its audiences. In doing so, they identify with the aims of the New Cinema History. Over  the past decade, this term has come to signify a radical ‘shift away from the content of films to consider their circulation and consumption, and to examine the cinema as a site of social and cultural exchange’, as Richard Maltby explains.17 New Cinema History is also characterised by a wide range of methodological approaches, from micro-histories of local moviegoing to quantitative analyses of national patterns in cinema distribution and exhibition. As editors, we understand this emerging field more specifically in terms of a ‘social turn’ in film historiography. Thus Cinema Beyond the City puts the social experience of the audience at the centre in order to understand cinema’s relationship to the changing conditions of everyday life as experienced by ordinary people in the countryside.18 Allen argues that one way to make it easier to address cinema’s relation to society at large is to remove the metropolis from the centre of study.19 We agree that ‘the country’ gives film scholars a different agenda and a different set of priorities about what to study and how to study it. However, we kept ‘the city’ within the present volume. In our view, the flows back and forth between city and countryside, the common ground between centres and peripheries, as well as the regional dynamics within national borders, are essential to understanding the meaning of filmgoing as a sociocultural experience. Similarly, the cinema cannot be isolated from the surrounding entertainment and social landscape or the structural changes in everyday life that occurred as a result of increased urbanisation, rural industrialisation, secularisation and the development of mass consumer capitalism.20 To capture these concerns and others that cross-cut the chapters, we have organised the volume thematically rather than geographically. The first part regroups three micro-studies of local film presentation and reception which together deepen our understanding of the various ways in which ‘the local’ shapes film culture. The essays in the second part revolve around regional patterns and urban–rural comparisons in specific national contexts. In the third, the focus is on the rich diversity of alternative practices and places that characterise the rural experience of cinemagoing. The volume rounds off with a part that investigates regional film exhibition in the age of the multiplex, and looks in more detail at the continuities and discontinuities in the history of small-town and rural film consumption. Within each part, the contributions are engaged with different time frames and these are organised in more or less chronological order. In the overview that follows, the discussion of the individual chapters attempts to point out their relevance beyond that of the specific subject of investigation and to highlight the interconnections between the different case studies. Its goal is to give the readers a preliminary comparative framework to understand the larger social and historical processes at work in European film culture. Introduction: A New Approach to European Cinema History

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Local Dynamics The first section explores the ‘particularity of place’, a term which John Caughie introduces in his opening essay about small-town cinema in Scotland. It is by focusing on the early decades of permanent film exhibition in Bo’ness, a harbour town on the Scottish mainland, and Lerwick, the capital of the Shetland Islands, that Caughie immediately confronts us with the diversity and uneven development of small-town film culture. In both port towns, permanent cinema became a feature of everyday life in the early 1910s, but cinema’s status in each community was fundamentally different. In Bo’ness, new movie theatres were welcomed and endorsed by the church, the town council and the press as a rational and respectable entertainment with civic significance. Variety entertainment was a crucial factor localising the experience of ­cinemagoing and it remained on the bill of most cinemas well into the 1920s. In fact, the live acts on the bill were often given more attention in the publicity and reviews than the movies. Caughie argues that variety’s persistence in Bo’ness, despite the ongoing process of standardisation of film distribution and exhibition nationally, hints at the importance attached by its patrons to a participatory form of entertainment. By contrast, the North Star cinema in remote Lerwick, the most northern cinema in the UK, was never integrated into the existing public sphere of civil society. Tellingly, it was the company’s accountant, an outsider from Aberdeen, who officially opened the new theatre, whereas the first purpose-built cinema in Bo’ness was welcomed with a speech by the local Provost (the Scottish equivalent of a mayor). Right from the start, the programmes of the North Star looked more like those of a metropolitan cinema than a small-town venue, consisting almost exclusively of films. Along with other evidence collected by Caughie, the absence of live entertainment, especially from local dramatic clubs, suggests that the Shetlands’ one and only permanent movie theatre constituted a separate social space, more or less dissociated from other aspects of civic life on the island, except for a few instances in the summer when it catered to the largely transient fishermen population. Caughie’s contribution is the first in this volume that draws our attention to the ways in which the unique combinations of geography, demographics, religious and civic attitudes and existing traditions of entertainment shaped cinema’s reception and function as a public sphere on the local level. At the same time, he raises the question of how the fragmented nature of small-town cinema culture can be woven into a larger historical narrative. Caughie aligns with Derek Sayer’s idea of a montage of petites narratives, which seems an appropriate solution for writing a cinema history of a nation that could not rely on an indigenous film production for identity formation around the film medium.21 Still, from the perspective of comparative history and the bigger story that needs to be told, the question is how can we move beyond a patchwork of local stories? The second chapter by social historian Dörthe Gruttmann, who deals with film exhibition and reception in rural Germany, offers in a sense the beginning of an answer. Unlike Scotland, Germany had a major indigenous film industry and its products strongly defined the notion of its cinema culture. However, here too we find a diversity of practices, even within the homogenously Catholic region of the ‘black’ Münsterland, which is the object of Gruttmann’s study. In her precise analysis of film culture in Telgte and Billerbeck, she discusses the integration of the cinema into the 4

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deeply religious and closely knit Catholic milieu of rural Westphalia. The establishment of permanent movie theatres was successfully blocked in both market towns until 1945. Although their way was paved by travelling showmen, the film exhibitors who operated permanent movie theatres in the post-war era still had to overcome deepseated suspicion and fierce resistance by the clergy, the municipal council and Catholic associations. Dignitaries and authorities closely collaborated to contain ‘foreign’ cultural and social influences, frequently developing grass-roots actions to ‘improve’ local film culture. Resistance was strongest against the pioneers who came from the outside and who literally and figuratively embodied the alleged dangers of metropolitan modernity. Significant is the example of a Protestant couple of film exhibitors from Berlin who managed with great difficulty to establish a cinema in the hall of a Billerbeck hotel after the war, but ultimately failed in the face of competition from a town resident, a beer brewer with strong ties to the community and enough money to build a new cinema. Thanks to her micro-analytical approach, Gruttmann provides not only detailed insight into the social, cultural and economic tensions at work on the local level, but also convincingly argues that despite the hierarchical structure of the ­Catholic Church, small-town film culture in Westphalia was shaped by an interplay between ­top-down directives and bottom-up initiatives, by local and supra-local influences. In the last chapter in this part, Tim Snelson takes up the question of the particularity of place from the perspective of two British seaside resorts, focusing on how economic and social imperatives shaped post-war cinemagoing in Great Yarmouth and its much smaller neighbour Gorleston-on-Sea. The particularities of film exhibition in seaside towns seem almost self-evident with their seasonal influx of holidaymakers, but Snelson observes remarkable differences in how movie theatres dealt with highly fluctuating market conditions and negotiated the often conflicting demands of locals and tourists, many of whom came from the big cities and had rather a different idea of what constituted a good ‘night out’ than small-town audiences. In Yarmouth, exhibitors not only targeted different audiences in the on- and off-season, but also differentiated between weekday and weekend programmes to ensure a steady income from the widest possible patronage, even if it meant programming more raucous fare. Family-friendly films and stage shows offered working-class tourists and their children ‘something special’, whereas X-rated horror and other exploitation films were put on the bill to attract local youths, initially on weeknights and in winter when the tourist trade was slow, but in the 1970s on a more regular basis. In Gorleston, a small Edwardian seaside town with two 1,000-seat cinemas for a population of slightly under 5,000, Snelson found that film exhibitors were more status-conscious and showed a stronger commitment to maintaining middle-class respectability in accordance with the make-up of the local population and the resort’s older and more affluent tourist clientele. Hence, unlike their colleagues in Yarmouth, they kept the same middlebrow fare throughout the year and maintained a ‘film-only’ policy, leaving more participatory and boisterous forms of entertainment to other venues. However, faced with declining attendance, both cinemas were hard pressed to survive and by 1964 one had already been transformed into a bingo hall, a fate common to many movie theatres across the UK and a typical British phenomenon. The other theatre closed five years later, turning Gorleston into one of the many British small towns without a cinema – a pattern of decline that can be witnessed across Europe from the early 1960s onwards. Introduction: A New Approach to European Cinema History

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Regional Patterns While the micro-historical enquiries in the first part may raise issues about g­ eneralisation and representativeness, the comparative approach of analysing two towns still invites scholars to move beyond the ‘village level’ and make connections between particular circumstances and developments which may otherwise have seemed marginal or unique. More importantly, these case studies open the way for a more ­comprehensive level of analysis, especially when combined with large-scale national and more quantitative studies.22 The opening essay of this second section exemplifies how interdisciplinary collaboration and the integration of quantitative and qualitative approaches allow for a better understanding of the place of hinterland audiences within national frameworks of distribution, exhibition and reception. Combining methods and insights from history and social geography, Åsa Jernudd and Mats Lundmark look at regional patterns in Swedish film exhibition and address the question to what extent the experience of rural cinema audiences differed from the metropolitan experience of moviegoing. By mapping the precise locations of 35mm film outlets, their seating capacity and ownership structure, the authors create a context for understanding film exhibition in the county of Jämtland, an agricultural region in the north of Sweden. Their research focuses on the 1940s, when the country witnessed a sharp, nationwide rise in cinema attendance and equally sharp growth in the number of film exhibition outlets, a development that has been largely ignored by Swedish film scholars, who have concentrated instead on the concomitant boom in film production. The flourishing of the domestic film industry partly explains the growing popularity of cinemagoing, and Jernudd and Lundmark provide with their study of Jämtland indirect evidence for the preference of Swedish audiences for Swedish films.23 However, they take an altogether different angle to the subject of the thriving film culture in the early decades of the Swedish welfare state by exploring the geographic, economic and sociopolitical conditions for its emergence. Characteristic of the Swedish market in 1940s was a strong urban–rural contrast in terms of ownership. Whereas a handful of vertically integrated corporate companies monopolised film exhibition in the big cities and large towns, civil society organisations occupied a key position in rural regions due to their ownership of multipurpose halls, leaving small, independent cinema businesses squeezed between the interests of these two players, the first with economic power, the second with political clout. Thanks to a combined process of centralisation and institutionalisation, civil society cinemas – mostly run by either the workers’ movement or the temperance movement – boomed in the late 1940s and early 1950s, with the People’s Houses concentrating in the ­industrialised countryside and the temperance houses in agricultural regions. In Jämtland, the majority of the cinemas were located in farming communities and had been operated by independent commercial exhibitors in multipurpose venues since the early twentieth century. With the exception of a few People’s Houses, these halls were owned by the local divisions of the temperance movement, which had a stronghold in the region. However, in the 1940s, many civic societies took over the control of their venue, deciding to run their own cinema venture with the support of national umbrella organisations that provided the films. Although these in-house cinemas officially operated on a not-for-profit basis, they represented a vital source of income for the 6

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s­ ocieties as the returns were often used to maintain the building or sponsor less lucrative cultural and social activities. By the early 1950s, the non-commercial sector was good for almost 30 per cent of the Jämtland market. Along with the research of several other authors in this volume, Jernudd and Lundmark’s study reveals the centrality of multipurpose halls in the history of rural cinema, an importance that raises new questions about film exhibition at the intersection of ideological, social and commercial constraints. The examples from Sweden, France, Germany and the Netherlands suggest a significant and continued interrelationship between moviegoing and other realms of public life well into the 1950s. In the period of early cinema, a similar permeability of film consumption and civic society also characterised the urban experience of the cinema, especially on the neighbourhood level, but in cities and larger towns it seems that the boundaries were redressed with the medium’s institutionalisation during ‘cinema’s second birth’. Like Jernudd and Lundmark, Thissen’s contribution uses a combination of metalevel and micro-level analysis to shed light on the geographical differences in cinema provision and film culture in the Netherlands, not only between big cities, small towns and villages, but also depending on factors like religion, secularisation and industrialisation. Drawing on the existing historiography, notably Karel Dibbets’s quantitative study of the Dutch market, Thissen provides an analysis of the rural–urban dynamics in the exhibition sector against the backdrop of the sociocultural and political compartmentalisation of Dutch society into a Protestant, Catholic, socialist and liberal pillar. Her study then zooms in on the Protestant countryside, in particular on eastern Groningen, an agro-industrial zone where the cinema attendance approached metropolitan levels despite the region’s remote and rural character. By focusing on the demographic make-up of the local population and the broader sociopolitical context, Thissen is able to show how class, religion and municipal policies shaped the business opportunities for film exhibitors. What also emerges from her work is the strong connotation of cinema with metropolitan modernity, which she traces in the public discourse and publicity materials, and in the very names given to movie theatres, such as ‘Metropole’ and ‘Modern’. Most striking is the popularity of the name ‘City’ (always in English) in the Netherlands, which literally conflates ‘going to the cinema’ and ‘going to the city’. This name-giving draws our attention to the question of how the geography of national film culture was experienced by small-town and rural audiences, a question that is addressed in the next two chapters, which make extensive use of oral history. Social historian Corinne Marache examines the relationship between film culture and rural life in the Gironde, a department in the south-west of France. With the help of the historical society of Coutras, she interviewed former exhibitors and audience members to understand cinema’s place in rural society from the 1920s until the early 1960s. In the first part of the chapter, she brings alive the forgotten history of the ambulant projectionists who toured the French countryside well into the post-war era. In 1947, an estimated 12,000 locations in France were served by travelling exhibitors using 16mm film.24 Rain or shine, they toured long distances by bicycle or motorbike transporting their portable equipment in a little cart. They went from village to village on a fixed weekly circuit approved by the CNC (Centre national du cinéma) and in the early evening would set up their show in a village hall or café, helped by local residents to whom they offered a cheap and much welcomed pastime. Each week, these showmen Introduction: A New Approach to European Cinema History

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brought a new programme, mostly consisting of old films – a few shorts and a feature, which they rented in Bordeaux where all the major distributors had an office. On Monday, they personally picked up the copies, returned the ones that they had used the previous week and began their next round. When reading the stories of these travelling showmen, the emblematic figure of the village postman in Jour de fête (1949) comes to mind. Of course, Jacques Tati’s film was made in precisely those transformative years when the French countryside was rapidly modernising, bringing along new pleasures and challenges which the film maker captured with humour and compassion. In the south-west of France, the first permanent cinemas appeared in Bordeaux around 1910, but their regional diffusion was slow. Ambulant showmen continued to serve the smaller cities and larger towns. This began to gradually change after World War I when the first permanent movie theatres opened in smaller towns. The construction boom was part of a much wider modernisation effort. From the 1920s on, many French small towns underwent an architectural makeover as municipalities invested in new schools, post offices, streets, squares and sporting facilities. By the end of the 1930s, most petites villes in the Gironde had a permanent movie theatre and many of them stood out for their resolutely modernist architecture. In the reminiscences of small-town moviegoers that Marache collected, both the cinema buildings and the entertainment experience were strongly associated with urban modernity. However, respondents also pointed out that going to the movies was intertwined with more traditional forms of sociability, with dating and dancing, local fêtes and foires. More generally, social life in the rural countryside was still governed in many respects by the cyclical rhythm of farming. In the summer, there was less time for leisure because of the farm work and related agricultural, agro-industrial and household activities. This was not only the case in France, but also elsewhere in rural Europe. Moreover, with the growing prosperity and mobility in the post-war era, many preferred a trip to the sea rather than to the cinema. Tim Snelson notes that in the 1960s the majority of tourists in Great Yarmouth and nearby beaches came from the big cities, but a considerable number also came from the rural hinterland of the Norfolk coast. For much of the twentieth century, the choice in films and exhibition spaces was typically quite limited for those in the countryside. The elderly French who shared their movie memories with Marache were well aware that the pictures that they watched in their youth at the local cinema were seldom recent releases. Yet they did not resent that their peers in Paris and Bordeaux were much more up-to-date and, at least in retrospect, the delay in time and lack of choice were presented as an inevitable consequence of living in the countryside. However, other contributions to this collection suggest that rural audiences in France were worse off than elsewhere in Europe. In 1948, audiences in Coutras, a market town situated 65 kilometres east of Bordeaux with which it was linked by a direct railway connection, saw only three films out of eighty-six that were less than a year old. More importantly, 85 per cent were more than two years old, including the vast majority of the French films, which dominated the bill. By contrast, in Östersund, 550 kilometres north of Stockholm, 82 per cent of the Swedish films and 40 per cent of the Hollywood films were shown less than three months after their national release in the capital. Even in the remote villages of Jämtland, the film produce was still fresher than in Coutras. This did not necessarily imply that audiences in the rural Gironde were not part of the national film culture. For one, 8

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French film culture was not so much about seeing the latest films, but about loving the cinema. Especially in the post-war era, the discourse of cinephilia took the form of an almost nationalist cultural discourse, asserting an intimate and unique historical relationship between the French and cinematography. More generally, the time lag between a film’s national release and its local screening also had positive side-effects. As Matthew Jones notes in his chapter on rural film culture in Britain, months of waiting and pre-talk could enhance the experience of cinemagoing, especially for an (inter) national box-office hit. Marache’s respondents recalled that there were long queues for hit movies when they finally arrived in their town and people were advised to buy tickets well in advance. Small-town movie screenings of big pictures were often local events, even if they took place long after a film’s first run in metropolitan cinemas. Growing up in the Dutch countryside, I remember the excitement when ten weeks after the national release in Amsterdam, some girls in my high-school class had managed to secure tickets for the local premiere of Grease (1978) – the ultimate happening for those of us who were hopelessly devoted to John Travolta. Viewers’ memories are often unreliable, especially where films are concerned. Objectivity is elusive, Matthew Jones remarks in his reflection on the methodological problems that arise when researchers use oral history for understanding the practices and preferences of cinema audiences. He works with questionnaires and interviews that were collected in the context of the AHRC-funded research project Cultural Memory and British Cinemagoing in the 1960s led by Melvyn Stokes. Jones is concerned with discovering the trends that emerge from these qualitative data and considers the result of his analysis as one version of the 1960s – a version that has been constructed and narrated by people who experienced the cinema in the countryside during the decade that witnessed its demise as a mass entertainment medium. By taking the hybrid and open approach to oral history that Jones advocates, researchers can identify broad trends without losing the unique character of each individual cinema experience. One of the remarkable findings of his research is that despite the fact that many movie theatres in the UK were closing down in the 1960s, even more so in the countryside than in the big cities, the memories of rural cinemagoers seem not to have been affected by this dramatic transformation. Because of the growth in car ownership, people could travel longer distances in a shorter time. Before the 1950s, it was not unusual for people to walk an hour to see a film or to spend even longer time on a bus journey. After local competitors had closed their doors, many of the surviving small-town film exhibitors could remain in business because people’s radius of action drastically increased with car ownership. Yet there is more to this new perspective on cinema’s relationship to mass auto-mobility. As Jones convincingly argues, cars became ‘spaces in which cinema memories were formed and resurfaced’. Moreover, what happened in the car on the way to and from the movie theatre may well have been more memorable than the cinema experience itself. Jones’s goal is to generate insight into the social and cultural characteristics of British film culture in the countryside in relation to the nation as a whole. He therefore explores how national patterns in film consumption were reflected in the memories of his rural and small-town respondents. In the case of Hollywood cinema, it seems that their taste did not differ significantly from city dwellers. However, when focusing on two highly popular urban film genres in 1960s British cinema – the Introduction: A New Approach to European Cinema History

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hedonistic ‘swinging London’ films and the gritty ‘kitchen-sink dramas’ situated in the industrial north – the respondents’ geographic context does seem to have ­influenced their understanding and appreciation of particular films. To most rural and small-town viewers, the fashionable youth scene of swinging London represented an unfamiliar world, which seemed very different from their own way of life. Many were curious about the capital and some admitted that they wanted ‘to live in London’ when they were young. With the gritty stories that were set in urban, working-class milieux in northern England, most respondents identified in terms of similarity rather than dissimilarity. The social problems that were tackled in kitchen-sink dramas were often familiar and indeed ­sometimes ‘too much like real life’, as one respondent put it. Remarks like this reveal that it was not only an urban–rural bias that shaped the reception of genres, but also the class background and aspirations of individual audience members. It is at the conjunction of multiple demographic factors that we have to understand the experiences and meanings of the cinema as a social and cultural phenomenon, both in and outside the city. Hence, the methodological challenge remains to avoid reducing the enormous diversity of cinema audiences and experiences by subsuming them into abstract container categories like ‘urban’, ‘metropolitan’, ‘small-town’ and ‘rural’ without further analytical differentiation and nuance, but also without getting stuck in too many details. Jones’s proposition to think in terms of ‘trends’ is very helpful in this respect, especially in combination with his practice of systematically integrating individual quotes from respondents in his analysis to remind us of the unique experience of the individual viewer within the broader collective framework. Alternative Exhibition Practices Part III concentrates on one of the long-term trends that can be discerned in the history of European film culture: the wide range of alternative exhibition formats and contexts in which audiences encountered the movies when they lived in villages and hamlets, or in small towns where there was no permanent cinema. In many respects, film exhibition in rural Europe escaped the processes of institutionalisation and standardisation that took place in the mainstream urban markets across the Western world, and especially in the United States and Canada. By the end of the 1910s, the permanent movie theatre had become the dominant dispositif in which films were exhibited and watched in North ­American cities and towns. Elaborating on Gaudreault and Marion, Paul Moore argues that, from the point of view of film exhibition, it is above all the emergence of the movie theatre as ‘an autonomous social space distinct from other entertainments’ that characterises cinema’s second birth.25 However, as Yvonne Zimmermann observes, ‘the ­institutionalization of the cinema as the signature site of film consumption in urbanised regions’ did not prevent the medium’s continued alliance with other cultural, social and economic p ­ ractices. Indeed, in most parts of rural Europe, the movies never found ‘a place of their own’ and film exhibitors continued to operate in other venues, mostly in multipurpose halls. The four chapters in this part all examine aspects of alternative exhibition and together they provide insight into the multiple ways in which the film medium was embedded in existing and new sociocultural spheres inside and outside of the commercial film sector. 10

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In the opening chapter on corporate film screenings in Switzerland, Yvonne Zimmermann returns to questions raised by Richard Maltby about cinema’s function as an agent of consumerism. However, she shifts the perspective from theatrical to non-theatrical exhibition and from Hollywood and American economic expansionism to the use of the cinema as a promoter of consumer culture by the Swiss food industry.26 Her analysis focuses in particular on the road shows of the Maggi Food Corporation. Initially consisting of slide-illustrated lectures, its programmes later also included short silent films with a live commentary. In addition to free admission, audiences were lured with a soup degustation during the break. From the early 1900s until the 1960s, the company toured the country with these programmes and tastings during the winter season, using schools, gyms and local halls and targeting children and women as their main audience. Entertainment, education and marketing went hand in hand. The Maggi movies, especially the company’s Heimat-films about Swiss mountain regions, carefully aligned the promotion of modernisation with traditional family and patriotic values in order to convince potential consumers to buy its foodstuffs and help rural audiences in particular to adjust to a rapidly industrialising world. Key to understanding the nationwide popularity of Maggi’s shows, Zimmermann argues, was the fact that they maintained the mode of address and participatory reception of early cinema. In addition, in many rural parts of the country there was little choice of film entertainment. With some rare exceptions, commercial travelling shows disappeared in Switzerland with the introduction of permanent cinemas. In their absence, the ­corporate film shows by Maggi and other large corporations (e.g. Suchard and Nestlé) played a central role in the familiarisation of rural populations with cinemagoing as a sociocultural practice, Zimmermann concludes. At the same time, these road shows were set up as a marketing and advertising instrument for product industries. People did not have to pay to see the films, but ultimately the screenings were profit-driven. In fact, one could argue that the convergence of film as cultural artefact and social experience on the one hand, and vehicle of consumer capitalism, on the other, was rarely as strong as in the context of corporate film shows. Thunnis van Oort explores further manifestations of non-theatrical exhibition, concentrating like Zimmermann on for-profit enterprises. His chapter deals with ambulant exhibition in the Netherlands after the ‘classical period’ of tent shows. In the standard historiographical narrative, commercial travelling cinema was a short-lived exhibition format, a phenomenon strongly associated with the medium’s early development that allegedly died out with the breakthrough of permanent movie theatres in the 1910s. However, like earlier contributions in this volume, Van Oort’s study of ambulant film exhibition in the Netherlands demonstrates that the traditional account of cinema’s development does not do any justice to the dynamics of rural film exhibition. Tent shows, a seasonal fairground business in cities as well as the hinterlands, disappeared during the interwar period. Ambulant film exhibition in multipurpose halls, on the other hand, thrived from the 1930s until the late 1950s in the Dutch countryside. Hotel-restaurant-café complexes with large multifunctional auditoria became the dominant film outlet in localities where the economy would not support a permanent movie theatre. In Catholic provinces, travelling shows were also frequently given in communal halls that were part of the public sphere of the church. We see a similar phenomenon in France, where parish cinemas operated on a commercial Introduction: A New Approach to European Cinema History

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basis, but remained within the strict control of the clergy. Whether operating in the neutral sphere of the market or under the influence of the religious/ideological institutions, permanent exhibitors considered their ambulant counterparts a threat to their own business. As Van Oort points out, the repeated efforts by the Netherlands Cinema Alliance (NBB) to regulate and restrict the travelling trade strongly suggest that ambulant shows were a non-negligible economic force on the market. During the 1940s and the early 1950s, this market segment continued to grow, as did the number of venues served by travelling exhibitors. These were the heydays of rural cinemagoing in the Netherlands. A total of sixteen ambulant operators were active in this period and several of them became major players outside the big cities and provincial capitals. The latter were typically organised as regional family-owned chains and combined the operation of permanent movie theatres in the larger market towns with so-called ‘weekend-cinemas’ in smaller towns and villages. In addition, most chains served a circuit of villages that were visited only once or twice a month. In other words, these chains served a wide range of localities with different formats and business models. Spreading risk and maintaining a considerable degree of flexibility to upgrade or downsize operations in the travelling sector were key to their success and temporary survival, when rural cinema attendance began to drop sharply in the early 1960s, following the national trend that had set in a few years before. By the end of the decade, the ambulant business was no longer profitable and most weekend-cinemas were closed down. Only a handful of marginal entrepreneurs survived and they worked outside the commercial market. In a nutshell, this is the revised history of travelling film exhibitors in the Netherlands. Some aspects of this story can be generalised for other European countries, notably the persistence of ambulant cinema in multipurpose halls well into the post-war era and the many partnerships with owners of hotels and café-restaurants. However, the scale and scope of the travelling business in the Netherlands seems exceptional and related to the particularities of the Dutch market, which for most of the twentieth century had a much lower attendance rate per capita than neighbouring countries. Ambulant exhibitors filled a gap which did not exist elsewhere in Europe, where permanent cinema had gained a much stronger foothold in small towns during the interwar years. With a sharp focus on institutional structures and strategies, Mélisande Leventopoulos examines the ways in which the French Catholic youth movements sought to shape the film taste of rural adolescences during the cinema boom of the late 1940s and 1950s. Like Dörthe Gruttmann (Chapter 2), she breaks away from the usual approach to Catholics and the movies, which concentrates on film censorship, to investigate the Church’s direct involvement in film exhibition in the broader context of Catholic cultural politics. Since the late nineteenth century, the French Catholic Church had extensively used mass entertainment media, magic lantern shows and illustrated magazines in particular to fight the ‘religious recession’ and strengthen Catholicism. In the early 1900s, in response to the growing popularity of the cinematograph, parish priests began to organise screenings to lure children and teenagers away from commercial cinemas – a development that we witnessed in Catholic regions across Europe. After World War I, hundreds of multifunctional parish halls in France were equipped with a 9.5mm Pathé-bébé or 17.5mm Pathé-rural projector to show 12

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free films in the context of youth work and other educational programmes. At the same time, new Catholic halls opened that were used primarily as cinemas and catered to the general public. Run by travelling showmen and serving all ages, these ‘family cinemas’ charged admission and operated within the realm of commercial film exhibition, but with the restriction that they only showed ‘good films’, meaning films approved by the central Catholic censorship organisation. On the eve of World War II, France counted about 1,500 Catholic cinema halls. In this respect, the Church was rather well equipped to respond to the post-war boom in attendance among rural youths, especially in strongholds like Bretagne and the Loire Valley/Centre region where family cinemas proliferated. However, its leadership lacked a vision on film education. A strong anxiety about the corrupting influence of commercial cinema had been the main rationale behind the Catholic involvement in film exhibition during the interwar period. This attitude changed radically after the war, when a new generation of Catholic militants, mostly students, came to the forefront and embraced the cinema as ‘the people’s university of the future’. Starting within the Parisian branch of the youth movement for Catholic students and its working-class counterpart, a new infrastructure for film education was set up which ranged from a technical support system to the development of film analysis courses and the coordination of a Catholic ciné-club circuit. Unlike the more localised and bottom-up initiatives that Gruttmann found in the small-town Catholic milieu of Westphalia, these French initiatives followed rigid top-down principles of organisation with Paris functioning as the absolute centre from where cultural politics were disseminated via regional militants to local activists in small towns and villages. Leventopoulos details how the Catholic rural youth movement (Jeunesse agricole chrétienne) began to educate rural youths about the cinema and guide them in their choice of films by integrating film reviews, plot summaries, background articles and quizzes in their monthly and bi-weekly magazines. The militants of the young rural women’s branch ardently embraced the discourse of a popular cinephilia based on the Catholic faith. They not only promoted films that were approved by the central Catholic censorship organisation, but also explicitly advocated for faithful representations of country life in French cinema and for more films with rural themes and peasant heroes with whom country girls and boys could identify. In the mid-1950s, the rural youth organisation moved to the next level of Catholic film action and launched its own network of ciné-clubs. The adoption of the ciné-club format meant a quite radical break with the past because the clubs operated entirely outside the commercial sector. The obligatory membership to gain admission may have posed an initial barrier, but the main problem was that the films were selected by the central office in Paris and reflected an urban, more intellectual appreciation of cinema. Put simply, the programmes did not match the popular taste of rural audiences. Moreover, the post-screening discussions were often a disaster because the rank-and-file members did not know how to talk about films. Learning from this initial miscalculation, the urban format was adapted to the rural context, but Catholic ciné-clubs remained a marginal phenomenon in the countryside and most of them vanished during the 1960s. In retrospect, however, the tradition of a cinephilic engagement with the movies turned out to be quite resilient in rural France. Art & Essai cinemas do well in the French countryside, as we will see in more detail in Kristian Feigelson’s chapter in the final section of this volume. Introduction: A New Approach to European Cinema History

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Despite the radically different geopolitical context, there are some interesting overlaps between the Catholic ciné-clubs of 1950s France and the rural film clubs that were organised in the German youth movement of late 1960s and the 1970s, which Gunter Mahlerwein discusses in the final chapter of Part III. In the post-1968 decade, the youth movement was the most important form of grass-roots activism among rural adolescents in the German Federal Republic. An urban phenomenon at first, it soon spread to the countryside, where the demand for an autonomous youth centre – outside the influence of the municipality, church and existing associations – was frequently met with fierce resistance because it was perceived as an overt protest against the traditional social and cultural order. Influenced by American and British rock music as well as left-wing politics, youth centre activists developed an alternative culture in which the cinema was integrated by way of monthly film nights, which consisted of a screening followed by critical discussion. The film programmes were typically set up by a special film team of cinephiles, who often developed a taste for art cinema by reading specialised literature, attending discussions with young film-makers, and visiting art-house cinemas in nearby cities. In most cases, the film team was responsible for the selection of films, which sometimes led to heated debates because their predilection for art-house films was not necessarily shared by other youngsters. In most youth centres such conflicts were solved by implementing more democratic selection practices and programming a broader range of films, alternating between ‘hard-core’ art cinema and more accessible movies. The need to find a balance between art and entertainment, intellectual and popular sensibilities, was a recurring problem for rural film clubs, regardless of the historical context. In the big city, there usually was and is a large enough audience to support a strictly art-house programme, but in the countryside the aesthetic ambitions of cinephile programmers are usually tempered by economic and social constraints. At the same time, art cinema has a continued presence in the countryside, which seems to have its roots in the various youth movements of the post-war era. Again we can begin to aggregate research findings and observations. What appears from these contributions about alternative exhibition practices is the need for a more specific historiography of filmgoing in rural settings. Rural film culture is marked by an amazing diversity of sites and situations, which calls for further exploration and ­ ifference ­categorisation. More importantly, its history is characterised by a qualitative d in the way the cinema operated as a cultural practice and social experience. For rural audiences, the experience of filmgoing remained diverse and fragmented to such a degree that we might ask ourselves to what extent these viewers participated in the mass entertainment culture that was rooted in the permanent movie theatre as the preferred site of capitalist film consumption with an ideologically defined set of rules in respect to exhibition practices and audience behaviour. Contemporary Trends in Historical Perspective The final essays in this volume each offer a long-term perspective on contemporary trends in small-town and rural film exhibition. By putting the present in contrast with the past, the authors provide further insight into the historical continuities and discontinuities that have been discussed with varying emphasis in the first three sections. 14

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Karina Aveyard traces the history of community cinemas in Britain from the foundation of the first film society in London in 1925 until present-day developments in volunteer-led film exhibition, whereby she explores the interplay between initiatives on the grass-roots level and the broader political discourse on film as culture and educational instrument. Like the French ciné-clubs, film societies were initially an urban phenomenon and a rather elitist endeavour with their condemnation of popular movies and almost exclusive focus on avant-garde cinema, documentaries, classics from the silent era and other non-mainstream cinematic forms. After the war, in the context of left-wing cultural politics committed to elevating the taste of the lower classes, the film societies expanded their social and geographical basis. While cinema admissions plummeted, the movement flourished from the 1950s until the late 1970s, notably in small towns in rural Yorkshire, Scotland and the south-west, where commercial film exhibition was almost inexistent. Technological innovation is an important factor in understanding patterns of growth and decline in alternative, volunteer-led film exhibition. The widespread availability of 16mm copies spurred the growth of film societies in the post-war era, whereas the emergence of home video and the launch of movie channel Film4 heralded their decline in the 1980s. Since the late 1990s, there has been a resurgence of community cinemas, most strongly again in rural regions with a low density of movie theatres. This recent growth can partly be explained by the advent of userfriendly and relatively inexpensive exhibition technologies (DVD, Blu-ray and portable projectors). However, as Aveyard convincingly argues, the enthusiasm for community cinema cannot solely be accounted for in terms of opportunities created by new technologies. Volunteer-led film exhibition requires active engagement on the organisational level and a continued commitment to social and cultural ideals, as she points out. Her analysis also makes clear that these ideals have considerably shifted over time in response to changes in the public discourse on the cinema as well as changing notions of rural sustainability. Whereas first-wave community cinemas were strongly engaged with film education and appreciation, today’s film clubs typically have a different vocation. A significant number still promotes film appreciation in the tradition of the film societies, but more frequently the screenings are primarily organised and perceived as social events that foster community cohesion. As a result, the programming revolves no longer around art-house genres, but typically consists of mainstream films that have already proved their success at the box office. In sharp contrast to the United Kingdom, where the contemporary political climate attributes a minor role to the government to assure cultural access in rural regions, Kristian Feigelson’s case study of a community cinema in Die, a semi-rural small town in the Rhône-Alpes region of France, shows that pro-cinema policies can make a real difference to people who live in rural regions, where most traditional movie theatres have closed down and which are ignored by the big multiplex companies. Although today the provision of cinemas in municipalities with less than 10,000 inhabitants is extremely low in France, especially compared to the boom period of the 1950s, paradoxically, these smaller localities represent about half of the total number of cinemas that are classified Art & Essai, an official art-house label which stipulates that a considerable part of the programme is devoted to quality cinema. In fact, recent statistics reveal that in many rural and semi-rural départements, art houses dominate the market and their market share continues to grow year by year. As Feigelson observes, Introduction: A New Approach to European Cinema History

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this remarkable development challenges common-sense notions of cultural geography, although it must be said that the large majority of these venues also show mainstream movies and would not survive without the Art & Essai subvention and financial support of the local municipality. This is also the case with Le Pestel in Die, which has been owned by the town since 1985 but is rented out to a private entrepreneur. With empathy for the challenges of running an art-house cinema in the countryside, Feigelson details the theatre’s programming practices, social engagement with the Die community, policy of cultural diversity and participation in the international East–West Festival. Thanks to government support and the idealism, enthusiasm and commitment of its managers and volunteers, Le Pestel maintains the French cinephilic tradition and manages to survive in an increasingly competitive market in which the majors leave little room for independent cinemas. What transpires in the history of Le Pestel is a strong commitment to post-1968 ideals of community activism, which we also see in Mahlerwein’s study and which may have played a role in the recent resurgence of volunteer film exhibition in the UK as well, as it coincided with the retirement of the first cohorts of the baby-boom generation. Aveyard notes that in rural Norfolk the initiative for a film club often comes from higher-educated retirees who recently moved there from London. In respect to the demographic dynamics, it is significant that in the UK as well as in France, community cinemas primarily attract a clientele well above the age of cinema’s core audience. In the final chapter, Stuart Hanson raises the question of age and the future of smalltown film exhibition. Young people (age group fifteen to twenty-five) have historically constituted the core audience of movie theatres. In the French countryside, youngsters nowadays prefer to travel long distances to multiplex complexes to see the latest Hollywood and French blockbusters. They shun independent mono-screen movie theatres like Le Pestel, which only offer mainstream films weeks after their national release and in general favour the less commercial art-house fare. More data are needed to establish the film preferences and practices of their peers in other parts of Europe, but existing evidence suggests that there is not much reason to believe that art-house style cinephilia has much of a future outside metropolitan Europe, with the exception perhaps of student towns. In any case, the greying clientele for traditional movie theatres represents a ticking bomb under state-subsidised film exhibition in rural France and even more so in other countries where rural regions do not benefit from a structural, ideologically motivated government support system for independent cinemas and quality programming. The last two chapters examine key trends and major transformations in the spatial distribution of cinemas, combining film-historical data and insights with perspectives from social geography and urban planning. Daniel Biltereyst and Lies Van de Vijver offer a longitudinal analysis of film exhibition in Flanders, one of the most densely-settled regions in Europe. Despite its size, Belgium has been a lucrative market since the early 1900s, with a provision of cinemas and attendance rates that are only surpassed in Europe by the United Kingdom. The proliferation of film venues can be partly explained by the importance of the non-commercial sector. From the 1920s until the 1960s, about a third of the film outlets were run by religious and political organisations which each used the cinema to attract people who belonged to their sphere of influence. Like elsewhere in Europe, cinema attendance in Belgium decreased 16

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dramatically from the late 1950s onwards and as a result of the decline the structure of the market fundamentally changed. Small, family-owned businesses that operated mono-screen cinemas disappeared and film exhibition was increasingly controlled by a small group of big players that operated multiscreen venues. The decline in film venues was particularly sharp in small towns and villages, whereas the number of screens in metropolitan Brussels, Antwerp and Ghent, and in the main provincial cities, remained more or less stable. A key moment in Belgian cinema history was the opening of the twenty-five-screen Kinepolis complex in Brussels in 1989, only four years after the first European multiplex opened in Milton Keynes in Britain. The Kinepolis Group became market leader in Belgium and with 110 screens the company holds a near monopoly in the main segments of the national market. Biltereyst and Van de Vijver apply theories of spatial functional hierarchies to gain insight into the geographical distribution of cinemas across time and to understand how different networks of film exhibition operate in present-day Flanders. In the early twentieth century, the boom in permanent cinemas spread from the three metropolitan centres – Brussels, Antwerp and Ghent – to the main provincial cities and from there to small towns in more rural areas during the interwar period. At the turn of the twentieth century, after several decades in which rural and small-town cinemas represented a considerable segment of the exhibition sector, they conclude that cinemagoing has become once again an essentially urban leisure-time activity that is concentrated in the big cities and metropolitan agglomerations – a development similar to that observed in many European countries. Although in Flanders the dichotomy between city and countryside is increasingly blurred because of urban sprawl, functional hierarchies between urban networks still hold and determine the fields in which the different players operate. The authors found a strong correlation indeed: the activities of the multiplex companies are concentrated in metropolitan areas and major regional centres, whereas independent commercial exhibitors operate in smaller cities and niche markets that are left aside by the majors. In the final chapter, we return to the United Kingdom, which for a large part of the twentieth century left the rest of Europe far behind in terms of cinema attendance and which represents today the largest and most developed multiplex market within the EU. Whereas Aveyard’s contribution emphasises rural film exhibition, which in Britain has become an almost entirely volunteer-led affair, Stuart Hanson deals with the latest trends in commercial film exhibition: the re-emergence of the movie theatre as a key feature of the urban landscape, especially in medium-sized cities and smaller towns. Since the opening of The Point in Milton Keynes, the number of multiplex cinemas continued to grow in the context of increased suburbanisation and planning policies that encouraged the emergence of out-of-town shopping and leisure centres. However, since the mid-2000s, cinema’s place in the town centre has been re-established, Hansen argues, both in the public discourse and in actual practice. His contribution underlines the importance of studying policy shifts in urban planning and economic legislation to understand the changing geography of new cinema construction. The growing emphasis on ‘urban regeneration’, especially under Tony Blair’s Labour governments, resulted in new mixed retail and leisure developments in many inner cities across Britain and the opening of new multiplexes by both national players and smaller regional multiplex operators. However, not all regions profit from this new trend in the same way. Introduction: A New Approach to European Cinema History

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Smaller market towns, especially in more rural regions, continue to lose their cinemas as traditional venues close and the multiplex companies are not interested in taking their place. However, in some of these towns, the gap is filled by independent exhibitors who renovate old mono-screen movie theatres and operate them as second-run cinemas on a business model that has been developed to serve community interests. As in the case of Le Pestel in Die, key to the success of this new generation of independent cinema operators is a close relationship with the local community. Regular moviegoers are encouraged to participate in a membership system which offers them special benefits like reduced ticket prices and special members’ events. At the same time, these members reinforce the economic sustainability of the venue and its function as a social space. At the end of this volume, the conclusion that cinema has become once again an urban entertainment is difficult to avoid. At the same time, the research in the final section hints at the persistence of a range of independent, community-centred initiatives that aim at keeping the social and cultural experience of filmgoing alive in rural regions. As Gunter Mahlerwein points out, there is a long tradition in the countryside of cultural self-organisation. The new film medium had its roots in the big city, but travelling showmen brought the cinema to the country not long after the first presentations to metropolitan audiences. In later decades, the movies became a more permanent feature of social life in towns and villages, although rarely a daily routine. What did the cinema mean to people who lived in Europe’s hinterlands? There is no simple answer to this question. There are no simple analytical frames to be adopted, no one-dimensional methods of interpretation that may satisfactorily reveal the meaning of filmgoing in the European countryside – any more than there is a single, essential metropolitan experience of the cinema. However, the metropolitan ideal of cinema did become the paradigm of film historiography. With this volume we have shed a different light on European film culture by looking at its dynamics and diversity from the perspective of the periphery. It is our hope that the contributions in this book will stimulate more innovative and comparative approaches to the history of cinemagoing in Europe and elsewhere, while encouraging other disciplines to discover what might be learned from film historians. NOTES 1. For the American historiographical debate on this issue, see the introduction and conclusion of Kathryn H. Fuller-Seeley (ed.), Hollywood in the Neighborhood: Historical Case Studies of Local Moviegoing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008) as well as Robert C. Allen’s contribution in this volume of essays about small-town and rural cinemagoing in the United States. See also Robert C. Allen, ‘Race, Region, and Rusticity: Relocating U.S. Film History’, in Richard Maltby, Melvyn Stokes and Robert C. Allen (eds), Going to the Movies: Hollywood and the Social Experience of Cinema (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2007), pp. 25–44. 2. Karina Aveyard, Lure of the Big Screen: Cinema in Rural Australia and the United Kingdom (Bristol: Intellect Press, 2014), p. 3. 3. Robert C. Allen, ‘Decentering Historical Audience Studies: A Modest Proposal’, in FullerSeeley, Hollywood in the Neighborhood, p. 22. 18

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4. ‘The Countryman and the Cinematograph (1901)’, BFI Screen online, www.screenonline.org .uk/film/id/444455/, accessed 13 June 2015. 5. Cf. Thomas Elsaesser, ‘Discipline through Diegesis: The Rube Film between “Attractions” and “Narrative Integration”’, in Wanda Strauven (ed.), The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006), pp. 211–14. 6. Christian Metz, Le signifiant imaginaire (1977). Quotes are from the English translation: The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982). 7. Ibid., pp. 102, 103. 8. Ibid., p. 101. 9. Ibid., p. 102. 10. Frank Kessler, ‘La salle en ville comme dispositif’, in Laurent Creton and Kira Kitsopanidou (eds), Les salles de cinéma: Enjeux, défis et perspectives (Paris: Armand Colin, 2013), pp. 53–4. It is telling in this respect that the working-class patrons of Parisian neighbourhood cinemas (a ‘community audience’ of people with ‘little schooling’) are erased from his metropolitan model and integrated in the rural archetype. As we know from historical sources, many of them were recent migrants from the countryside. Metz acknowledges that he offers just ‘one ethnography of the filmic state’; other variations are possible – depending on the cultural, social and geographical contexts, but he situates these other modes outside Western countries. Imaginary Signifier, pp. 138–9. 11. See in particular Allen, ‘Race, Region, and Rusticity’, pp. 25–44, and ‘Decentering Historical Audience Studies’, pp. 20–33. See also Kathryn H. Fuller-Seeley and George Potamianos, ‘Introduction: Researching and Writing the History of Local Moviegoing’, in Fuller-Seeley, Hollywood in the Neighborhood, pp. 3–9. 12. Robert C. Allen, ‘Manhattan Myopia; or, Oh! Iowa!’, Cinema Journal vol. 35 no. 3 (Spring 1996), p. 97. 13. André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion, ‘A Medium Is Always Born Twice’, Early Popular Visual Culture vol. 3 no.1 (2005), pp. 3–15. See also Paul S. Moore, ‘The Grand Opening of the Movie Theatre in the Second Birth of Cinema’, Early Popular Visual Culture vol. 11 no. 2 (2013), pp. 113–25. 14. Moore, ‘The Grand Opening of the Movie Theatre in the Second Birth of Cinema’, p. 113. 15. See, for instance, Gregory A. Waller, Mainstream Amusements: Movies and Commercial ­Entertainment in a Southern City, 1896–1930 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995); Kathy Fuller, At the Picture Show: Small-town Audiences and the Creation of Movie Fan Culture (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1996); Fuller-Seeley, Hollywood in the ­Neighborhood. 16. It should be noted that the homogenising tendency of Hollywood is partly magnified by film historiography. For one, North American scholarship on small-town and rural film exhibition (e.g. Waller, Fuller, Potamianos, Klenotic) has focused primarily on the era of silent cinema. For another, little attention has been paid to non-theatrical venues where films continued to be screened after the emergence of permanent movie theatres (e.g. churches, multipurpose halls and community centres). A broader approach in time and scope may well generate a richer and more differentiated understanding of Hollywood’s impact on film culture in the American hinterlands. 17. Richard Maltby, ‘New Cinema Histories’, in Richard Maltby, Daniel Biltereyst and Philippe Meers (eds), Explorations in New Cinema History: Approaches and Case Studies (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), p. 3. Introduction: A New Approach to European Cinema History

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18. Cf. Richard Maltby, ‘On the Prospect of Writing Cinema History from Below’, Tijdschrift voor mediageschiedenis vol. 9 no. 2 (2006), pp. 85–7. 19. Allen, ‘Decentering Historical Audience Studies’, p. 22. 20. Cf. Maltby, ‘On the Prospect of Writing Cinema History from Below’, pp. 84–91. 21. Derek Sayer, Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century: A Surrealist History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), p. 7. 22. Cf. Maltby, ‘New Cinema Histories’, pp. 13–14. 23. On the importance of domestic films, see Andrea Sisto and Roberto Zanola, ‘Cinema Attendance in Europe’, Applied Economics Letters vol. 17 no. 5 (2010), p. 516. 24. Claude Forest, Les dernières séances: Cent ans d’exploitation des salles de cinéma (Paris: CNRS Editions, 1995), p. 80. 25. Moore, ‘The Grand Opening of the Movie Theatre in the Second Birth of Cinema’, p. 114. 26. Maltby, ‘On the Prospect of Writing Cinema History from Below’, pp. 87–90.

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PART I LOCAL DYNAMICS

PART NO. PART TITLE PT LINE 2

1 Small-Town Cinema in Scotland: The Particularity of Place

Ch no Title

John Caughie Author

In the introduction to Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century: A Surrealist History, Derek Sayer states: ‘I am not interested in the grand narratives that discipline so much as the details that derail’.1 He acknowledges the indebtedness of his study to The Arcades Project, and in particular to Walter Benjamin’s essay ‘Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century’.2 Sayer reminds us of Benjamin’s historical methodology: I needn’t say anything. Merely show. I shall purloin no valuables, appropriate no ingenious formulations. But the rags, the refuse – these I will not inventory but allow, in the only way possible, to come into their own: by making use of them.3

While acknowledging that his history of Prague in the twentieth century will tell a story, unlike Benjamin’s ‘mirror-world’ of Paris in the nineteenth, it will be a story ‘that is woven from a multitude of petites narratives’.4 I am drawn to this as a kind of methodological perspective because it seems to me to reflect somewhat exactly the experience of researching early cinema in small towns: early cinema, that is, before cinema distribution and exhibition had become more or less institutionalised, and the programme had become more or less standard. Indeed, the little narratives of cinema and public entertainment in small towns derail with their detail the grand narratives of that institutionalisation, and the shape of the entertainment breaks up into local public experience. The project of studying early cinema in small towns in Scotland was inspired by the hypothesis that there would be a significant difference between small-town histories on the one hand and metropolitan or urban histories on the other, and that this difference would be important in producing a more complex mapping of early cinema. What has been disconcerting is the patchwork of significant differences not only between small towns and the centre, but also between one small town and another. Historical narrative fragments into a diversity of public spaces, recounted quite differently by local newspapers, some of which can be assigned to material social and economic contexts and some of which are left over as untidy historical refuse. The difficulty then is to reweave these ‘petites narratives’ back into some kind of historical or explanatory narrative. Historiographically, this is now becoming the familiar problem of too much data and too much detail, and it is perhaps for this reason that it may be useful to begin with the spectre of Benjamin and his ‘chaotic’ history of Paris, his ‘citing without quotation marks’, his respect for the ‘refuse of history’, and his break with ‘vulgar historical naturalism’ by importing the ‘principle of montage’: ‘The first stage in this undertaking’, he says, ‘will be to carry over the ­principle of montage into history.’5 Small-Town Cinema in Scotland: The Particularity of Place

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This research is part of a three-year project, ‘Early Cinema in Scotland, 1896–1927’6. The major aim of the project is to fill in a historical gap in British and European film history, discovering, perhaps, a national, or, more precisely, a ‘national-regional’ cinema, which has been largely absent from histories of early British cinema. The absence is at least partly because many histories have been production-centric, and there is little evidence of indigenous film production in Scotland which might compare with the early pioneers of cinematography in England, or the attractiveness of Ireland to inward investment. The project, then, engages with a number of paradoxes. First, the evidence points to the popularity of cinemagoing in the major cities and towns in Scotland, with numbers of seats per capita and average attendances exceeding those of England and of much of Europe. Second, Scottish narratives – of Rob Roy, Bonnie Prince Charlie, Lucy of Lammermoor, Young Lochinvar, Annie Laurie – all formed part of the diet of early cinema, and the romance of Scottish literature and legend was a fertile pasture for European and American producers. Third, however, only a handful of the films was shot in Scotland and something less than a handful was produced by Scottish companies. Despite the local popularity of cinemagoing, then, and despite the international popularity of Scottish stories, Scottish entrepreneurs preferred the immediate returns of cinema exhibition to the somewhat more precarious investment in cinema production. The history of early cinema in Scotland is therefore largely one of cinemagoing, and of distribution, exhibition and regulation. The construction of a ‘national’ cinema is defined less by questions of identity and representation, and much more by the local and diversified experience of cinemagoing. My focus within the project is on film exhibition in ‘large’ and ‘small’ towns, which, in the terms of the 1911 census, would include areas whose population was between 2,000 and 30,000, constituting 34 per cent of the population of Scotland. A further 23 per cent live in mainland and island rural communities. It is, of course, worth noting that for more than half of the population of Scotland (4,760,904 in the 1911 census) whatever exposure to cinema they may have had – and it was by no means universal – would have been outside the urban areas. Predictably, there was a marked concentration of population around the industrial areas in the central belt of the country, with 40 per cent of the population concentrated in the three industrial counties, Lanark, Renfrew and Dumbarton, which surrounded Glasgow and bordered on the industrial and shipping section of the River Clyde. It is these areas that created the legend of the popularity of cinema in the early part of the twentieth century, with Glasgow, as the epicentre of cinemagoing, cinema building and film exhibition, claiming for itself the title of ‘Cinema City’. While this is clearly important for mapping cinema and for testing the claims to legendary popularity, my sample of cinema in small towns will include industrial service towns in the central belt between Edinburgh and Glasgow, market towns in the agricultural areas of the north-east, weaving towns in the Borders area, and some more remote towns like Lerwick in Shetland or Campbeltown in Argyll. This sample, with town populations ranging between 7,000 and 15,000 but with differential forms of regional catchment, tries to capture some of the cultural diversity of distributed communities, identified by patterns of employment, civic and religious governance, and traditions of entertainment. For the cinema, they are towns which were already on

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the entertainment map, with a pre-history of popular travelling shows which followed fairs, markets, fishing fleets and, in the case of Campbeltown, for instance, on the Clyde coast, tourists. Crucially, they are accessible by rail or sea transport, and therefore to distribution networks. In this article, Bo’ness is my primary case study, with Lerwick as a contrasting case study, a montage of locations that resists any normative tendencies. Methodologically, the larger project proposes both synchronic and diachronic approaches to early cinema in Scotland. At this point, I am taking a diachronic approach, following the chronology of cinema exhibition outside the major cities. My primary source is local newspapers, the Bo’ness Journal and the Shetland News, and I am working not from digitised newspapers, but from microfilms. While this takes rather longer, it also exposes me to some of the distractions of the local, of the ‘refuse of history’, and it exposes cinema to other public discourses. I am testing this source as a way of accumulating messy data within which experiences may be imagined, rather than datasets, which allow history to be evidenced, and I am using the local press as evidence of public profile. In the 1911 census, Bo’ness had a population of 14,032. The town is situated on the navigable south bank of the Forth estuary and thus had good links to coal-mining areas and to the heavy industrial production centres in and around Glasgow. The main local industries were coal, ironworks and, on a smaller scale, pottery. At the beginning of the period it was also an important port for Baltic and North European trade – mainly for the import of the timber that was necessary for coal-mine props. During World War I, shipping was restricted in the upper reaches of the River Forth and Bo’ness lost much of its shipping trade to Rosyth, which became the main port on the Forth. As an industrial service town, Bo’ness mainly served the Glasgow heavy industries with coal, industrial goods and iron (the manhole covers in Glasgow are still embossed with the name of the Ballantine Bo’ness Iron Company). In a period of high employment, Bo’ness would be a relatively prosperous community, with employment, largely male, ranging from managerial to dock labour, and with a strong civic spirit. Lerwick had 7,296 inhabitants in 1911. It was the major city of Shetland, with an island population of 27,911. Lerwick is situated 100 miles north of mainland Scotland, and 210 miles north of Aberdeen, its mainland sea link. It was connected to the mainland by a mail boat, which ran weekly between Aberdeen and Lerwick in the winter and twice weekly in the summer – weather permitting and weather in the North Sea frequently did not permit. The issue of film distribution is immediately apparent. While Lerwick might be seen as a catchment area for all of Shetland, with a large part of the island population living within 10 miles of the town, the roads were not good, and in a 1914 report on a local car test on country roads it took four and a half hours to travel the 40 miles from Lerwick to North Roe, the most northerly settlement on the main island of the Shetland archipelago. The major industry of the period was fishing, and, until a huge slump after World War I, Shetland was reputed to be the second busiest herring port in Europe, exporting cured herring across the continent. Pelagic fishing was seasonal and during the fishing season from April to September, the population of Shetland might be swelled by up to 9,000 itinerant workers – fishing crews, but also packers, coopers and gutters, many of whom were women – who followed the fishing fleets and lived in overcrowded rented accommodation.

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BO’NESS The choice of Bo’ness as a case study was opportunistic, inspired by an annual Bo’ness Festival of Silent Cinema, established in 2009 and built around the continued existence of the Hippodrome, a refurbished and fully functioning cinema with claims to be the earliest extant purpose-built cinema in Scotland. Opening in March 1912, it had a seating capacity of 710, according to the architect. But according to the Dean of Guild responsible for planning, it could seat nearly 1,000. Refurbished in 2008, it now seats just over 400. In many ways the history of the Hippodrome is the history of cinema in small towns in Great Britain. Into the early sound era, it offered a mix of variety and film. From the early 1930s until the late 1960s, the Hippodrome operated as a ‘film-only’ cinema. In the 1970s, it became a bingo hall. Somewhat uncharacteristically, following local campaigning to preserve it as a heritage site, it was reinvented with the support of the local council to give new life to small-town cinemagoing. In 1912, the Hippodrome is evidence of the surprising vitality and ‘modernity’ of cinema in this small town. Not only is it one of the early purpose-built movie theatres, but it is also architecturally innovative. The local architect, Matthew Steel, designed a round building, still distinctive in its art deco architecture and interior decoration, which was intended to be not simply functional but ‘up-to-date’ and ‘modern’.

Renovated and revitalised Hippodrome, Bo’ness (Photo: Kim Traynor, 2010)

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The building of a cinema such as this was not merely to satisfy public demand for entertainment but was itself a signal of the aspiration of the town to be ‘modern’. Between 1897 and 1927, Bo’ness had six venues showing the cinematograph and at certain points (1912–14 and 1920–2) it had four venues showing films and variety acts on a more or less weekly basis to a population of around 14,000 people. Initially, the venues included public halls, such as the Town Hall, which continued to show film programmes until 1924. The Drill Hall, which was the base for the 10th B Company [Cyclist] of the Royal Scots Guard, responsible for patrolling beaches on the River Forth, showed films till 1914. By December 1910, the year in which cinematographs were established in picture houses or ‘electric theatres’ in Glasgow, Bo’ness already had a hall accommodating an audience of 400 in what was called the Electric Theatre. This venue was joined in 1912 by the purpose-built Hippodrome, owned and managed by Louis Dickson, who had previously rented the Drill Hall. From 1919 to 1922, he also ran the Pavilion, converted from a bakery and accommodating an audience of 600. However, this second cinema, intended to show films only, without variety turns, lasted only three years. In early 1914, the owner of the Electric Theatre had planning permission for a new cinema seating 1,000 people, replacing the ‘incommodious’ ­Electric Theatre, but World War I interrupted his plans and the cinema was never built. In 1921, a disused church was converted by the architect Matthew Steel into the ­Picture House, which continued as the Star Cinema until the 1960s, when it too became a bingo hall. Until 1922, all venues were showing a mix of cinema and variety, with the live entertainment frequently taking prominence in newspaper advertisements. By 1924, the Town Hall had reverted to touring variety in combination with local music and drama. Only the Hippodrome and the Picture House continued to ­operate as cinemas without interruption till the 1960s. The chronology of the opening and closing of venues, and the shifting patterns of cinema and variety are complex, but the competition between the venues for a limited audience was dynamic and definitive for this particular small town. My hypothesis was that the historical trajectory of early cinema in many small towns in Scotland began from a position of civic significance – embraced, civically, as part of a local and modernising public space – and that, by the end of the 1920s, cinema had more clearly become part of an international market dominated by Hollywood and by the shaping influence of the long, narrative feature film. Development, however, was uneven, and in this movement from the local to the international, from traditional entertainment to the feature film, live variety ‘turns’ refused to go away. If New Cinema History is concerned with the experience of cinemagoing, it is worth remembering that for a significant proportion of the population, watching films was only part of the experience. Importantly, live acts and variety and sometimes the films themselves retained a participatory form, a ‘sing-along’ culture – the Pathé songs, for example – that survived well into the sound period. Without wishing to romanticise the audience, the pleasures of the cinematograph were not simply the pleasures of absorption and consumption but the pleasures of participation in a communal activity, possibly even the distracted pleasures of being part of an ‘unruly’ or ‘untutored’ community. The movement between these forms of engagement, from the suspense of the serial film to the acrobatic live act to the slapstick comedy to the patriotic song, all within a single evening’s ‘good night out’, evades easy categorisation and complicates the notion Small-Town Cinema in Scotland: The Particularity of Place

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of a stable public sphere. My hypothesis in broad terms is that the period moves unevenly and inconsistently towards stability, and that the persistence of live acts in Bo’ness until the end of the ‘silent’ period may be a mark of the persistent attraction of participatory, communal entertainment. The first recorded screening of the cinematograph in Bo’ness was in the Volunteer Hall (Drill Hall) on 27 December 1897, between Christmas and New Year, about eight months after the first screenings in Edinburgh, Glasgow and Aberdeen. The programme was ­sponsored by the Bo’ness Parish Church and chaired by the Reverend Robert Gardner, Bachelor of Divinity. The Bo’ness Journal reported: THE CINEMATOGRAPH: As will be seen from the advertisement in our columns, the inhabitants of Bo’ness will have the first opportunity of witnessing the latest development of science – the Cinematograph – on Monday evening first, when two exhibitions will be given in the Volunteer Hall, under the auspices of the Parish Church Bazaar Committee. The almost marvellous productions of this invention have been so much spoken about, and as the great majority of Bo’ness people cannot yet have seen the living pictures, there is sure to be a crowded house on Monday night. The first exhibition will be a great treat to the children.7

Subsequent screenings in the 1900s were sponsored by the Foundry Boys Society, a church-based organisation for young apprentices, by the Sunday schools and by temperance societies. There seems to have been a relatively relaxed approach to Sunday screenings in Bo’ness, an issue that caused considerable concern elsewhere in the UK for much of the early period. I found little evidence in the press of particular moral or religious regulation. However, to avoid any sense of a commercial enterprise operating on the Sabbath, these screenings were often accompanied by sacred songs and invited a silver collection rather than charging for a ticket. This practice associates early cinema in Scotland with the ‘culture of enlightenment’, which Charles Musser associates with the new technologies of the phonograph, the illustrated lecture and the kinetoscope. ‘Advocates considered them elevating experiences capable of winning citizens away from those rival amusements that were corrupting and base’.8 These new media were rational entertainments that, civically and pastorally, introduced modern technologies in a reassuring setting. The sponsorship of the church and its affiliates reminds us that the Church of Scotland was a social as well as a religious organisation, democratic in its constitution, mediating between the spiritual and the secular, and a defining element in the construction of a public sphere. Defined by historian Tom Devine as a ‘parish state’ responsible historically through its elected elders for education, poor relief and the maintenance of order, it was much more local in its governance than the remote governments of Edinburgh or Westminster.9 The initial endorsement of cinema by the church, however temporary and ambivalent it may have become, placed the early cinematograph within rational entertainment, respectable civil society and the local public sphere. Alongside the church, the town council was happy to promote cinema as a testament to civic modernity, promoting a town and a community that was ‘up-to-date’. The council was happy to lease out its own premises – the ‘new’ Town Hall opened in 1904 – to local and touring companies. Occasional reservations were expressed. In 1912, there was some concern by the Bo’ness Library Committee that the decline 28

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in book borrowings may be due to ‘the counter attractions of electric theatres, cheap books, and the want of larger supplies of fresh books, especially fiction’.10 Other councillors in the same year, under the provision of support for necessitous children, ‘did not approve of the principle which allowed a man to spend his time and money in Picture Palaces and then come back to the ratepayers to feed his children’.11 Broadly, however, within its regulatory function, the council welcomed cinema. From 1902, the Saturday evening entertainments at the Drill Hall appeared ‘under the auspices of the Provost, Magistrates and Town Council’. Sunday evening entertainments, which included ‘suitable animated pictures’ and ‘limelight views’, were also offered ‘under the patronage of the Provost and Magistrates’. In 1912, the Provost formally opened Louis Dickson’s new Hippodrome, commenting in his speech on the popularity of these new entertainments and insisting that ‘it should be the endeavour of those responsible to have only such programmes as would educate and elevate the tastes of the people’. Dickson assured him that ‘he always made the program interesting and instructive, and one particular feature was that he did not cater to any vulgarity whatever (Applause)’.12 Cinema, then, was celebrated as part of the rational, civic entertainment, which had been promoted in the ‘respectable’ press throughout the nineteenth century. The same civic welcome was offered by the Provost to the opening of Dickson’s Pavilion in 1919, but there the civic acknowledgment of cinema seems to stop. The Picture House opened a year later in January 1920, but without public announcement, with little mention in the press and with no official civic welcome.

Poster opening Hippodrome, Bo’ness, 1912

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The impression from press coverage from 1920 onwards is that the cinema as an institution had come to be regarded as an international business that was more and more independent of any local identity or civic function. From 1924, the Town Hall, operated under licence by the council, gave up its various attempts to incorporate cinema and became a venue for travelling variety shows, and, importantly, for local theatricals. Increasingly, the Town Hall became a public, community space for live touring entertainment, amateur drama and local opera, and a critical institutional gap opens up between community entertainment and commercial entertainment. In many respects, while the choice of Bo’ness as a site for a case study may have been opportunistic, it is also opportune. As a small town in which there were two or three venues competing for the same audience, one can begin to see more clearly from advertisements and editorial comment, often based on copy supplied by the exhibitor, what the terms of the competition were. In the first place, they are not generally centred on the films, but on safety and comfort, on permanence and on the visible tokens of respectability. Thanks to the Cinematograph Act, the Bo’ness venues seem to have been safe and, given the relative frequency of fires elsewhere, some play is made of safety in the advertisements. For example, in a 1909 advertisement for Dickson’s Picture Palace in the Drill Hall, a separate line is included informing the readers that ‘It may be mentioned that the cinematograph operating box is fireproof, being constructed of iron, so that there is no danger to anyone while the pictures are being shown.’13 However safe they may have been, the physical conditions of attending cinemas do not seem inviting from today’s perspective. They were undoubtedly often overcrowded: 1,000 people in the Hippodrome, designed for 710 and which now seats 400 comfortably. They were also badly ventilated and probably half of the audience smoked cigarettes and pipes. In 1911, the Electric Theatre introduced the radical policy of forbidding smoking at the six o’clock show on Saturday, to give (quite literally) a breathing space between the matinee and the evening performance. By 1922, the Picture House was billing itself as ‘Clean! Quiet! Comfortable! The Home of the Elite! Vacuum Cleaned, Disinfected and Deodorised Daily’.14 Permanence was also a selling point. There were frequent appeals throughout the period to a sense of cinema being rooted within the community, distinct from the touring companies, which simply passed through. For instance, in 1910, Dickson’s Picture Palace (Drill Hall) billed itself as the ‘Bo’ness Original Permanent Picture House’.15 Symptomatically, this appeal in advertisements seems to mark cinema’s move from the travelling shows and concert parties to a civic public space, embedded in a local community. In the 1910s and 1920s, managers such as Louis Dickson and John Jeffrey (himself a local councillor) were public and civic figures, running benefits for the local Children’s Festival, for injured miners or for the victims of a housing fire. They were part of a civic community rather than mere commercial entrepreneurs with a licence to entertain. Respectability was critical and there were frequent appeals to its tokens. The attendance and endorsement of prestigious public figures were incorporated into advertisements. In 1911, Dickson advertises that his programme has been shown to Herbert Asquith, the Prime Minister, and his wife in North Berwick.16 At least two touring companies billed themselves as ‘Royal’ – Walker’s Royal Cinematograph and Electro-Drama (‘Eight times engaged by Royal Command’) and Scott’s Royal Electric 30

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Cinematograph Company, each establishing its regal or prime ministerial credentials as an advertisement for its respectability. All of these appeals are part of the competitive movement of advertising cinema from the undifferentiated mass to the ‘elite’ – of which the Picture House claims quite explicitly to be the home. What is perhaps most interesting and distinctive, however, and may seem to run against this trend from ‘popular’ entertainment to ‘refined’ entertainment, is the persistence of variety turns. In Bo’ness in 1927, the Hippodrome, one of the first purpose-built cinemas in Scotland, was still showing ‘Mdlle Dalmere’s TABLE CIRCUS Performing cats, rats, monkeys, canaries, etc’; and ‘Madame Thomson’s SIX FORGET-ME-NOTS, in a Singing and Dancing Act’.17 Throughout the period, there is a pattern of venues attempting to give up live entertainment and then either reverting to the variety format or closing. In February 1913, the Electric Theatre announced that it was going to give up ‘turns’ and show pictures exclusively. But in April, when it had been taken over by new management, it re-introduced variety. Dickson’s Pavilion opened in 1919 with a films-only programme, but it was not able to compete with the new Picture House and closed in 1922. The Picture House, which opened January 1920, announced itself as a cinema, showing a programme of films only, but in October 1921, it closed temporarily to build a stage. A few months later, it announced that it was going to have to give up variety ‘because of the trade depression’ and it reverted to a films-only programme. This change of course seems to demonstrate the dilemma of management between the apparent popularity of variety with audiences and the increasing expense of touring live acts. Variety struggled, but refused to die. This was at a time when the Bioscope, the exhibitors’ trade journal, regarded the incorporation of variety acts into film programmes as a form of desecration. By 1927, the Picture House was what we have now come to understand as ‘a cinema’. However, the Hippodrome persisted with its familiar and popular mix of variety and film into the early 1930s. The continuing ‘recidivism’ into variety and live entertainment long after it appears to have passed its assumed sell-by-date in urban contexts and attempts to kick the habit seem to have a distinctively long life in Bo’ness. The affiliation of cinema and variety may be an expression of the participatory community function of entertainment culture in this particular small town. As we will see, it is not replicated in all small towns in Scotland. Even as cinema evolved as a narrative art, and as feature programmes became more common, it is still often the variety act that commands most space in the advertisements and in editorial comment in the Bo’ness Journal. Distinctively, in this small town at least, the participatory form of variety seems closely identified with what was defined as a ‘good night out’ and for a long time live entertainment remained part of going to a picture show. LERWICK Shetland and its capital seem to be defined by their remoteness. Aberdeen, its point of contact with mainland Scotland is 210 miles away (336 kilometres). On the other hand, Bergen in Norway is ‘just’ 230 miles away (368 kilometres). As much a part of the North Atlantic as of the British Islands, it comes as no surprise that a Norwegian film company, Northern Bioscope from Oslo, brought a cinematograph entertainment Small-Town Cinema in Scotland: The Particularity of Place

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to Lerwick’s Town Hall in 1906. Culturally, Shetland still has traces of the Hanseatic League, the Baltic trading group of the late Middles Ages and the early modern period. Its continuing trade with Baltic seaports and with the Dutch fishing trade in the early twentieth century gave it a European perspective. Shetland’s links to the annual migrations of the pelagic fishing trade, to the whaling trade and to shipping more generally, give it a cosmopolitan sensibility much more than many of the more enclosed small towns of Scotland. Moreover, as Lynn Abrams has indicated, it is also a culture in which women – economically important through the knitwear industry, through crofting and through fishing – play a distinctive economic, domestic and cultural role, more than is typical in small parochial towns.18 Lerwick was a mustering point for convoys in World War I and II. The advertisements for cinema during World War I seem much more engaged with war reporting and Ministry of Information films than the advertising of cinema in Bo’ness, which seems dominated by variety. Shetland lost more than 500 men in World War I, a higher proportion of its population than any other part of Britain. Remote, but cosmopolitan, the island culture of Shetland is interesting precisely because it does not fit many of the stereotypes of remoteness or insularity. Shetland’s first exposure to the cinematograph came on 11 and 12 May 1897, around the same time as the first screenings took place in the big cities in Scotland and eight months before the cinematograph reached Bo’ness. Mr Robert Calder, billed as ‘cinematographist’, brought ‘animated pictures’ – an ‘exhibition of the marvelous’ – to Lerwick Town Hall along with a concert party which included Miss Sarah Calder, ‘the popular elecutionist’, and Mr George W. Walker from Glasgow, ‘the popular Scottish baritone’.19 Along with the animated photographs, the songs were illustrated by limelight lantern slides. Calder’s show was part of an annual schedule of touring concert parties, which appeared, usually for two nights, in the spring and the summer. The schedule included in 1896, Mr J. F. Caverto – ‘the man with the Mysterious Fingers’20 – and from 1896 till around 1912, the ‘Dandy Darkey Coons’ with ‘Plantation Songs, Choruses, Topical Songs, Step Dances and Stump Speeches’.21 In 1907, the Ormonde Family, who had also visited the Town Hall in Bo’ness, came to Lerwick with ‘Royal Animated Pictures’.22 ‘Huge Audiences Hypnotised Nightly’ boasted the local paper, which informed its readers that the troupe was led by Dr Ormonde, ‘the ‘Marvellous Rosicrucian Hypnotist’ of the ‘World Famous Ormonde Family Sunflower Coterie’.23 Calder’s was probably the most regular visiting concert party in Shetland. He came twice yearly, in April and July, usually for two nights in Lerwick and one night in Scalloway (seven miles away) with a variety show that included ‘Calder’s Royal Cinematograph’. What distinguishes the concert parties and the cinematograph in the 1890s and 1900s in Lerwick from the companies which visited Bo’ness is that their visits were seasonal and weather-dependent. There is no sense of the continuous exposure to the cinematograph, or indeed to variety entertainment, that can be traced in Bo’ness. Concert parties and animated pictures were occasional, taking up less than six weeks in the year in the 1900s, waiting for the summer season when they could arrive on the Monday boat and leave on the Friday boat. The culture of entertainment outside these short seasonal concert party and variety visits was local and occasional – amateur and children’s performances in the main centres of population, often associated with the churches; whist drives and dances in the more remote communities. Sometimes it was domestic: the development, for example, of the tradition of Shetland fiddle playing. 32

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Public entertainment does not seem to occupy the same routine and regular public space as it does in Bo’ness, and there is less evidence of civic endorsement of its modernity and its ‘up-to-date-ness’. Given the seasonal nature of touring entertainment with little evidence of a specific demand for cinematographic entertainment, it is a little surprising to find a purposebuilt cinema opening in Lerwick on 24 September 1913. While the Hippodrome in Bo’ness responded to clear demand and marked the movement from travelling shows and showmen to a purpose-built cinema, the appearance of the North Star cinema in Lerwick, the most northerly cinema in Britain, seems a much more entrepreneurial venture, gambling on the popularity of cinema without much evidence of demand and with links to the distribution network which may occasionally have been precarious. The gamble paid off, however, and the North Star continued to operate as a cinema till 1976, when it doubled with bingo, showing films for five nights a week and introducing bingo for the other two. In 1979, the fixed seating was removed from the stalls to allow it to be used as a nightclub, but it continued to show films till 1989. From then till 2007, it was a music venue, at which point the doors closed and the building was demolished in 2011. The North Star Cinema Company Ltd was registered in Aberdeen in May 1913, with a capital of £3,000 and a Lerwick merchant, Gilbert Anderson, as company director. The board included two other merchants from Lerwick as well as an accountant and company secretary who were based in Aberdeen. Aberdeen had a relatively well-developed cinema circuit and it seems likely that distribution was handled by the office there. The North Star could seat about 500 people, 200 of whom could be accommodated in the gallery on ‘tip-up chairs, upholstered in plush’.24 The building was powered by an eight-horsepower Kelvin generator (Lerwick did not have a power station till 1953). Admission prices initially were three pence, six pence, nine pence and one shilling. In the 1920s, special prices between nine pence and one shilling and six pence might be charged for ‘special’ features like The Lost World (1925) or Les Miserables (1925). Despite any shipping charges, Lerwick prices were broadly in line with those in Bo’ness. Unlike in Bo’ness, there was no civic welcome or public injunction to ‘educate and ­elevate the tastes of the people’. The North Star cinema opened with a speech by the ­company accountant, Mr John Jeffrey. He regretted the absence of the chairman (whose photograph was shown on the screen), welcomed the manager, Mr J. M. Smith, and thanked the pianist, Mr Geo. Lindores. In the Shetland News, I have found no comment by the town council or by the churches on the propriety of the new cinema, other than a report that the management should be congratulated on ‘their latest effort to combine education with recreation’ by showing Gaumont Graphic – ‘a “living” illustrated newspaper’ – but it is likely that this note was contributed by the manager himself as were most programme reviews published throughout the period.25 From the evidence of the local press, which ­customarily included reports from the town council (often verbatim accounts), the North Star cinema seems at no point to have been the subject of public or official debate, and, hence, it is difficult to establish that link to the cultural, social or political public sphere which seemed to characterise cinema in Bo’ness. From the available evidence, the North Star cinema seems to have occupied a different civic space from that in Bo’ness, without explicit church or local authority endorsement. Small-Town Cinema in Scotland: The Particularity of Place

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The other respect, in which the North Star cinema was distinct from the cinemas in Bo’ness, and particularly from the Hippodrome, is the absence of the persistence of variety. As far as the North Star is concerned, variety turns remained seasonal and very occasional. The advertised programme from 1913 onwards was almost exclusively a programme of films, changing two or three times a week, interrupted only occasionally by appearances of a solo ‘artiste’ like Flo Dixie, ‘The Scottish Vesta Tilley’26 or Madame Margaret Jones, offering ballads and sentimental songs.27 Increasingly, the solo artist was local: ‘Shetland’s Premier Character Comedian, John Anderson, introducing (by special request) his latest Topical Song and Story in the Shetland dialect’.28 Throughout the 1910s and early 1920s, solo visiting variety ‘turns’ could be seen three or four times a year for a six-night run, but from 1925 onwards they had completely vanished from the advertisements. Touring concert parties never visited the North Star cinema. However, they did appear on the bill at the Town Hall. The differentiation between the offering at the civically operated Town Hall and the commercially run cinema seems to have begun in the early 1910s, much earlier than any separation begins to appear in Bo’ness. What is missing from advertisements and reports of the North Star programme is any ongoing sense of the cinema as part of a wider sphere of variety entertainment, the kind of communal, participatory ‘good night out’ that Bo’ness found it so hard to abandon. The one form of participatory entertainment that did appear at the North Star were singing or story-telling competitions. These were organised from 1922 onwards during the fishing season and with prizes of £2. Significantly, the competitions were only open to fishermen and other men working in the fishing industry. They ran for one week of the year, usually in August. The competitions were not open to women, which may reflect the low social status and low ‘respectability’ of the fishing girls. If the communal, participatory forms of entertainment in Bo’ness were aimed at the local community, these competitions seem to be aimed as entertainment for a ­specifically male, and substantially transient, community. While programming at the North Star for most of the year was typical of a pictures-only cinema in the 1920s in cities and towns throughout Scotland (and beyond), it is odd details such as this that interrupt the patterns of experience and return us to the particularities of place. THE Particularity of place Paradoxically, cinema in Bo’ness, only 30 miles (48 kilometres) from Glasgow and with 14,000 inhabitants, was still tied into a variety culture of live acts and ‘turns’ in the late 1920s, which is more characteristic of the 1910s, while Lerwick, with the most northerly cinema in Britain and with a population of 8,000, is already showing film programmes in 1913 that would be typical of a first-run cinema in a major city. The contrast is most striking during World War I when the programmes advertised in Bo’ness are graphically dominated by variety acts, with war topicals appearing in small print. In the same period, the programmes in Lerwick consisted almost exclusively of films, and advertisements frequently made a major feature of war topicals and Ministry of Information films. After the war, as feature films became the dominant format, the Lerwick programme looked more 34

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and more like a city programme, while the experience of cinemagoing in Bo’ness still seemed to be coloured by the live entertainment and communal culture of a small town. Of course, one must be cautious. The vitality of cinema and entertainment culture in Bo’ness meant that at least two cinemas were competing for the same limited audience, whereas the North Star in Lerwick had no competition. This, of course, affected the mode of selling the programme and the rhetoric of advertising. The Hippodrome’s persistence with variety into the 1930s may have been to give it a unique selling point over the Picture House. Equally, Bo’ness has easy access to variety turns, which circulated around the central belt, while Lerwick seems to have gradually dropped off the map for touring companies in the 1910s and 1920s. The material conditions of geographical remoteness and accessibility limited the attractiveness of Lerwick to touring companies (though some still appeared seasonally in the Town Hall), restricted the flexibility of film distributors and determined the choices which were available to Shetland audiences. One cannot assume that Lerwick had a more constitutionally ‘cinematic’ audience than Bo’ness. What one can assume, however, is that the experience of cinemagoing was different, and even more radically different than I would have anticipated. In terms of the cinema programme and the experience of cinemagoing, the small town of Lerwick seems more different from the small town of Bo’ness than it is from the West End of Glasgow, and thus the idea of what constitutes a ‘small town’ begins to crumble. What is clear from these two case studies, in their detail, is that the standard historiography of cinema struggles to capture the diversity of experience of a large part of the population. The particularity of place and its material and geographic conditions may explain the patterns of programming and exhibition, and the choices that exhibitors made. Accessibility and proximity to major distributors was clearly a significant factor. However, exhibition practices were also determined by the patterns of touring companies and local live entertainment, their evolution and decline. Bo’ness was still a location in which touring companies could try out shows before moving to the music halls in Glasgow and Edinburgh, while travelling to ‘remote’ Shetland was a major expeditionary commitment. As variety became expensive compared to film hire, it was no doubt inevitable that live entertainment would concentrate around areas of high population density. The particularity of place, however, also inflects the complexion of the public sphere and the social and civic space of cinema. Whatever material or commercial practices may underpin them, there seems to be a significant difference in the two towns in the social and public spaces which cinema occupies. From the evidence available in the local press – limited, perhaps, but central to the establishment of public profile – my impression is that cinema was a key element in the civic modernisation of Bo’ness, a dynamic economic location in an industrial belt. This is not evident in the public press in Lerwick, an economy at the beginning of the twentieth century still dependent on the more or less stable forms of cottage industry, crofting and fishing. The contradiction, of course, is that, in its programming, the North Star cinema in Lerwick frequently seems more ‘up-to-date’ than the Hippodrome in Bo’ness, which in 1927 is still bound to live entertainment acts which were, by then, ‘old-fashioned’. To put it another way, the Hippodrome, with its continued investment in variety may Small-Town Cinema in Scotland: The Particularity of Place

35

have resisted the ‘modernisation’ of the cinema programme more effectively, and in doing so it may have retained the engagement of its audience. The contradiction points to the gap between the institution of cinema as a locus of public modernity and the experience of cinema, which is constantly inflected and skewed by the particularity of place and history and local culture. What is crucially at stake for a history of ­moviegoing is that awkward, irregular and fluctuating movement in early cinema between the theatricality of a participatory and communal entertainment and the absorption of a developed classical cinema.29 What, in turn, is at stake in that is the diversity of the audience and its expectations of a ‘good night out’. The intuition that the further a cinema is from the centre, and the more remote its location, the further it will be removed from the driving force of modernisation and change, is confounded, or, at least, confused. ‘Modernity’ is constantly qualified by local cultures and the particularities of place. Lerwick and Bo’ness, seemingly at opposite ends of the geographical and cultural spectrum of ‘small towns’, are refreshingly counter-intuitive, resisting a unifying and explanatory narrative of small-town cinema history, derailing the order of the spectrum, requiring a more complex mapping. This is why Benjamin’s rejection of ‘vulgar historical naturalism’ and his promotion of ‘the principle of montage’ seem salutary. The history of cinema in small towns is not a narrative history, and it is certainly not a grand narrative flowing from the centre to the peripheries, but, to cite Robert Allen, it is a landscape of ‘uncertain, untethered pathways and networks’ or, to return to Derek Sayer, it is a historical montage ‘woven from a multitude of petites narratives’. 30 NOTES 1. Derek Sayer, Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century: A Surrealist History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), p. 7. 2. Walter Benjamin, ‘Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century’, in Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 3–26. 3. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, p. 460. 4. Sayer, Prague, p. 7. 5. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, pp. 458 and 461. 6. The project is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), AH/I020535/1. 7. Bo’ness Journal, 24 December 1897. 8. Charles Musser, The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990), p. 56. 9. Thomas Martin Devine, The Scottish Nation, 1700–2000 (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1999), pp. 84–102. See also Stewart J. Brown, ‘Religion and Society to c.1900’, in Thomas Martin Devine and Jenny Wormald (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Modern Scottish History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 78–98. 10. Bo’ness Journal, 1 March 1912. 11. Ibid., 22 March 1912. 12. Ibid., 15 March 1912. 13. Ibid., 15 October 1909.

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14. Advertisement in ibid., 5 May 1922. 15. Ibid., 15 April 1910. 16. Ibid., 6 January 1911. 17. Hippodrome advertisement in ibid., 14 January 1927. 18. Lynn Abrams, Myth and Materiality in a Woman’s World: Shetland 1800–2000 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005). 19. Shetland News, 8 May 1897. 20. Ibid., 26 September 1896. 21. Ibid., 6 June 1896. 22. Ibid., 23 November 1907. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid., 20 September 1913. 25. Ibid., 6 December 1913. 26. Ibid., 27 March 1915. 27. Ibid., 22 July 1920. 28. Ibid., 11 April 1914. 29. See Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980). See also Richard Rushton, ‘Early, Classical and Modern Cinema: Absorption and Theatricality’, Screen vol. 45 no. 3 (2004), pp. 226–44. 30. Robert C. Allen, ‘Reimagining the History of the Experience of Cinema in a Post-moviegoing Age’, in Richard Maltby, Daniel Biltereyst and Philippe Meers (eds), Explorations in New Cinema History: Approaches and Case Studies (Oxford: Blackwell, 2011), p. 56; Sayer, Prague, p. 7.

Small-Town Cinema in Scotland: The Particularity of Place

37

2 Ch no

Film Title Culture and the Catholic Milieu in the Münsterland: ­Billerbeck and Telgte in the 1950s Author Dörthe Gruttmann

Today, many small towns and rural regions in Germany have no cinema. The multiplexes in their closest big cities have to satisfy the appetite for new films and cinema events. For much of the twentieth century, however, many smaller towns and larger villages had their own movie theatre(s) or at least an infrastructure for regular film screenings, but this aspect of German film culture has been largely ignored until now.1 Similarly, the influence of the Catholic milieu on film exhibition has only recently become a topic of growing academic interest. However, most studies in this emerging field focus on national or regional developments and do not take local aspects into account, although, especially in small towns and villages, the impact of the church on local film culture was often considerable because ecclesiasticism was stronger there than in the cities.2 By closely examining how the Catholic milieu shaped the experience of filmgoing in two towns in the Münsterland, I intend to gain a better insight into the local dynamics of film culture, while I hope that my research shows at the same time that such a case study can help us to better understand regional or national patterns. As Thunnis van Oort points out: One of the central issues in recent debates on the history of cinemagoing, film exhibition and distribution, is how to connect micro-level to macro-level research. Examining Catholicism’s attitude to cinema offers an interesting perspective on this question, since Catholic communities were simultaneously organized on local, regional, national and international levels.3

The towns of Billerbeck and Telgte, two important pilgrimage destinations in the diocese of Münster, will serve as case studies. My analysis will mainly deal with the late 1940s and 1950s because it was in this period that cinemagoing became an important leisure activity in both towns. Before World War II, the authorities in Billerbeck and Telgte felt that there was no need for a permanent movie theatre in their towns. During the 1930s, applications to erect a new cinema were rejected time and again. In 1937, for instance, the mayor of Telgte justified his rejection of a licence by arguing that it would be an unprofitable business that could not provide for a family.4 Circumstances changed considerably in the immediate post-war era and Telgte and Billerbeck witnessed the advent and success of permanent cinemas. Once the cinema had been integrated into the cultural infrastructure, the negative or positive influence of the cinema became a topic of public debate. By analysing the controversies around certain films and grass-roots Catholic initiatives to ‘improve’ the local film climate, we seek to

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understand how the communities of Billerbeck and Telgte negotiated their relation to the cinema and sought to contain its potentially ‘harmful’ influence. Catholic small towns in the Münsterland region Before examining the significance of the Catholic milieu and its impact on cinematic culture in Billerbeck and Telgte, we will first provide a short historical background. Billerbeck and Telgte are situated in the Münsterland, a predominantly rural region in Westphalia. Both towns date from the Middle Ages and were important pilgrimage destinations in the diocese of Münster (Telgte remains so until this day). Neither of them possessed any major industry during the twentieth century and most of their inhabitants belonged to the (lower) middle classes, whereas the hinterland was (and still is) agrarian. Due to its picturesque townscape and location in the midst of the Baumberge hills, Billerbeck (4,236 inhabitants in 1950) was a popular tourist destination. Telgte (4,634 inhabitants in 1950), on the other hand, has long served as a suburb of Münster, the former provincial capital. Therefore, the local population was more diverse than in Billerbeck, including workers and civil servants who were employed in the city.5 Like many small towns in rural Germany, Billerbeck and Telgte served as political and administrative centres for the surrounding farming communities and villages. The towns also served as cultural centres. Local amateur theatre groups, choirs, bands and other clubs regularly offered concerts and performances in pubs and inns. From 1950 onwards, Billerbeck had an open-air theatre. Entertainment was also provided by the annual marksmen’s festivals and the festivities that local associations organised to commemorate their foundation (Stiftungsfeste). A red-letter day for the inhabitants of Telgte and tourists alike was the Mariä-Geburts-Markt, a fair held after the day of the Birth of the Blessed Virgin Mary, consisting of a horse market, a funfair and an exhibition of agricultural machines.6 Another important cultural institution was the Telgte museum of local history and pilgrimage (today called Religio), which was founded in 1934. With the exception of the Tecklenburger Land in the north, the Münsterland was an overwhelmingly Catholic region. In Billerbeck and Telgte more than 95 per cent of the population was Catholic. This figure dropped to about 80 per cent after the war as a result of the influx of Protestant refugees from the eastern parts of the former German territory. The region, which is often referred to as the ‘black Münsterland’, (Schwarzes Münsterland) was known for its strong (political) Catholicism, which makes it ­particularly relevant to a study of the relation between the church and the cinema. Catholic values and moral standards traditionally made up a vital part of regional and local identities in the Münsterland. The power of Catholicism not only meant that the ecclesiastical year was firmly integrated into everyday life, but also that the clerics had a central role in the towns, except during the Nazi era. The social control of the Church, which persisted until the early 1960s, was reinforced by the relatively small size of the towns and closeness of their inhabitants.7 Cohesion was established by religious ­affiliation: Catholicism was a worldview that conveyed a certain sense of unity and group identity. This group identity was further fostered by membership in Catholic clubs and Film Culture and the Catholic Milieu in the Münsterland

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societies as well as by reading the Catholic press, which served as the voice of the political party Zentrum (Centre Party) and after 1945 of the Christian Democrats.8 The milieu was highly organised, especially in the twentieth century when the Catholic Church and its believers were under increased pressure because they had to deal with rapid modernisation and the ensuing political, social and economic changes that profoundly affected everyday life. From a religious point of view, the response took two directions: rejection and adaptation. This is reflected in the attitude to the cinema. On the one hand, the Catholic Church and its organisations tried to use the film medium for their own purposes. On the other hand, efforts were made to ban particular films (though not the cinema itself per se). A brief history of film exhibition in Billerbeck and Telgte will help to explain the Catholic milieu’s impact on the development of local film culture. The cinemas in Billerbeck and Telgte In the early twentieth century, efforts to establish a permanent cinema failed in both towns. In 1913, a cinema (Tonbild zur alten Post) opened in a Billerbeck restaurant, but only lasted a couple of months. It is unclear if its early demise was due to the poor quality of the show, as the town chronicler wants us to believe, or some other reason. The townsfolk were compensated for the absence of a permanent movie theatre by travelling cinemas and by the screenings organised by local associations, which either owned their own projector (like, for instance, the Catholic male youth organisation Jünglingssodalität), or rented one for the occasion. As a matter of principle, the town administration of Billerbeck refused permits for screenings that were in conflict with Catholic values and beliefs.9 Inhabitants of Telgte also had to content themselves with travelling shows in pubs and restaurants. In the 1930s, the town was visited at least once or twice a week by ambulant film exhibitors.10 However, unlike the people in Billerbeck, they had more options because they were not far from Münster. In October 1945, the town council of Billerbeck granted Fritz Mischke a licence to operate a cinema. Mischke and his wife were Protestant newcomers from Berlin, where they had owned several cinemas that had been destroyed in the war. Their ­Union-Theater in Billerbeck was opened in March 1948 in a leased hall that was part of Hotel Ahlers. It had 352 seats and was solely used for film screenings. Films were shown every day of the week and the Mischkes monopolised the business of ­cinemagoing for several years. Only in 1954 did they experience competition when local resident Theodor Zumbusch opened the brand-new Odeon next to his inn. A similar situation occurred in Telgte. In 1946, a cinema licence was given to Franz Müller of Greven, who had been the manager of a cinema in the city of Münster. The hall where the screenings were given belonged to an inn and could accommodate a few hundred people (figures for the seating capacity vary between 329 and 430). In 1953, Müller sold his Film-Theater to Heinz Riech, who was also an out-of-towner. Riech completely modernised the premises, but when he reopened his renovated hall under its new name – the Park Theater – he was no longer the only film exhibitor in Telgte. Just around the corner, a purpose-built movie theatre had opened its doors. This new 490-seat Lichtburg cinema, notable for its modern interior design and daring 40

Cinema Beyond the City

Altdeutsche Gaststätte and the adjacent Odeon-Theater, Billerbeck (Courtesy Stadt Billerbeck Archive)

use of colour – a combination of red, green and yellow – was equipped with the latest technology, including a wide screen suited for CinemaScope films. A pub was integrated into the building so that guests could have a drink before or after the show. As in Billerbeck, the newcomer on the market was a local resident with strong ties to the community: Bernard Homoet came from a family of brewers and was the proprietor of the Telgte corn distillery. The Lichtburg offered screenings all week long, with two shows a day at the weekend. Riech’s Park Theater was usually closed on Mondays and Tuesdays. It didn’t only show films but was also used for parties, balls and theatrical performances. In terms of programming, there seems to have been a tendency towards product differentiation between the two cinemas. Some inhabitants of Telgte remembered that the Park Theater screened action movies, whereas the Lichtburg specialised in more sentimental fare, especially Heimat-films and musicals (Revuefilme).11 In both Billerbeck and Telgte, it was clear from the outset that there was no need for two cinemas. The venues that closed first were those operated by outsiders to the local community and whose business was situated in a multipurpose building. Initially, they were taken over by their immediate competitors (in Billerbeck in 1955; in Telgte in 1957), who thus monopolised the local market. These older venues remained open for several years after the take-over. In Billerbeck, the Union-Theater was taken over in 1955 and closed down at the end of the 1950s. In Telgte, the Park Theater lasted quite a bit longer. Homoet secured its lease in 1957 and the venue remained open until 1966. Eventually, the more modern, purpose-built cinemas had a similar fate. Homoet’s Lichtburg closed its doors in 1968 (fifteen years after it opened), whereas the Odeon in Billerbeck remained in business until 1974 (in total twenty years). This development seems to be typical for small towns in rural regions across Germany.12 Film Culture and the Catholic Milieu in the Münsterland

41

Films as a threat to Catholic beliefs The fear that the cinema as a commercial leisure institution or that specific film texts would undermine Catholic values, religious beliefs and education surfaced in many countries. However, there is little research on how this fear played out on the local level.13 As we will see in this section, the measures taken in Billerbeck and Telgte were similar, but had a quite different outcome. In both towns, groups and individuals protested against particular films on ­religious grounds and tried to get them banned by putting pressure on the cinema owner or the authorities.14 In Billerbeck, the situation seems to have been especially tense because of the outsider position of the Mischkes who ran the Union-Theater. It seems that these newcomers from Berlin never managed to integrate with the local community. According to the records of a council meeting held in 1949, the council believed that most of Billerbeck disapproved of the couple.15 Whether this was because Fritz Mischke was a Protestant or because he was a party leader of the newly founded local Social Democrats is uncertain. In any case, it is clear that the fact that they did not have an influential local advocate or moral backer hampered their business. It took them over two years to establish their cinema in the hall which they leased from Hotel Ahlers. The Film Section of the military government refused to grant them a licence and they were forced to engage a manager who had the right papers. Once the cinema was opened, the Mischkes had many conflicts with the hotel owner. Their plans to erect a new cinema building also met with fierce resistance and ultimate failure. Initially, the problem was the scarcity of construction materials after the war. However, in 1950, the town administration blocked the couple’s project outright by declaring that their building lot had been designated as a green area.16 Tension further increased in 1952, when Mrs Mischke introduced late-night shows at the Union-Theater. The new programming practice met with strong opposition from communal leaders and local associations because it was clear from the start that she intended to show films that had been negatively rated by the FilmDienst. The Film-Dienst was the voice of the Catholic Film Commission for Germany Hotel Ahlers, Billerbeck, with the Saint Ludgerus Cathedral and was set up to assess all films and to in the ­background. T   he porch on the left was the entrance disseminate their judgments to local priests to the Union Theater (­Courtesy Stadt Billerbeck Archive)

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and the Catholic public.17 In the 1950s, the periodical’s reviews reached millions of Germans as they were displayed on the notice boards of parishes and municipalities and reprinted in the Catholic and secular press. The films were mainly assessed from a religious point of view. For the classification, they used the international rating scale of the OCIC (Organisation catholique internationale du cinéma/International Catholic Organisation for Cinema). The scale ranged from 1 (suitable for all) to 4 (rejected).18 However, outright rejections were rare (less than 1 per cent) and only 5 per cent of the films were classified in category 3, which meant a negative notice because the film was considered to have a harmful effect. Nevertheless, there were quite a few films that caused great commotion in Telgte and Billerbeck as well as in other small towns in Germany. The first late-night movie that Mrs Mischke programmed was Eva und der Frauenarzt (Eva and the Gynaecologist, 1951), a sex-education film that dealt with venereal diseases, abortion and premarital intercourse. Not surprisingly, the Film-Dienst considered it ‘unsuitable for the public’. The municipal committee for cultural affairs (Städtischer Kulturausschuss) of Billerbeck shared this view, but they could not block its screening, which took place – coincidentally or not – the night before the Day of Confessions for the youth (Jugendbekenntnistag).19 Several days later, the local newspaper published two letters that condemned the film as inappropriate and morally reprehensible. One of the letters was jointly signed by the municipal committee for cultural affairs, the local agricultural association (Landwirtschaftlicher Ortsverein Billerbeck), several Catholic associations and the provost. They expressed the view that late-night shows might be common in big cities, but that such screenings could not be tolerated in a rural context where people had a Christian attitude towards life.20 Thus, the authors – prominent figures in the Billerbeck community – deliberately dissociated themselves from metropolitan film culture and put pressure on Mrs Mischke to adapt her late-night programmes to local conditions. However, Mrs Mischke chose to ignore this publicly expressed indignation. The news that she intended to continue to show films with a negative Film-Dienst rating led to further debates and concrete action. These films, including Cuba Cabana (1952) starring Zarah Leander, were extensively discussed by the town council as well as the committee for cultural affairs. The municipal administration continually put pressure on Mrs Mischke not to screen such films and demanded stricter age verifications. Mrs Mischke was asked to change her block-booking contract with her film distributor, Herzog Film, so that she could refuse films that had been rated 3 or 4 by the Film-Dienst. According to the Catholic Film Commission for Germany, several cinema owners in Trier and in Catholic small towns in Southern Germany (especially the Baden region) had successfully changed their contracts. However, Herzog Film refused to change Mischke’s contract. In fact, the distributor complained to the local ­administration about illegal interference in business operations and violations of constitutional rights.21 Herzog Film also insisted that the cinema proprietor was obliged to screen all films. Otherwise the company would claim compensation for the owner and for itself (probably because the contract stipulated that the company would get a percentage of the box-office earnings). In May 1953, the town administration of Billerbeck ended up paying over 200 DM to Herzog Film to prevent the screening of Cuba Cabana.22 However, this seems to have been an exception. The Union-Theater continued to programme controversial films and for good reason because, according to the municipal administration, these screenings were always well attended. Film Culture and the Catholic Milieu in the Münsterland

43

Whereas the Mischkes found themselves repeatedly in conflict with the municipal and religious authorities, the proprietor of the Odeon, Theodor Zumbusch, had no such problems. He belonged to a well-established family in Billerbeck and avoided conflicts because he was part of the local community. The Odeon rarely screened films considered unsuitable by the Film-Dienst. Films in the categories 1 and 2 dominated its programme. In Telgte, the screening of particular films also met with resistance and the protests were considerably more successful than in Billerbeck. In 1955, a committee for the protection of the youth (Aktionsausschuss Jugendschutz) was formed, which consisted of representatives of the churches, schools, parents, the police and local youth organisations (Ortsjugendring). The committee considered film a particularly dangerous influence upon the local youth and, aiming to create a ‘clean film atmosphere’, they started negotiations with the two cinema owners in order to alter their exhibition practices. First, the committee wanted the cinemas to stop displaying indecent and improper posters in public spaces. Second, films that broke with decorum had to be banned from the local screens. Finally, the exhibitors were required to enforce age restrictions. It took two years for the association to achieve its main goal. Following a strategy that had been successful in other small towns, the committee asked the local administration to offer tax reduction or subsidies to the cinema proprietors in exchange for the guarantee not to screen films that were rated 3 or 4 by the Catholic Film Commission. Again, here as elsewhere, the problem was the then dominant system of film distribution. Cinema owners were forced to book the entire offering of a distributor in advance and were not allowed to reject certain films that they considered unsuited for their audiences. Whether Homoet, the proprietor of the Lichtburg, had to make a compensatory payment to his film distributor or whether he managed to negotiate a new contract is unknown, but he obviously entailed a loss in profit by not screening films with negative ratings because the town administration paid him up to 600 DM compensation a year – at least until 1961.23 Also, Homoet only refrained from showing films with ‘controversial’ subject matter after he had taken over the competing Park Theater, which made him the only player on the local market. Still, the deal between Homoet and the municipality did not seem to go far enough for the film committee of the Ortsjugendring. In 1961, this local youth organisation proposed a motion to reduce the payment to Homoet because they found that he screened too many films rated 2EE (films to be viewed with considerable reservations) and had displayed inappropriate advertisements. The town administration, however, refused to reduce the compensation. In their view, Homoet had respected the original agreement.24 The cinema as a vehicle for Catholic beliefs One strategy to influence the impact of the cinema was to protest the screenings of allegedly harmful movies in local cinemas. Another strategy was to use the film medium for educational purposes. In 1954, the Billerbeck branch of the Catholic Kolping Society launched the idea of film screenings followed by a public discussion. The format was a local success and was soon copied in other small towns in the Münsterland and even beyond. Hence it is worth looking at this initiative in more detail. 44

Cinema Beyond the City

The film discussion evenings of the Kolping Society took place at the newly opened Odeon cinema and were set up in collaboration with the adult education organisation (Volksbildungswerk) to which all Catholic associations in Billerbeck belonged. The initiative was also supported by the municipal authorities, the local schools and the Diocesan Film Office (Diözesanfilmstelle). The screenings took place every four to six weeks during the winter months, when many Billerbeck inhabitants had less work, especially those in agriculture. Thus, in winter 1955–6, four discussion evenings were organised. The films were debated directly after the screening. Initially, the moderator was the diocesan film consultant, Hans Fahle, who was later replaced by the head of the episcopal Press Office, Dr Günter Graf. According to the local vicar, the discussion evenings were often sold out and reached a much wider audience than the film clubs. Many visitors – on one occasion more than 130 according to the Film-Dienst – had to be turned away. During the first five years, an estimated 7,500 people participated in these Catholic film events in Billerbeck with an average of 400 persons per event at the start. In contrast to the film clubs, where discussions focused on aesthetic and cinematographic aspects, the ecclesiastical film evenings gave priority to moral and religious interpretations.25 Although the organisers noted that young people were especially active participants in the discussions, the audience seemed to have represented a crosssection of the population. This corresponded to the aims of the initiators because no specific age group was targeted in advance. As the Film-Dienst explained, the evenings served to encourage the appreciation of (culturally) valuable films and to foster critical judgment among the rural population. However, the aspirations of the Catholic Church and its organisations went further. They hoped that the cinemagoers would not only reflect upon the content, but would also draw (moral) lessons from the films and apply these to their own lives. Most of the films shown had been positively reviewed by the Film-Dienst, but not all. This is indicated in an article published in the Nachrichtendienst Münster, a news service paper of the diocese of Münster, which was edited by the cathedral vicar (and later bishop) Heinrich Tenhumberg and written by Dr Graf. Praising the educational screenings in Billerbeck, Graf specified that not only ethically valuable films had been discussed, but also a film that had to be viewed with considerable reservations.26 Although the article does not mention the title, it is likely that he refers to a film with a 2EE rating. In Telgte, the committee for youth protection supported an initiative called ‘friends of the good film’ (Freunde des guten Films). This organisation tried to raise the quality of the local film culture by offering carefully selected programmes. The evenings were set up in collaboration with Homoet, who let them use the Lichtburg free once a week. As in Billerbeck, most of these films had been positively reviewed by the Catholic Commission. Examining the fifty-five films shown between the first evening in November 1955 and December 1957, only one title was rated category 3. The majority of those shown by the Freunde des guten Films were rated between 1 and 2EE. These were German as well as foreign productions and typically a few years old. However, when the film was also part of the regular weekly programme at Homoet’s cinema, as was sometimes the case, it was often a recent release.27 Film Culture and the Catholic Milieu in the Münsterland

45

A local initiative becomes regional: Catholic film discussion ­evenings in the diocese of Münster Film screenings by the church or related religious organisations offered an alternative to the commercial cinema. While the overall ambition was to ‘develop strategies for restoring Christian values to contemporary life’, this could be achieved in different ways.28 In some dioceses in Germany, Catholic organisations arranged their own screenings in ecclesiastical facilities. This was not the case in the diocese of Münster, which deliberately refrained from this, preferring to make use of commercial cinemas. On the bishopric level, it was repeatedly pointed out that good cooperation with cinema owners was an essential condition for successful Catholic film work.29 ­Therefore, the initiative in Billerbeck was not only welcomed by the local authorities, but also by the diocese of Münster and the Catholic Film Commission for Germany. Three years after the first film discussion evening in Billerbeck, the experiment was valued as one of the strongest assets of Catholic film work in the diocese of Münster.30 Indeed the phenomenon spread rapidly to other small towns and rural communities in the Münsterland. Promoted as ‘educational events’, they were viewed as a counterpart to the more liberal film clubs and by the end of 1958 had become a permanent feature of Catholic film work in some forty towns in the region, including Telgte. As a rule, its advocates were the parish, the local adult education organisation or the cinema proprietor. The Diocesan Film Office judged the evenings as an overwhelming success based on the interest and positive reactions of the filmgoing public, but also because they improved the relationship with local cinema owners.31 Other regions where Catholic film discussion evenings became popular were the south Oldenburg area and the Lower Rhine region. However, it remained by and large a small-town phenomenon. The only exceptions seem to have been Wilhelmshaven, a big port city, and Bottrop in the heart of the metropolitan Ruhr region.32 CATHOLIC FILM CULTURE IN MÜNSTER The research on Billerbeck and Telgte shows that in small towns in the Münsterland the Catholic Church had considerable influence on the inhabitants and on the cinema proprietors. This raises the question of whether there were people who tried to escape the restrictions imposed by this powerful Catholic milieu. Did a part of the population of Billerbeck and especially Telgte go to the city of Münster (120,000 inhabitants) to watch certain films, perhaps those that were not screened in their hometown? With a dozen cinemas in the 1950s and 1960s, it is safe to assume that there was a greater choice than in the small-town cinemas.33 In the 1920s and 1930s, people from Telgte often went to the cinema in Münster, as there was a direct railway connection and it was only 11 kilometres away. Although travelling film exhibitors visited the town weekly, these shows could not compete with the experience of cinemagoing in Münster, where new films could be watched in modern theatre buildings. But in the first years after the war, going to Münster was difficult because of the devastation caused by the conflict.34 Most movie theatres in Münster had been destroyed as well as the railway connection. This explains why in 1946 Telgte’s head of administration after years of

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refusal finally granted a licence for a permanent cinema. In the 1950s, when Telgte had two movie theatres, there seems to have been little incentive to go elsewhere to see a film. Both the Lichtburg and the Park Theater did good business and were regularly overcrowded. Only in the 1960s, with the increase in mobility afforded by car ownership, did it seem that people returned to the cinemas in Münster, which offered more choice and the latest releases.35 There is no evidence that people from Billerbeck regularly went to the movies in Münster while they had a cinema in their own town, which was until 1974. The local choice seems to have been sufficiently attractive and the distance of 25 kilometres too off-putting, especially for those who did not own a car. Finally, research on film and youth culture in Münster during the 1950s suggests that the local film climate did not fundamentally differ from the local dynamics in Telgte and Billerbeck.36 Although Münster’s social structure was more diversified than in most small towns in the Münsterland, it remained a very Catholic city. The majority of its population was Catholic (73 per cent in 1950) and, not unimportantly, Münster was the episcopal see.37 Like their counterparts in Telgte and Billerbeck, the clerics, teachers and municipal authorities in Münster sought to keep young people away from films that were negatively rated and tried to give them an alternative. For instance, four times a year, educational film screenings for schoolchildren were hosted by the local cinemas. In 1953, a youth film association (Jugendfilmring) was founded whose purpose was to screen ‘appropriate’ films and discuss them afterwards. The film club in Münster was legally responsible for these screenings, but the actual organisation was in the hands of the youngsters themselves. This youth film association, in which the Protestant and the Catholic Church were both involved, existed next to the Protestant Filmgilde and the powerful Catholic Filmliga. Despite the urban context, the Catholic Church and its allies managed to exert considerable influence on commercial film exhibition in Münster, as the example of the scandal around the Die Sünderin (The Sinner, 1951) with Hildegard Knef makes clear. This controversial film was to be screened in Münster at the 1,000-seat Apollo-Theater in early 1951. Initially, the Catholic Church tried to prevent this outright. After much discussion and with the approval of the chief of police, the Dean of the Catholic-­ Theological Faculty, Professor of Media Studies Hagemann and the local press, it was agreed that the film could be shown but only if police were present. However, not everyone was pleased with this compromise. Militant Catholic youths strongly protested, barred the doors of the Apollo to prevent the screening and were successful.38 According to a contemporary witness, some inhabitants of the Münsterland travelled as far as the Oldenburg area, a predominantly Protestant region around 160 kilometres north of Münster, to see The Sinner.39 CONCLUSION: THE CATHOLIC INFLUENCE ON SMALL-TOWN FILM CULTURE In this chapter, I have tried to demonstrate that the impact of the Catholic milieu on local film culture was not univocal. Top-down decisions made on a national scale did not necessarily have a lasting effect on the local level. On the other hand, local initiatives, like the educational film evenings at the Odeon-Theater in Billerbeck, could have regional or even supra-regional impact. Clearly, the highly organised nature of Film Culture and the Catholic Milieu in the Münsterland

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the Catholic milieu during the 1950s was also apparent in the film sector. The Catholic Church and its believers fought against the dominant commercial film culture, which they considered a corrupting influence, especially on youths. They fought not only with words by denunciating immoral films and genres in the media, but also by providing alternatives. Initiatives designed to alter the film climate were often grass-roots and organised at the local level. This was not something specific to small towns, but it had a larger impact there than in bigger cities because spheres of influence and networks usually overlapped. For example, often the mayor and some town councillors would also be members of the parish council. Hence, at least until the 1960s, church parishes were entangled in small-town affairs in many ways, including in the realm of (commercial) leisure. The case studies of Billerbeck and Telgte revealed that the influence of the Catholic Church and its clerics on the film exhibition business should not be underestimated. The responses to the growing popularity of cinemagoing in these two communities give us an impression of the film culture that prevailed in many Catholic small towns in the diocese of Münster during the post-war era. The region seems to have been exceptional in the sense that the Catholic milieu maintained a dominant position for a long time.40 Because cinema owners could not be controlled by local censorship, the diocese of Münster and the authorities often sought to work with them rather than against them. In the Münsterland this strategy was successful because of the relatively precarious social and economic position of the small-town film exhibitor. As part of small, closeknit Catholic communities, they were subject to more pressure than their colleagues in big cities and hence often more willing to align with the Church and other local forces. Moreover, Catholic exhibitors were bound to their religious beliefs and the teachings of the Church. But being entrepreneurs at the same time meant that they were frequently in a difficult situation because they needed to keep an eye on the box office. Still, our study reveals that meeting audience demand for more daring films than those approved by the Catholic Film Commission did not always take priority.41 The debates and educational film activities in Billerbeck and Telgte coincided with the film work of the diocese, which witnessed its strongest phase in the 1950s.42 From the 1960s on, the influence of the Catholic milieu on everyday life and leisure began to decline. But by then, notably due to competition from television and increased mobility, small-town cinemas in the Münsterland were already struggling for their existence and soon they would be a phenomenon of the past. NOTES 1. The few existing studies on cinemas in small towns and rural areas are sometimes integrated in small-town histories. See Wilhelm Grabe, ‘Kino in Warendorf’, in Paul Leidinger (ed.), Geschichte der Stadt Warendorf, Vol. 3: Bildung, Kultur, Gesellschaft, Medizinalwesen, Militär und Sport. Entwicklungen und Institutionen (Warendorf: Ardey, 2000), pp. 295–316. See also Werner Faber, ‘Filmbesuch und Filmbesucher im Dorf’, in Walter Hagemann (ed.), Filmstudien. Beiträge des Filmseminars im Institut für Publizistik der westf. Wilhelms-Universität Münster, Vol. 3 (Emsdetten: Lechte, 1957), pp. 27–44; Dieter Helmuth Warstat, Frühes Kino in der Kleinstadt (Berlin: Volker Spiess, 1982); Anne Paech, Kino zwischen Stadt und Land.

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Geschichte des Kinos in der Provinz: Osnabrück (Marburg: Jonas, 1985); Harald Weber, ‘Kino auf dem Land: Das Palastlichtspieltheater in Obersuhl’, Rund um den Alheimer: Beiträge zur Geschichte und Landeskunde des ehemaligen Kreises Rotenburg vol. 35 (2014), pp. 48–53; Andrea Haller, ‘Frühes Kino zwischen Stadt und Land. Einige Überlegungen zum Verhältnis von Kinoprogrammgestaltung, Kinopublikum und moderner Stadterfahrung vor 1914’, in Tobias Becker, Anna Littmann and Johanna Niedbalski (eds­), Die tausend Freuden der Metropole. Vergnügungskultur um 1900 (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2011), pp. 229–58. 2. See, for instance, Christian Kuchler, Kirche und Kino. Katholische Filmarbeit in Bayern (1945–1965) (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2006); Daniel Biltereyst and Roel Vande Winkel (eds), Silencing Cinema. Film Censorship around the World (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 3. Thunnis van Oort, ‘Christ Is Coming to the Elite Cinema. Film Exhibition in the Catholic South of the Netherlands, 1910s and 1920s’, in Daniel Biltereyst, Richard Maltby and Philippe Meers (eds), Cinema, Audiences and Modernity. New Perspectives on European Cinema History (London: Routledge, 2012), p. 54. 4. Telgte’s mayor explained in a letter to a rejected applicant that residents travel to cinemas in the nearby city Münster or visit the screenings organised by the Nazi organisation Kraft durch Freude; Correspondence between the mayor and Franz Gabriel dated 30 July 1937, municipal archive Telgte, Stadtarchiv Telgte (hereafter: StAT), Best. C, no. 1837. Applicants in Billerbeck were also rejected, though no reasons are given. See, for example, the letter by Heinrich Nattler, dated 20 November 1948, Stadtarchiv Billerbeck (municipal archive Billerbeck, hereafter: StAB), Best. D, no. 61. 5. For a detailed historical background on both small towns see: Werner Freitag (ed.), Geschichte der Stadt Billerbeck (Bielefeld: Verlag für Regionalgeschichte, 2012); Werner Frese (ed.), Geschichte der Stadt Telgte (Münster: Ardey, 1999). 6. For the cultural life in Billerbeck, see the chapter ‘Kleinstädtisches Kultur- und V ­ ereinsleben, neue Formen der Freizeitgestaltung und Teilhabe an der neuen Medienkultur’, in Freitag, Geschichte der Stadt Billerbeck, pp. 402–39; regarding Telgte, see Dietmar Klenke, ‘Die lokale Gesellschaft im Spiegel ihrer Vereine’, in Frese, Geschichte der Stadt Telgte, pp. 555–75. 7. See Peter Exner, Ländliche Gesellschaft und Landwirtschaft in Westfalen 1919–1969 (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1997). 8. See Thomas Schatten, Geschichte der katholischen Zeitschrift ‘Film-Dienst’ (Düsseldorf: Schatten, 1999), p. 19. Research distinguishes between the terms ‘Catholic milieu’ and ‘Catholic environment’ (katholische Lebenswelt). Here, for reasons of simplification only the term Catholic milieu will be used, including characterisations of the Catholic environment. For the differentiation between these two terms see: Arbeitskreis für kirchliche Zeitgeschichte (AKKZG), ‘Konfession und Cleavages. Ein Erklärungsmodell zur regionalen Entstehung des katholischen Milieus in Deutschland’, Historisches Jahrbuch vol. 120 (2000), pp. 358–95. 9. Billerbecker Anzeiger, 21 December 1912; Billerbecker Anzeiger, 1 March 1913; Dörthe Gruttmann, ‘Kleinstadt in der Moderne. Billerbeck im 20. Jahrhundert’, in Freitag, Geschichte der Stadt Billerbeck, p. 416. 10. StAT, Best. C, no. 1837. 11. For Billerbeck, see a letter by Mischke to the Amt, 10 June 1953, StAB, Best. D, no. 61; for Telgte, see Westfälische Nachrichten, 19 July 1997; correspondence between the Amt and Franz Müller, StAT, Best. C, no. 1861. The statements about the number of seats of the ParkTheater are contradictory; see letters by the town administration, Best. D, no. 607. The file on the construction of the Odeon has no shelf mark.

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12. Gruttmann, ‘Kleinstadt in der Moderne’, p. 427; Westfälische Nachrichten, 19 July 1997; see also Grabe, ‘Kino in Warendorf’, p. 306. 13. An exception is Thunnis van Oort, Film en het moderne leven in Limburg. Het bioscoopwezen tussen commercie en katholieke cultuurpolitiek (1909–1929) (Hilversum: Verloren, 2007), about Catholics and film culture in the Southern Netherlands. 14. Johannes Bernard, ‘Untersuchung über die katholische Filmarbeit. Zusammenarbeit mit Kinobesitzern’, Kirche und Leben, 13 April 2008, http://kirchensite.de/index.php? myELEMENT=154340, accessed 3 September 2013. 15. Record dated 11 November 1949, StAB, Best. D, no. 198. 16. Gruttmann, ‘Kleinstadt in der Moderne’, p. 427; StAB, Best. D, no. 61. 17. Schatten, Geschichte der katholischen Zeitschrift ‘Film-Dienst’, pp. 65–6. 18. Ibid., p. 161. The rating scale of the Catholic Commission for Germany was as follows: 1 – Suitable for all, for children (ten years of age and over); 1E – Suitable for all, for children (twelve or fourteen years of age and over); 2J – For adults, tolerable for adolescents (sixteen years of age and over); 2 – For adults; 2E – For adults, with reservations; 2EE – For adults, with considerable reservations; 3 – Advised against an attendance. The film has a dangerous effect; 4 – Rejected. The film destroys belief and morals. 19. The committee was composed of the Amtsdirektor (the head of administration of the local county), the mayor, two councillors, the vicar, a teacher and another local inhabitant. 20. Billerbecker Anzeiger, 17 June 1952, StAB, Best. D, no. 61. 21. Letter dated 13 November 1953, StAB, Best. D, no. 61. 22. Letter to Herzog Film, dated 15 May 1953, StAB, Best. D, no. 61. 23. StAT, file labelled 3021, without shelf mark. 24. Note by the director of the Amt dated 9 January 1958, ibid. 25. Film-Dienst, 24 November 1955; Billerbecker Anzeiger, 2 October 1954; Daniel Polreich, Die katholische Filmarbeit im Bistum Münster (Münster: Dialogverlag, 2007), p. 134; Hermann Leifker, ‘Die katholische Pfarrgemeinde Billerbeck in den letzten 50 Jahren’, in Basilius Senger (ed.), Liudgerusstadt Billerbeck 809/1959 (Billerbeck: Knüppel, 1959), p. 124. 26. ‘Vorbildliche Filmerziehung’, Nachrichtendienst Münster, 1 March 1956, p. 3. 27. StAT, file labelled 3021, without shelf mark. 28. Sabine Hake, German National Cinema (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 121. 29. Bernard, ‘Untersuchung über die katholische Filmarbeit. 30. ‘Zum 5. Mal Filmsonntag’, Kirche und Leben, 5 May 1957. 31. Ibid.; Polreich, Die katholische Filmarbeit im Bistum Münster, p. 136. 32. Polreich, Die katholische Filmarbeit im Bistum Münster, pp. 133 and 135. Apart from Wilhelmshaven, I found no evidence that Catholic film discussion events were set up in towns with a predominantly Protestant population. 33. Diana Nordlohne, ‘Amerikanisierung in den 1950er Jahren: Film- und Jugendkultur in Münster’. Master’s thesis, University of Münster, 1998, pp. 84–6. 34. Letter from the Amtsdirektor to Wirtschaftsverband der Film-Theater für Westfalen, Lippe u. Rheinland, dated 24 July 1946, StAT, Best. C, no. 1861. 35. ‘Mindestens dreimal pro Woche ging’s ins Kino’, Westfälische Nachrichten, 19 July 1997. 36. Nordlohne, ‘Amerikanisierung in den 1950er Jahren’. 37. Ibid., pp. 79–85. For the history of Münster see Franz-Josef Jakobi (ed.), Geschichte der Stadt Münster, Vol. 3 (Münster: Aschendorff, 1993).

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38. Nordlohne, ‘Amerikanisierung in den 1950er Jahren’, pp. 90–1. 39. Judith Protze, Oldenburger Lichtspiele. Film- und Kinogeschichten der Stadt Oldenburg (Oldenburg: BIS, 2004), p. 97. 40. Polreich, Die katholische Filmarbeit im Bistum Münster, p. 138. 41. Cf. Ian Goode, ‘Cinema in the Country: The Rural Cinema Scheme – Orkney (1946–67)’, Post Script: Essays in Film and the Humanities vol. 30 no. 2 (2011), pp. 17–31. 42. Polreich, Die katholische Filmarbeit im Bistum Münster, p. 216.

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3 Ch no

Where Title the Exceptional and Everyday Meet: Post-War Cinema Culture in British Seaside Towns Author Tim Snelson

Despite their central place in twentieth-century British cultural life, seaside towns have been marginalised within the fields of both urban history and cinema history. Seaside towns are seen to fall outside the standard frameworks and everyday concerns of both sets of historians. If seaside towns are discussed, it tends to be within the field of tourism studies, which offers some excellent leisure histories, both general and placespecific, of significant coastal resorts.1 However, as might be expected, these tend to focus on the exceptional experiences of tourists rather than the everyday practices and provisions for residents and, perhaps in part resultantly, there is scant research into the place of cinemas and cinemagoing within them. The few cinema histories of seaside exhibition and cinemagoing focus on the heyday period of ‘the picture palace’ in the late silent and early sound eras of the 1920s and 1930s in large resorts such as Blackpool and Brighton.2 But what about smaller resorts that were less able to rely on the income generated during holiday periods? How did they negotiate the often conflicting demands of tourists and locals? What strategies did they employ to address fluctuating market conditions in which the population might escalate to more than double in the summer months, as hundreds of thousands of metropolitan visitors bolstered and changed the nature of their marketplaces? In order to address these questions, this chapter will focus upon the coastal towns of Great Yarmouth (52,970 inhabitants in 1961) and Gorleston-on-Sea (4,892 inhabitants in 1961) in East Anglia.3 It will also concentrate upon a period marked by contradictory tendencies and uncertainties, the early 1950s to late 1970s, when ­declining cinema attendance was contrasted with the steady rise in British seaside tourism.4 This study serves therefore not only to offer synchronic comparisons of different-sized seaside towns, but also diachronic comparisons of seasonal shifts in the cinemas’ strategies across these turbulent decades. Programming analysis and newspaper discourse analysis of key cinema sites are used to build a picture of cinema culture in these British seaside towns. I will detail the different strategies cinemas adopted, both on- and off-season, to address these complex, at times conflicting, social and economic factors. In his historical study of film booking in the coastal town (now a city) of Portsmouth – not a significant tourist destination – Robert James explains that the ‘relationship between cultural provision and cultural pleasure is complex, and that consumer tastes could be highly volatile, even over quite short periods of time’.5 In this chapter I demonstrate a very different form of volatility, however, with taste cultures contested cyclically across even shorter seasonal and weekly periods, as power relations

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shifted from tourists to locals and back again. I also highlight the divergent strategies employed within a larger and smaller seaside town – and the different cinema sites therein – as they competed to maintain a foothold in simultaneously volatile and predictable market conditions. The cinemas in the coastal town of Great Yarmouth operated very differently from those in both urban and coastal cities, and in non-coastal towns. They also adopted widely divergent strategies from the cinemas in the smaller neighbouring town of Gorleston, constructing very different identities through their programming and promotional discourses. Into the late 1970s, the seafront cinemas in Yarmouth alternated film entertainment and live performances (variety theatre, amateur opera, pop concerts) to target different demographics and niche audiences not only on- and off-season, but at different times of the week as the make-up of the town’s inhabitants shifted. In Gorleston, however, this blurring of cultural categories and markets was far less marked, with a commitment maintained to the everyday concerns of its smaller local community, respecting more clearly defined cultural distinctions and spatial boundaries. As this chapter will demonstrate, there is a distinct contrast between the paternalistic proprietorship and predictable programming of the small-town cinemas in Gorleston and the transient targeting of more fluid audiences and tastes in the larger seaside town of Great Yarmouth. The chapter will build upon the research of those working within the New Cinema History in using comparative analysis of localised case studies not as a means to ‘illuminate national trends’ but to indicate the specificities, incongruities and shifting landscapes (both seasonally and historically) of cinemagoing in two adjacent but diverging seaside towns marked by the conflicting demands and intersecting experiences of the everyday (locals) and the exceptional (tourists).6 ‘Oh I Do Like To Be Beside the Seaside’: Cinema Culture Along The ‘Golden Mile’ This analysis of seaside cinemagoing in Great Yarmouth and Gorleston in the postwar period (mid-1950s to mid-1970s) must be understood not only in relation to the contradictory tendencies of declining British cinema attendance and escalating seaside tourism, but also in the context of ongoing concerns and discursive struggles over the appropriate ‘social tone’ of seaside resorts, with ‘status-conscious visitors and residents’ in competition with ‘working-class tourists for access to leisure time and space’.7 While domestic tourist expenditure grew across this period, the increase in the number of more affluent Brits holidaying abroad was more dramatic. Therefore this period also held the seeds for the decline of the domestic seaside industry. The search for middle-class distinctions overseas alongside declining standards in resort facilities and accommodation due to a general lack of investment (from businesses and government) – factors which of course are interconnected – meant that lower-income holidaymakers (typically younger and/or working class) became the key market.8 A 1964 report on the Norfolk holiday industry stressed that the majority of tourists came from London and the Midlands (particularly the East Midlands), followed by those from the more rural east region and from the industrial north.9 I am particularly interested, therefore, in the programming strategies different cinemas adopted to address these complex and conflicting Where the Exceptional and Everyday Meet: Post-War Cinema Culture in British Seaside Towns

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social and economic pressures in relation to the perhaps divergent tastes of metropolitan and rural visitors, and the competing demands and concerns of local residents. In light of these research interests, I will focus not on more recognised and, comparatively, still buoyant destinations such as Blackpool and Brighton, but the less revered seaside resort of Great Yarmouth – a town in East Anglia now most famed in entertainment terms for housing the ‘World’s worst waxworks museum’10 – and its smaller, neighbouring town of Gorleston-on-Sea. The populations of Brighton and Blackpool were and continue to be around three times larger than that of Great Yarmouth. However, Yarmouth’s population is subject to considerable fluctuations. Even following a steady decline in the tourist trade since the post-war period I am focusing upon, the population of Great Yarmouth effectively doubles in the summer months due to tourism, with 1.3 million holiday visitors and 3.7 million day visitors each year.11 Gorleston also has a long history of tourism but the resort is more exclusive, maintaining a smaller, older and more affluent market for its ‘Edwardian Beach’ that is congruent with the town’s wealthier and more middle-class residents and, perhaps resultantly, its wider perception. Despite the resilience of its tourist industry, the overarching perception of Great Yarmouth, both within and outside, is of a run-down town in steady decline since the bygone eras of the Victorian, Edwardian and interwar periods. Great Yarmouth has a long and illustrious cinema and entertainment history stretching across these periods and beyond. The chapter will initially focus on the three cinema buildings along Great Yarmouth seafront known as the ‘Golden Mile’, as this has been the town’s main entertainment and tourist attraction from the mid-Victorian era. These are the Windmill (previously the Gem), the Empire and the Royal Aquarium (now the Hollywood). While Biograph films were presented in the Britannia Pier’s variety programme from 1902, Yarmouth’s first cinema was the Gem, which opened on 4 July 1908. It was one of the earliest purpose-built cinemas in Britain, screening a continuous flow of ‘electric vaudeville’ to potentially more than 1,200 paying customers at a time. Its then manager, C. B. Cochran (later to become a famed impresario), stipulated that men and women had to sit on opposites sides of the auditorium.12 The Gem was taken over by Jack Jay (whose son Peter still owns this site and the other two Great Yarmouth cinemas I am analysing) in 1938, and was refashioned as the Windmill, offering ‘cine-variety’ and summer stage shows (featuring the likes of George Formby and Norman Wisdom) from the end of World War II through to the late 1970s, then solely film programmes out of season. It closed as a cinema in the 1980s, becoming a children’s play centre, a Ripley’s style ‘odditorium’ and currently an indoor, movie-themed miniature golf course. A few hundred metres along the ‘Golden Mile’, the Empire opened on the 1 July 1911 as Yarmouth’s second purpose-built cinema, and operated almost solely as such until the 1970s, when it alternated between bingo, late-night horror bills and children’s cartoon shows. It is now closed after being unsuccessfully relaunched in the 1990s as a nightclub and bar complex based on New Orleans’ Bourbon Street.13 The third site I am analysing still operates as a cinema, as part of the East Anglian Hollywood cinema chain. The oldest and most prestigious of the sites, it opened as the Aquarium in 1876 – later the Royal Aquarium following the patronage of King Edward VII, then Prince of Wales – but the attraction of sharks, penguins and other sea life didn’t prove popular with either locals or tourists. It closed after six years and was extensively rebuilt in 1883 to accommodate theatrical performances and vaudeville, with the likes of Oscar 54

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Great Yarmouth, Royal Aquarium and Bowling Greens, circa 1960

Wilde and Lillie Langtry gracing its stage. It remained as such until the early 1930s, after which it operated most of the year as a cinema. However, it continued to offer live entertainment in the summer, staging Sunday pop concerts and summer variety shows from the 1930s until the 1980s, when it was converted into a five-screen multiplex under the management of the Hollywood chain.14 The Aquarium and the Regent (opened as a prestigious picture palace and theatre in 1914, and located off the ‘Golden Mile’ on Regent Street) competed for the prestige pictures and roadshow releases across most of the twentieth century, until the Regent was converted to a Mecca Bingo Club in 1982. I will make some reference to the Regent (later the ABC Regent) but my focus will be on the Windmill, the Empire and the Royal Aquarium along the ‘Golden Mile’. Gorleston-on-Sea had two cinemas in the post-war period, both single-screen cinemas with around 1,000 seats. The first cinema in the town, the ‘tiny, but cosy’ Filmland, opened in July 1913 and went through a number of name changes, settling on the perhaps overly grand Louis Quatorze – the locals are said to have affectionately dubbed it Lousy Quarters – but was shut before World War II and destroyed during an air raid.15 Quick to follow ­Filmland’s lead, however, was the Coliseum, which opened on the August bank holiday of 1913 and was a little more lavish than its competitor. Following a take-over by Douglas Attree in 1931, the cinema was given an art deco façade, and stayed looking largely the same and under the same ownership – though with son Douglas Attree Jr taking over management in the 1940s – until it was demolished to make way for a shopping centre in 1970. In the post-war period, it was a second-run cinema which, according to a local historian, ‘seldom if ever ran a film for more than three days’, unlike Yarmouth cinemas such as the Aquarium which had access to premium product.16 The Palace, another art deco-style, second-run cinema, opened on Gorleston’s main high street in 1939, but was converted into a casino/bingo hall in 1964 and remained as such until 2012. Where the Exceptional and Everyday Meet: Post-War Cinema Culture in British Seaside Towns

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I will discuss the programming strategies and newspaper commentaries on these sites taken from Great Yarmouth and Gorleston’s main daily newspaper, the Yarmouth Mercury, analysing how these five cinemas’ products, pleasures and patrons were differentiated on- and off-season in the years 1954, 1964 and 1974. I have therefore adopted a systematic sampling method that, although small, will give a reasonable sense of continuity and change across the period considered, and between the different cinemas within these two coastal towns. The analysis is therefore comparative in relation to a number of factors, comparing the programming and promotional strategies based upon: the three decades; on- and off-season periods; size and nature of seaside towns; size and nature of cinemas; and, in regard to different forms of entertainment. ‘Roll Up! Roll Up!’: Programming for Great Yarmouth’s Summer Season and Winter Trade The seasonal character of Great Yarmouth’s three cinemas across the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s – although adjusted to accommodate changes in the availability and popularity of particular genres, cycles and trends – remains somewhat consistent. What is significant, however, is the way in which the products they offered and the audiences they targeted shifted across the on- and off-season periods of the annual calendar, particularly to accommodate the ‘summer show season’ which stretches from June to September, and, to a lesser extent, during other holiday periods such as Easter and Christmas. The shifts in the three cinemas’ programming are far more marked by cyclical seasonal changes than linear historical change across the decades, as the cinemas shifted their strategies to appeal to summer and winter trade. There are, however, some diverse and, I think, astute approaches adopted by the different cinemas in adjusting their character and offerings to appeal, sometimes at different times within the week, to tourists and locals. Although the divergent characters of these cinemas is exacerbated across the years 1954, 1964 and 1974 – particularly in regard to the issue of social tone – the overall pattern remains quite consistent. Across these periods, the Windmill’s main commitment remained its summer season theatrical shows, with film-only entertainment returning for only parts of the off-season trade and filling daytime slots before the summer shows. In 1954, January to early February saw the programming of older Hollywood films, ranging from Cecil B. DeMille’s The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) in early January to Humphrey Bogart in the almost two decades old Angels with Dirty Faces (1938) finishing on 6 February when the theatre closed for almost four months to prepare for the summer season. The twice-nightly ‘Summer Review Show’ was advertised from late May until its last week in late September. Although the Windmill continued to have continuous daily film matinees until the first performance of the live show (and the same film-only bill throughout Sundays when the live show did not run) during the summer season, it did not promote the specific film titles, only advertising it as ‘the ideal family show: sixty minutes of Walt Disney Cartoons etc’. The advert for its 1964 season – a nostalgic ‘Old Thyme Music Hall’ celebrating the ‘good old days from the naughty ’90s to the roaring ’20s’ – elaborates a little more on the daily film show billing, advertising Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy and the Keystone Cops, in addition to Disney and Tom and Jerry cartoons. The Windmill very much positioned itself, therefore, as a family-oriented space aimed at children, but also at the nostalgic reminiscences of childhood – and in some cases of childhood holidays spent in Yarmouth and other resorts – of 56

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the parents and grandparents accompanying them. In a pre-season Anglia Television ‘Here and Now’ news item, the news reporter challenges the Windmill’s decision to stage such an old-fashioned review show in the ‘age of the pop singer’. The ‘Old Thyme Music Hall’ show’s producer counters that it is time ‘older people had something for themselves’, highlighting the cine-variety theatre’s explicit targeting of an older audience.17 In the winter season of 1954 (late September through to Christmas), the Windmill reverted to a full-time cinema – changing its programme twice weekly and double billing almost exclusively Hollywood fare – offering recently released family adventure films and comedies such as Crossed Swords (1954) with Errol Flynn, the Bowery Boys in Paris Playboys (1954) and Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis in The Caddy (1953), as well as a number of Universal Westerns. The cinema seemed to maintain its commitment, therefore, to family audiences with almost all films having an all ages permitted ‘U’ certification and some adverts explicitly highlighting that ‘children are admitted unaccompanied’. However, in the 1964 and 1974 seasons, the Windmill did not open outside the live summer season, with the only film entertainment on offer being the daily film show of silent shorts and cartoons prior to the live shows in the summer of 1964. Even these children’s matinees switched to the Empire in 1974. The only exception to this policy was the hire of the venue to the Great Yarmouth Amateur Operatic and Dramatic Society for one week, prior to the Windmill’s live summer season, throughout the 1950s (though not in 1954) to put on their annual drama festival. This concession to residents’ highbrow (or at least middlebrow) proclivities and practices – there was a particular taste for amateur productions of Noël Coward plays – highlights the ongoing cultural negotiations between exhibitors and local residents.18 The late 1960s and 1970s saw an interesting development in the Windmill’s summer shows, switching from nostalgic revue and variety shows to specialising in summer seasons of current British TV sitcoms and their stars that were unique to this venue. In 1974, the Windmill billed twice-nightly stage performances of ­current popular ITV comedy Love Thy Neighbour (1972–6), starring main cast members Jack Smethurst and Kate Williams, across the whole of the summer season. Other seasons included Carry On film stars Sid James and Frankie Howerd and the cast of sitcom On the Buses (1969–73), both of which had contemporaneous 1974 advertisement for the Windmill and films that transposed the franchises to seaside Empire from the Yarmouth Mercury (Great Yarmouth Library newspaper archives) holiday resorts, namely Carry on Camping (1969) Where the Exceptional and Everyday Meet: Post-War Cinema Culture in British Seaside Towns

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and Holiday on the Buses (1973).19 There is an interesting overlaying for audiences here between ­different mediums, extending and eliding the distinction between holiday and home ­entertainments. This certainly raises questions as well in regard to social tone, with Love Thy ­Neighbour, On the Buses and the Carry On films all being deemed as low cultural forms by ­middlebrow critics at the time and, if retrospectively, having been condemned as quintessential examples of politically incorrect British culture of the 1970s.20 H ­ owever, a discussion of the implications of this for the perceived social make-up and political perspectives of the Windmill’s audiences is outside the scope of this chapter. The Empire is interesting in that from the 1950s to the 1970s it actively targeted a more adult local audience, increasingly fostering a more disreputable almost ‘exploitation’ cinema-type character. From mid-January to June and midSeptember to late December 1954, the Empire almost exclusively double-billed ‘B’ and programmer Westerns (mostly Republic) and American hard-boiled crime films, some of which, such as I, the Jury (1953) and Without Warning (1952), were ‘X’-rated films available exclusively to those over sixteen. This was not the case during Yarmouth’s summer seasons and other holidays such as Christmas, however. The advert for its ‘Terrific Holiday Programme’ features Western romance Fortune Hunter (1954) and sci-fi action in Tobor the Great (1954), double-billed for the second week in June, is representative of its summer programme. It was also able to attract some bigger first-runs like The French Line (1954) with Jane Russell (billed as the ‘First Time in Yarmouth’) as, by early June, first-run cinemas such as the Royal Aquarium and the Regent had given most of their programmes over to live comedy and musical stage shows. This model was replicated in the 1964 winter season but with Hammer and sub-Hammer horror (both UK and US) and ‘exploitation’ films (mostly American crime and social-problem films) replacing Westerns as the key genres on offer. The double ‘X’ bill now became a regular feature rather than an occasional offering, with two ‘X’-rated films tending to be billed Sunday to Thursday. Slightly more family-oriented fare – Hollywood Westerns and adventure films and some British comedies such as Carry on Jack (1963) – were then billed over the weekends when families might be visiting Yarmouth for short breaks. During the summer months, however, the Empire billed only ‘U’ and ‘A’ pictures, such that children could always attend even if they had to be accompanied by an adult. In 1964, the Empire also adopted a strategy to attract youth audiences by programming recent and classic youth films featuring music, rerunning Elvis films including Kid Galahad (1962) in June and Follow That Dream (1962) in July, to coincide with the release of the latest Elvis film at the Regent, and screening West Side Story (1961) over the Easter weekend. The summer of 1964 saw the now infamous clashes between Mods and Rockers along the south coast seaside resorts of England – most famously Clacton, Margate and Brighton – as extensively and sensationally reported in the British tabloid press.21 As the front-page headline of the Yarmouth Mercury declared, the August bank holiday saw ‘“Mod and Rocker” trouble spread to Yarmouth’ with twenty-eight arrests for assault, threatening behaviour and obstructing the police.22 It was explained at length that this ‘rowdy-ism’ might have been as bad (or good depending on whose perspective) as in Clacton or Brighton if it weren’t for the preparedness of police. Venues 58

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in Yarmouth were seemingly also prepared for the influx of youth, booking popular rock bands such as the Kinks into smaller venues and the Royal Aquarium giving pop singer and teen heartthrob Billy Fury top billing at their ‘Big Star Show’ that summer. During the summer months, the Aquarium screened films on Sundays – often the type of ‘X’-rated fare that proved popular with the Empire crowd – suggesting an attempt to draw back a local audience on nights when holidaymakers were returning home. While the Empire shunned the ‘X’-rated films for the summer months, it reverted to its winter trade strategy in late September 1964, billing two ‘X’-rated horror or exploitation films Sunday to Wednesday 1954 advertisement for the Royal Aquarium from the and something a little more family ­Yarmouth Mercury (Great Yarmouth Library newspaper archives) friendly (typically ‘A’-rated) over the weekend. The year 1974 would see the Empire become almost exclusively Yarmouth’s horror cinema, scouring the depths of British, European and American horror such that it could change its late-night horror bills four times a week. This now included the summer months when instead of giving over its space to family audiences from June to September, it instead designated mornings for children’s cartoon shows and encouraged families to switch across to its sister venue, the Windmill, for its TV sitcom stage shows in the evening before the 11.15 pm horror shows (see illustration on p. 57). There is little criticism of these horror shows in the Yarmouth Mercury, however, despite the Empire’s attempt to build up a somewhat salacious image for them. This may in part be because they respected spatial and temporal regulations (including admission rules via the purposefully foregrounded certifications of films in adverts), thus offering predictable and ordered transgressions. The increasingly youth-frequented amusement arcades along the ‘Golden Mile’, however, continually threatened to spill out onto the streets at any time of the day or night. As Chapman and Light have highlighted, seaside resorts went into decline in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and many entertainment venues transformed into amusement arcades where young people could gamble on slot machines. These street-level, typically open-fronted venues became increasingly associated with antisocial behaviour and low-level criminality.23 Therefore, the gravest concerns expressed in the local press regarding these cinemas were that they might be transformed into amusement arcades as business declined. For example, the 1969 takeover and planned redevelopment of the Aquarium by the Forte Group inspired the chairman of the Great Yarmouth and Gorleston Publicity Association to state: ‘I shudder to think this might include another amusement arcade – I think there Where the Exceptional and Everyday Meet: Post-War Cinema Culture in British Seaside Towns

59

are sufficient on our seafront already’.24 As discussed above, the Aquarium had traditionally maintained its distinction from second-run and cine-variety theatres, such as the Empire and the Windmill, by highlighting its luxurious, even majestic qualities. For example, the 1954 winter and spring season included Yarmouth premieres for Hollywood epic The Robe (1953) and Flight of the White Heron (1954), a CinemaScope documentary detailing the Royal Family’s 1954 Commonwealth tour (see illustration on p. 60).25 Adverts also stressed that the cinema’s luxurious, fully-licensed lounge featured live music from the Royal Aquarium trio. However, despite their less salubrious reputations, the Windmill and the Empire – and their audiences – were still positioned in the hierarchy above the adjacent amusement arcade sites and Yarmouth’s funfair, the Pleasure Beach, located at the far end of the ‘Golden Mile’. The main objections to the 1969 plans to demolish the Windmill and the Empire, and build new multipurpose entertainment buildings on these sites, were not concerned with the demolition of these historical buildings but with the plans to include ground-floor amusement arcades. These plans never came to fruition. Summarily, later newspaper articles went on to show more respect for these venues and their histories. A 1996 Yarmouth Mercury article juxtaposes the ‘dignified frontages of these Victorian and Edwardian buildings’ to the ‘amusement arcades of dubious aesthetic merit’,26 while a condescending 1980 article highlights that ‘the youngsters who have been to see the Sex Pistols in the “Great Rock and Roll Swindle” since the Windmill resumed presenting films […] are unlikely to realise that this particular building pioneered cinema in the borough of Yarmouth’.27 If there is an issue regarding social tone in the local press, therefore, it seems to relate far more to youth’s disregard for keeping certain types of entertainment housed within their designated spatial and temporal boundaries, than it does to contestation over specific spaces between locals and tourists, or between different-classed individuals and groups therein. Tea and Sympathy: Middlebrow Distinctions Meet Everyday Concerns at Gorleston’s ‘Coli’ While the newspaper reports on the repurposing, closures and decline of Great Yarmouth’s cinema buildings in the late 1960s and 1970s focus on their once palatial grandeur and historical and national significance – particularly the patronages of exceptional figures from British monarchs to Hollywood royalty – the comparable articles on Gorleston’s cinema closures concentrate on more everyday concerns and continuities.28 The Yarmouth Mercury articles on the closure of Gorleston’s last remaining cinema, the Coliseum, in late 1969, draw upon more local memories in highlighting the central role that this cinema – and to a lesser extent the Palace – played in community life across generations. A November 1969 article commiserates that the closing of the ‘Coli’ – as it was affectionately known by its regulars – to make way for a shopping centre will leave Gorleston a ‘Place without Cinema’. It celebrates the 1914 cinema not as a marker of the town being apace with modernity – as with some reports on Yarmouth’s place in British cinema history – but as a sign of ‘a more leisurely age’ and ‘part of a Gorleston which, even 60

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now at times and places, hints of a community, with rather special links between its people’. The article reminisces that ‘time was that a more expensive seat at the Coliseum also bought a cup of tea and a biscuit’ and that the cinema programme was often interrupted by long-time and much-loved manager Douglas Attree’s ‘plea[s] for a good cause’ over the auditorium speakers.29 The cinema’s benevolent, even paternalistic role within the community is detailed in subsequent, nostalgic articles explaining, for example, that at Easter, children were admitted to the cinema for free if they donated decorated eggs which were then taken to Gorleston’s Cottage Hospital as Easter gifts and food for patients.30 This focus on local community interests and tastes – while respecting underlying distinctions between classes of audiences – is articulated in the Coliseum’s and the Palace’s programming strategies in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1954, neither cinema changed its programming significantly in and out of the holiday season, maintaining coherent identities and, likely, target audiences across the year. The Coliseum –  promoted in the 1950s with the very everyday tagline of ‘the best in entertainment in a friendly and homely atmosphere’ – tended to programme more middlebrow fare than the Yarmouth cinemas discussed previously. Midweek bills included Roman Holiday (1953), The Glenn Miller Story (1954) and Young Bess (1953) and, significantly, more ‘quality’ British cinema such as Hobson’s Choice (1954). Although it tended to schedule more family-friendly films at weekends (Thursday to Saturday) – such as Disney’s Peter Pan (1953), Treasure Island (1950) and Genevieve (1953) – there is no discernible shift in generic or audience appeals across the year as a whole. Likewise, the Palace’s programming ­strategies are fairly consistent across the winter and summer seasons, but there is more of a focus on Hollywood Westerns and adventure films – The Boy from Oklahoma (1954), Pony Express (1953), Tarzan and the She Devil (1953), Abbott and Costello Meet Captain Kidd (1952) – across the 1954 programme. This is comparable with the Empire’s off-season and weekend bills, and appears to be aimed at more of a youth audience. The other entertainment that populates Yarmouth’s cinema bills over the summer – plays, variety shows and concerts, olde thyme and modern dance, local talent shows, etc. – are billed at Gorleston’s Pavilion Theatre and Floral Hall Ballroom throughout the year. There is far more sense, therefore, of spatial and ­temporal boundaries being respected and maintained throughout the year in Gorleston, as opposed to the mixed entertainment bills and shifting venue uses of Yarmouth’s cinemas. The certainty and communality offered by the paternalistic proprietors of Gorleston’s cinemas are perhaps the key distinguishing factor between them and those in the larger seaside town of Great Yarmouth, who switched their cultural and social allegiances as the seasonal market shifted. The use of the Palace in Gorleston changed for good in 1964, however. Having shown a few films in January, including The Great Escape (1963), the Palace cinema converted to the Palace Casino in February, offering roulette and bingo all year round. The members-only Palace Casino positioned itself as more upmarket than the Yarmouth bingo halls aimed chiefly at the holiday trade – including the Empire – and ­significantly, while no longer advertising a cinema programme, offered its members ‘free films before bingo’ at weekends. It also booked occasional specials such as live wrestling matches. Following the Palace’s conversion, the Coliseum switched some Where the Exceptional and Everyday Meet: Post-War Cinema Culture in British Seaside Towns

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of its attention to the Palace’s youth market – through ‘X’-rated European art-house films like Boccaccio ’70 (1962), Japanese sci-fi King Kong Versus Godzilla (1962) and British new wave film Billy Liar (1963) all booked on Sundays – while maintaining its staple middlebrow family audiences during the week with Disney films – The Sword in the Stone (1963), The Incredible Journey (1963) – Hollywood historical epics – Mutiny on the Bounty (1962), 55 Days at Peking (1963), The Long Ships (1963) – and classobsessed British comedies and dramas, many starring Dirk Bogarde, such as Doctor in Distress (1963) and The Servant (1963). The Coliseum’s billing of increasingly outdated blockbusters such as The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) and The Colditz Story (1955) in 1964 attests to the increasing difficulties the Gorleston cinemas faced in affording premium or recently premium product in an increasingly squeezed market. On the announcement of the Coliseum’s closure, manager Douglas Attree Jr explained that declining local interest and increased competition didn’t bode well for future prospects. Despite a recent successful run with The Sound of Music (1965) – some three years after its initial release – Attree explained that, regrettably, he had been forced to sell ‘Gorleston’s last cinema’ after forty years of family ownership. A further forty-five years on, Attree’s prediction that ‘I cannot see there being another cinema in Gorleston again’ has been proved correct.31 Conclusion The comparative analysis of Great Yarmouth and Gorleston’s cinema programming across 1954, 1964 and 1974 reveals significant differences in their exhibition strategies and, perhaps resultantly, the understandings of these spaces within their local communities and the local press. Operating in a much larger and competitive tourist market, which more than doubled the summer population of Great Yarmouth to that of a small or mid-sized city, cinemas like the Windmill, the Empire and the Royal Aquarium were able to tap into a large seasonal audience seeking exceptional and eclectic encounters, while maintaining a steady income from more everyday audiences – albeit demographically shifting ones – off-season and on Sunday nights throughout the year. Gorleston’s smaller population and more exclusive tourist appeal meant that it was necessary for the cinemas to ‘keep things in their place’ – both spatially and temporally – in order, at least initially, to ensure a regular audience for its less raucous offerings while preserving the town’s cultural distinction from its noisy neighbour. The seaside is often characterised as a ‘liminal’ even ‘carnivalesque’ space outside everyday concerns and power relations.32 However, analysis of the programming and discourses surrounding Great Yarmouth’s cinemas indicate highly coordinated strategies to satisfy the enduring demands of both winter and summer trade, rather than genuine transgression of cultural or social expectations. If these sites can be seen as in any way ‘liminal’ in the periods I am addressing, it is in their privileging of cyclical over linear time. Rather than transgressing rules and regulations, both on- and off-season, these sites offered locals and tourists the reassuring promise of repeated pleasures and pastimes they had enjoyed across a number of seasons and in other realms of their lives.

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NOTES 1. See, for example, Nigel Morgan and Annette Pritchard, Power and Politics at the Seaside: The Development of Devon’s Resorts in the Twentieth Century (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 1999); John Walton, The British Seaside: Holidays and Resorts in the Twentieth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000). 2. See, for example, Sue Arthur, ‘Blackpool Goes to the Talkies: Cinema and the Seaside in Thirties Britain’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television vol. 29 no. 1 (2009), pp. 27–39; John Sedgwick, Popular Filmmaking in 1930s Britain (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 2000). 3. General Register Office, ‘Table 3’, Census 1961: Country Report, Norfolk (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1964), p. 1. The current populations of Great Yarmouth and Gorleston are fairly comparable with these figures. Great Yarmouth Borough Council, Borough Profile (Facts and Figures) 2012 (Great Yarmouth Borough Council, 2012), p. 6. 4. Stuart Hanson, From Silent Screen to Multi-screen: A History of Cinema Exhibition in Britain since 1896 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), p. 93; Julian Demetriadi, ‘The Golden Years: English Seaside Resorts 1950–1974’, in Gareth Shaw and Allan Williams (eds), The Rise and Fall of British Coastal Resorts: Cultural and Economic Perspectives (London: Cassell, 1997), p. 53. 5. Robert James, ‘Cinema-going in a Port Town, 1914–1951: Film Booking Patterns at the Queens Cinema, Portsmouth’, Urban History vol. 40 (2013), p. 335. 6. Arthur, ‘Blackpool Goes to the Talkies’, p. 37. This chapter draws its inspiration for longitudinal, comparative approaches to localised case studies from, for example, Katherine H. Fuller-Seeley (ed), Hollywood and the Neighborhood: Historical Case Studies of Local Moviegoing (Berkeley: California University Press, 2008); Richard Maltby, Philippe Meers and Daniel Biltereyst (eds), Explorations in New Cinema History: Approaches and Case Studies (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011); Lies van de Vijver and Daniel Biltereyst, ‘Cinemagoing as a Conditional Part of Everyday Life: Memories of Cinemagoing in Ghent from the 1930s to the 1970s’, Cultural Studies vol. 27 no. 4 (2013), pp. 561–84. 7. Morgan and Pritchard, Power and Politics at the Seaside, p. 29. 8. Ibid., pp. 41–2. 9. R. I. Maxwell, Report on the Norfolk Holiday Industry (Norfolk: Norfolk County Council, 1964), p. 6. 10. Emily Allen, ‘World’s Worst Waxworks Faces Closure’, Daily Mail, 31 October 2012. www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2225636/Worlds-worst-waxworks-museum-Louis-­ Tussauds-faces-closure-elderly-owners-run-it.html, accessed 16 September 2016. 11. Great Yarmouth Borough Council, Report 2009 (Great Yarmouth Borough Council, 2009), p. 23. 12. Stephen Peart, The Picture House in East Anglia (Lavenham: Terence Dalton Ltd, 1980), pp. 26–7. 13. Peggotty, ‘Times Change at Empire’, Yarmouth Mercury, 8 March 1996. 14. Peter Bagshaw, ‘Centre of Fun and Glamour’, Yarmouth Mercury, 18 July 1975. This conversion had already begun in 1969 when the Forte Group took over the cinema and converted it into the Three-in-One in the 1970s, comprising two screens and a ‘fun pub’. This take-over is discussed at the end of the chapter. 15. Peart, The Picture House in East Anglia, p. 157. 16. Peggoty, Yarmouth Mercury, 3 August 2001.

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17. Anglia TV, ‘Here and Now: Show Business’, 1964, East Anglian Film Archive, www.eafa.org .uk/catalogue/205542, accessed 12 July 2014. The report significantly focuses on the young female dancers – and their tastes for fashion and rock and roll – in order to target a younger and more ‘hip’ demographic than that for the music-hall show. 18. Tinkler, ‘The Windmill, 1946–1972, Green Book’, Tinkler and Williams Theatre Collection, Archives Department, University of East Anglia, Norwich. 19. Peggoty, ‘An Odd Way to Live On …’, Yarmouth Mercury, 20 March 1992. 20. Leon Hunt, British Low Culture: From Safari Suits to Sexploitation (London: Routledge, 1998). The now notorious ITV comedy Love Thy Neighbour, based around the reactions of a white working-class family to a black family moving in next door, has since become shorthand for politically incorrect television of the 1970s. 21. See Stanley Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers (London: Routledge, 1972/1980). 22. Anon, ‘Courts Told of Weekend Rowdy-ism’, Yarmouth Mercury, 7 August 1964, p. 8. 23. Anya Chapman and Duncan Light, ‘The “Heritagisation” of the British Seaside Resort: The Rise of the “Old Penny Arcade”’, Journal of Heritage Tourism vol. 6 no. 3 (2011), p. 223.  24. Anon, ‘Aquarium “Must Not Be Another Fun Hall”’, Eastern Daily Press, 22 March 1969. 25. A story in the Kinematograph Weekly ‘Showmanship’ section highlights that civic leaders were invited to a special screening of The Robe at the Royal Aquarium and a local preacher mentioned the film in his sermon, 15 April 1954, p. 36. The cinema also exploited its history as an aquarium for the CinemaScope underwater spectacle of Beneath the 12 Mile Reef (1954), arranging for members of the local aquarist society and diving club to put on exhibitions in the foyer’s giant tanks which were left over from the building’s days as an aquarium. As the Kinematograph Weekly highlighted: ‘quite the right place for such a film, Great Yarmouth. Therefore one expected the exploitation to be as good as it was’, 3 June 1954, p. 32. 26. Peggoty, ‘An Odd Way to Live On’. 27. Peggoty, ‘Films Again at the Windmill’, Yarmouth Mercury, 20 June 1980. 28. Peter Bagshaw, ‘Centre of Fun and Glamour’, Eastern Evening News, 18 July 1975. 29. ‘Place without Cinema’, Yarmouth Mercury, 5 November 1969. 30. ‘Cinema Admission Cost an Egg’, Yarmouth Mercury, 9 June 1989. In addition to these ‘egg matinees’, in the 1950s, the Coliseum held popular ‘Christmas children’s matinees’ during which, as Gorleston resident Joe Carr recollects, ‘The manager dressed up as Father ­Christmas and all the children were given a gift of nuts and sweets’, Our Great Yarmouth, www.ourgreatyarmouth.org.uk/page_id__257_path__0p5p94p.aspx, accessed 3 June 2014. 31. ‘Gorleston’s Last Cinema’, Yarmouth Mercury, 7 November 1969. 32. Rob Shields, ‘The “System of Pleasure”: Liminality and the Carnivalesque at Brighton’, Theory, Culture & Society vol. 7 (1990), pp. 39–72.

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PART II REGIONAL PATTERNS

4 Ch no

Cinemagoing in Sweden in the 1940s: Civil Society Title Organisations and the Expansion of Rural Film Exhibition Author Åsa Jernudd and Mats Lundmark

During World War II, Swedes indulged in public amusements like never before and going to the movies topped the list of preferred outings. In a time of military mobilisation and scarcity of goods, cinema attendance soared, the number of venues exhibiting film increased and Swedish film production boomed. Film historian Leif Furhammar estimates that cinema attendance in Sweden doubled in the period between the mid1930s and the mid-1940s. In the two largest cities of Gothenburg and Stockholm, ticket sales increased sharply: 13 million tickets sold in 1936 had jumped to over 20 million by 1945. More surprising is the increase in cinema attendance outside the major cities, in the smaller towns and in rural localities. According to Furhammar, the increase in cinemagoing was more marked in the countryside than in the cities. This is intriguing considering the decrease in the rural population of people aged fifteen to twenty-five (the prime audience for the movies) due to the combined effects of urbanisation and increased mobility.1 Our article is evoked by two questions prompted by this paradox: What were the conditions that made it possible for the cinema to become so popular, and was the experience of cinemagoing structured differently for rural and urban ­audiences? The rise in attendance during the war and in the decade after the war was matched by an increase in the number of cinemas.2 On the eve of World War II, 2,049 cinemas catered to a population of 6.3 million. During the war years, old cinemas were renovated and new cinemas were built with larger seating capacities. As shown in Table 4.1, the number of cinemas had climbed to 2,244 by 1944 and it peaked in 1952 with 2,583 venues, serving a population of 7.1 million. The growth rate in big and medium-sized cities compared to smaller towns and communities is illustrated by differentiating the cinemas with eight screenings or more per week, which required a large residential population to be commercially viable, from cinemas with seven or less screenings per week, which are more likely to be found in smaller towns and communities.3 The table shows slightly more than a 25 per cent relative change rate for both kinds of cinema. A great deal of academic effort has been invested in researching Swedish film production and representation in the 1930s and 1940s, a period that saw the modern breakthrough in Sweden.4 The year 1932 marked the beginning of a long period of Social Democratic government, which persisted until 1976.5 From the perspective of the urban–rural divide, it is interesting to note that the theme of rurality in the Swedish films of this period is highlighted by historians of Swedish film. Rural themes

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Table 4.1  Cinema venues in Sweden by number of screenings per week Number of cinemas

1939

1944

1952

Relative change 1939–1952 (%)

8 screenings or more

454

541

577

27.1

7 screenings or less

1595

1703

2006

25.8

Total

2049

2244

2583

26.1

Sources: Sveriges biografer. Förteckning över biografer och biografägare 1944–1945 (Stockholm: Förlagsaktiebolaget Spectator, 1945), p. 109; Sveriges biografer. Förteckning över biografer och biografägare 1956 (Stockholm: Förlagsaktiebolaget Spectator, 1956), p. 94.

and motifs have been a persistent feature of Swedish cinema since the start and they became particularly pertinent in the 1940s.6 Another recurring theme in the domestic films of the early 1940s relates to the emergence of a modern youth (sub)culture expressed through new styles in dancing, music, haircuts and fashion, and influenced by swing music as well as Hollywood films.7 This emphasis ties in with the unique study of cinemagoing in post-war Sweden carried out in 2003 by ethnographer Carina Sjöholm. Tracking people’s experiences of life and leisure in smaller towns and rural areas, Sjöholm comes to the conclusion that in the 1940s film culture was no less than a social movement for young people, regardless of whether they were avid cinemagoers or not. She describes it as ‘a movement of an all-embracing kind, something that permeated the very life-sphere’. In her view, film culture functioned as a training ground for coping with social and cultural transformation in a context that put great emphasis on progress and change. 8 The post-war period especially was a time of far-reaching social reform, explosive economic growth and intensified urbanisation. Film culture at this point in history became a strong agent of modernity and the cinema offered an experience of contemplating as well as enacting modern life, which was not exclusive to urbanites but encompassed the entire nation.9 A further look at the geography of cinema ownership patterns during the 1940s and 1950s shows some remarkable developments in the Swedish film exhibition market outside the country’s major cities, which help us to better understand the post-war boom in cinemagoing and its significance for rural populations. In 1944, 12 per cent of the 786 registered cinema owners in the country were organised as joint-stock corporations, 53 per cent were independent commercial businesses and 35 per cent of the owners were civil society organisations. A small number of vertically integrated film companies, which owned the key high-profit cinemas in the larger cities and towns, made up the first group of joint-stock corporations and functioned as ‘majors’ on the Swedish film market. The second group consists of small privately or partner-owned companies which operated cinemas in urban as well as rural areas. This largest group is also the most diverse, ranging from companies that ran a single cinema to regional chains. Some exhibited films in purpose-built theatres, others operated in multipurpose venues, touring different locations with a mobile projector. 68

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The third group is made up of non-profit, civil society organisations. They operated cinemas in their own multipurpose venues in the countryside, typically located in small towns or near rural communities. In the post-war period, we can see a shift in the patterns of ownership. The market share of the majors remained more or less stable (around 10–12 per cent) but, by the early 1950s, the small private businesses had lost 15 per cent of their share of the market to the group of non-profit, civil society cinemas. By 1956, this figure had increased to 20 per cent.10 This shift in ownership patterns suggests that the driving force behind the expansion of cinemagoing in post-war rural Sweden was the not-for-profit civil sector. Taking film exhibition as our prime node of enquiry at which geographic, social, economic and cultural factors intersect, this chapter explores the functions and meanings of cinema in the civil sector with the aim of explaining the increase of film exhibition in rural areas in the immediate post-war period. Our analysis engages different methods. To begin, the diffusion of cinemas over the country was mapped for the 1944–5 season, differentiating between different categories of ownership to discern geographic and economic patterns on a rural–urban scale. The key source for this part of our research was Sveriges biografer. Förteckning över biografer och biografägare 1944–1945. This register of cinemas and cinema owners was kept by Filmägarnas kontrollförening, the Film Owners’ Control Bureau, an organisation that regulated ticket prices and controlled the accounts of box-office returns. The cinemas in the register are listed by locality in alphabetical order. The information contains the name of the cinema, the number of seats, the name of the owner and his/her or the company’s place of residence. There are also references to other cinemas owned by the same proprietor. All locations for film exhibition that are mentioned in the register were mapped, including the places toured by tent cinemas, using the number of seats of the cinema as indicator. The mapping was done by matching the number of seats of each cinema with the spatial coordinates for each locality.11 We offer three maps, one showing the geographical spread and number of seats of commercial cinemas, the second showing the geographical spread and number of seats for cinemas operated by non-commercial companies, whereas the third map details all cinemas in the county of Jämtland. After having established the geographic and economic context for rural cinema exhibition, we examine the institutional conditions and properties of the civil society cinemas. Our analysis focuses on the two types of civil society movements that dominated non-commercial exhibition: the workers’ movement and the temperance movement. Both operated on the national level and in the late 1930s both set up organisations to encourage local societies to invest in their multipurpose halls. Film exhibition became their prime focus. Gaining control over 35mm film exhibition was part of a larger strategy to win influence over mass media production and consumption.12 On a more mundane level, film exhibition was considered the best means of generating activity in the venues and income to the societies. Finally, the chapter presents a case study of rural cinema ownership in the county of Jämtland. If Sweden is divided along the middle into a scarcely populated north and a densely populated south, the county of Jämtland belongs in the north. The county is remote in relation to the main cities and larger towns of Sweden and to the European continent. Throughout the twentieth century the temperance movement had a Cinemagoing in Sweden in the 1940s: Civil Society Organisations and the Expansion of Rural Film Exhibition

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s­ tronghold there. For our case study of Jämtland, we relied on mapping techniques as well as historical research on exhibition practices, especially the analysis of advertisements in the local press. The film programmes offered by rural cinemas in the autumn of 1945 are compared to those of the cinemas in Östersund, the county’s only town and its municipal centre.13 In our comparative analysis, we look at exhibition patterns, the national provenance of the films that were screened and how long they had been in circulation on the Swedish market. Mapping Cinema in 1944–5: Urban and Rural Features As mentioned before, the total number of cinemas in Sweden in 1944–5 was 2,244, according to industry statistics. Around 80 per cent of the screenings in these venues was managed by commercial companies. Figure 4.1 shows the distribution of ­commercial cinemas over the country based on the number of seats and differentiating between the joint-stock-owned companies (majors) and the independents (smaller private or partner-owned cinemas).14 Immediately discernible from the map is the concentration of major-owned cinemas in the densely populated southern part of Sweden and in the cities and larger towns. It is also remarkable how the majors monopolise exhibition in a given locality, particularly in the south. The number of seats controlled by independent owners rarely exceeds 25 per cent in towns where the majors are active. In sum, the major companies controlled the urban cinemas and the number of seats correlates with the size and concentration of population. The map also reveals that the independent cinema companies operate in all counties, also in the very remote north. The high presence of commercial companies in rural areas can be explained as an effect of the many locally owned venues built and managed by civil society organisations. These multipurpose venues were leased to commercial exhibitors, who arranged film screenings on a more or less regular basis. The non-commercial cinema sector consisted of around 20 per cent of the total number of cinemas in 1944–5 and their share increased in the post-war period during which film exhibition and culture flourished like neither before nor after. Figure 4.2 shows how the cinemas owned and run by the workers’ societies (the People’s House cinemas), the temperance movement and other civic organisations were spread over Sweden in largely rural regions. Slightly north of Stockholm and moving westward across the country, there was a strong concentration of civil society cinemas. Also striking are the clusters of People’s House cinemas in the industrial areas: the Bergslagen region in central Sweden, a region historically dominated by mines and metalworks, Glasriket in the south-east (glass industry) and finally, the north in areas dominated by sawmills and mines. In the case of the civil society organisations, the logic of cinema diffusion involved avoiding the main cities and larger towns, where the major companies dominated film exhibition and where competition from other entertainments would be considerable. The map also shows that a small town or rural community would typically either have a People’s House cinema or a cinema managed by a temperance society or other voluntary organisation. 70

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Figure 4.1  Map showing the number of seats in commercial cinemas in Sweden, 1944–5

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Figure 4.2  Map showing the number of seats in non-commercial cinemas in Sweden, 1944–5

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Institutions of Rural Cinema: The People’s Cinema and ­Ordenshusens Riksförening In the late 1930s, there was a growing interest in the cinema among the leaders in the labour and temperance movements and the political institutions close to their interests. This shift in attitude should be understood in the context of growing fears about commercial leisure and youth culture. In the context of increased urbanisation and employed workers who had more time for leisure than ever before and more commercial entertainments to enjoy, the debate about ‘youth’ as a problem came to the forefront in Swedish society. In 1941, it reached a climax during the so-called ‘concert hall debate’, a public attack from the conservative camp on the recreational behaviour of working-class youth. The fiercest condemnation was reserved for dancing in commercial halls in cities and towns as well as in People’s Parks in rural areas. The detractors of youth culture also disapproved of cinemagoing and the urban youngsters’ tendency to hang out on street corners and in cafés. The solution to the ‘youth problem’ was sought in offering state subsidies to associations that set up leisure activities for young people. Consequently, many multipurpose venues run by civil society organisations were endowed with the new purpose of attracting and engaging youths. Film screenings were a means to this end. Cinema was considered morally superior to dances and could be defended (at least to some degree) against moral attacks thanks to the non-commercial, community-oriented and ideological nature of the societies. In the opening decades of the twentieth century, the leaders of the labour and temperance movements had routinely dismissed cinema as a degenerative form of escapism. Consequently, film exhibition was rarely acknowledged in the movements as a potential educational instrument. Yet at the same time, all over the country, films were screened in the multipurpose venues that were associated with both movements. The decision to show films in a People’s House or venue of the temperance society, whether by organising in-house screenings or by subletting the venue to a commercial film exhibitor, was up to each local committee and with few exceptions they operated independently of each other. This changed in the late 1930s with the instigation of new organisations within the two civil movements, which were set up to support local ­societies in running their venues and in this role they would have a considerable impact on the development of film exhibition in rural Sweden. Folkets husrörelsens riksorganisation (FHR), the National Federation of People’s Houses, was founded in 1937 by a conglomeration of organisations tied to the labour movement and the Social Democratic party.15 In 1940, with the appointment of Social Democrat and parliament member Karl Kilbom as full-time executive officer, it started to actively contribute to the expansion of cinema in rural Sweden. The aim of the national organisation was to support local societies with the day-to-day operation of their venue. This included guidance in how to generate income and how to foster edifying forms of recreation. The Folkets husrörelsens riksorganisation encouraged local societies to operate their own cinemas rather than leasing their building to commercial exhibitors. This would give the local society better revenues, control over the content of the film programmes and over the use of their venue (e.g. allowing them to adjust the schedule of the film screenings to other activities in the house). FHR argued that the chance to acquire films that corresponded better with the ideals of the movement would greatly improve if more societies would join its cinema Cinemagoing in Sweden in the 1940s: Civil Society Organisations and the Expansion of Rural Film Exhibition

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chain. By increasing the number of cinemas that belonged to the national organisation, the federation could also increase its power in the negotiations with the major film production and distribution companies and secure better contracts for its members. Finally, it was important to have an outlet for the feature films that were produced under the flag of the socialist movement. The National Federation of People’s Houses was a democratic organisation that was divided into twenty districts. The district executive committees organised the distribution of films within their respective areas and carried out much of the work of supporting inhouse film exhibition. A local society had a number of options to consider regarding film exhibition. It could let the venue to a commercial exhibitor or it could decide to screen 35mm films entirely on its own terms and negotiate film contracts and programmes directly with distributors in Stockholm.16 Or the society could become a member of the Folkets husrörelsens riksorganisation and commission the FHR to contract a number of films with one or several distributors, either as a complement to its own contracts or as a single bid. It could extend the FHR’s influence to include not only contact and contracts with distributors, but even the scheduling of specific film titles. In this case, the local society would become part of a regional FHR chain and receive a number of specific film programmes scheduled by the district or chain committee. In 1941, the FHR founded the Sveriges ­folkbiografer AB (the People’s Cinemas of Sweden Ltd), a company in which the local societies which showed films could become shareholders. Members of the regional FHR cinema chains were obliged to buy shares in Sveriges folkbiografer AB or at least strongly encouraged to do so. The National Federation of People’s Houses was quite a success. During the years 1941 to 1945, FHR membership increased from 375 to 701 societies. In the same period, the number of the organisation’s regional cinema chains doubled from 10 to 22 and their membership grew from 75 to 270 as more and more local societies joined one of the chains.17 Kilbom’s ideal was that each People’s House would become a centre for culture, ‘a temple of ideas’.18 In his eyes and those of many Social Democratic leaders, a good film was synonymous with a social-problem film, a film that addressed contemporary social issues. However, not everyone shared this view. Other prominent members in FHR, most of them active cinema proprietors themselves, were more concerned with ensuring a good economic return for the film exhibitors in the movement. This tension between cultural ideals and economic aims characterised the post-war debates around film and film exhibition within the National Federation of People’s Houses. In the organisation’s monthly journal Scen & salong (Stage & Auditorium), new releases were reviewed to offer guidance to the film programmers of the People’s Houses. Kilbom was also ambitious that FHR become independent of the majors. To this end, in 1944, the organisation bought a majority of shares in the distribution company Nordisk Tonefilm. In addition to encouraging the burgeoning production of 35mm films within the movement, Kilbom tried to convince the leadership that once the war had come to an end, the organisation should import films from production companies in France, the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia and Denmark.19 The idea of importing films was not well received by the other members in the steering committee as they considered French and Russian film too sophisticated for rural audiences.20 The temperance movement also set up a national organisation to support the local societies within the Swedish branch of the International Order of Good Templars and 74

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the National Templar Order. The National Society for Temperance Houses, Ordenshusens riksförening (OR), was set up in 1942. In the same year, the organisation reported a total of 1,108 venues owned by temperance societies. Of these venues, 39 organised their own 35mm film screenings, whereas 163 were sublet to commercial exhibitors. In total 238 venues were equipped with a separate projection booth which was required by law for public film screenings. About 65 per cent of these venues had their own projector: 131 societies were equipped with a system for the projection of sound films and 26 had a projector for silent cinema.21 While the Ordenshusens riksförening never became as large as its social democratic counterpart, ownership of multifunctional halls was crucially important to the temperance movement because it provided the means to organise and promote activities which did not involve the consumption of alcohol. By the end of 1946, the organisation had 518 members. Its cinema section had sixty-two members, which managed a total of seventy venues. Ordenshusens riksförening provided the same services as the National Federation of People’s Houses, ranging from contracting films and putting together film programmes to organising regional cinema chains.22 The Ordenshusens riksförening contracted films from almost all film distributors in Sweden. The tension between commercial and cultural values in the People’s House movement was not visible in the records of the temperance houses. During the war and in the post-war years, only one film gave rise to discussion: När seklet var ungt (When the Century Was Young, 1944). The film was described by a leftist critic as a pretentious attempt at socialist drama, which fell short of its ambition because the hero of the story – a socialist and temperance agitator – was obviously middle class, and because the film’s narrative closure rewarded him with the hand of the daughter of a rich patriarch.23 The film caused alarm and the Ordenshusens riksförening decided to recommend a boycott of the film on the grounds of its negative depiction of the temperance movement: in one scene, set at an open-air temperance meeting, people are drinking liquor.24 It is remarkable that only this film surfaced in discussions, considering the frequent representation of alcohol consumption in Swedish films produced between 1930 and 1945. Contemporary critics had a term for the popular comedies in which the drinking of hard liquor and beer was a standard motif: pilsnerfilm.25 Cinema in the Rural County of Jämtland The temperance movement had a stronghold in Jämtland, especially in the first half of the twentieth century. We zoom in on this county, which is situated in the heart of the Scandinavian Peninsula, to detail the conditions of film exhibition in rural Sweden. The coordinates are set on the southern part of the sparsely populated north of the country, where farming is the mainstay of the economy, even after the railway had connected the county’s centre Östersund in directions going north–south through Sweden as well as east–west, from Sundsvall to Trondheim in Norway. Featuring a flat social structure that can be explained by the persistence of a small-scale, self-owning agricultural economy, the social life in the county is dominated by the Protestant state church and the liberal-minded International Order of Good Templars.26 Jämtland borders on Norway and the Scandic mountain range and its inhabitants have traditionally been more culturally aligned with Norway than with the Swedish Cinemagoing in Sweden in the 1940s: Civil Society Organisations and the Expansion of Rural Film Exhibition

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Figure 4.3  Map showing the number of seats in cinemas in Jämtland County, 1944–5

south, where the vast majority of the population lives and where the nation’s main administrative, economic and cultural centres are located. Jämtland covers 8.2 per cent of the surface of Sweden and is the second largest county. However, its population is disproportionately small. In 1940, Jämtland had 138,722 inhabitants of which 16,647 lived in Östersund, the only town in the county.27 The military stationed one of its larger garrisons in Östersund. This is reflected in the map of the county (Figure 4.3), which shows the geographical distribution of cinemas according to the number of seats. In 1944–5, the military operated three cinemas in Östersund that catered exclusively to its recruits. The town also had five commercial cinemas. The largest, Sveasalongen, had 547 seats and falls into the category of independent cinemas on the map because its company only had one cinema. Metropol and Royal, with 448 and 280 76

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Cinema Royal, Östersund, 1943 (Source: Georg Lingsell/Jamtli Museum photo archive)

seats respectively, belonged to a local company. The two remaining cinemas, Saga (500 seats) and Röda Kvarn (521 seats), were owned by AB Centrum and AB Svensk Filmindustri respectively. The latter were major national companies, which operated chains in Sweden’s main cities and towns. The map shows that ninety-four rural localities in Jämtland had a cinema in 1944–5. The overwhelming majority of these venues (seventy-two) were managed by independent, ­commercial exhibitors, who typically rented a multipurpose building owned by the local temperance society. In other cases, they operated in buildings that were owned by a People’s House society or some other grass-roots organisation, such as a cultural-historical society or a sports society. On average, these venues would seat between 150 and 250 people. Similar to the national pattern in rural regions, the cinemas in rural Jämtland rarely had local competition. In only six localities do we find more than one film venue. The workers’ movement was not widely represented in Jämtland. Only six localities had People’s House cinemas, most of them in and around Sveg, where there was a foresting industry and a concentration of workers. In both Sveg and in Lillhärad, the People’s House cinema competed with a commercial cinema. Before the boom of civil society cinemas, most cinemas in Jämtland had been owned and managed by small commercial enterprises. In those days, the proprietor or an employee travelled around with a mobile projector and a set of films, typically serving two to four locations a week. The programme would alternate on a weekly basis. In some venues, the proprietor would install permanent equipment. Other exhibitors Cinemagoing in Sweden in the 1940s: Civil Society Organisations and the Expansion of Rural Film Exhibition

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covered a larger area, including more remote localities. They would travel with a tent show and a mobile projector. The map includes the localities of exhibition that the tent film showmen reported to the controlling authorities.28 Sources of information about the kind of programmes these ambulant showmen delivered are extremely rare, but a letter of complaint written by a local temperance official gives us some insight into the business of itinerant film exhibition. In 1937, Linus Pettersson, in charge of the temperance venue in the village of Hammerdal, complained to the national organisation about the film repertoire offered by the commercial exhibitor to whom they had sublet their venue: Here in our local, community centre in Hammerdal, an ambulating cinema regularly screens films. As we have every reason to be dissatisfied with the programmes, most of which are unknown to us and several years old, some no better than pilsnerfilm, change for the better would be desirable. The cinema proprietor takes no responsibility for the damage he does by showing these films, and it is useless to try to convince him that it would be more profitable and for his reputation advantageous to show better films, but the better ones are alas more expensive.29

A year later the issue was solved. The temperance society of Hammerdal installed permanent equipment for film projection in its venue and decided to operate the cinema under its own management under the name ‘Biograf Lyktan’ (Cinema Lantern). In the following years, a number of local temperance societies and a few other civil societies in Jämtland started in-house cinemas, some inspired by the example of the Biograf Lyktan in Hammerdal, others after correspondence with the Ordenshusens riksförening. OR-organised exhibition in Jämtland was set up in January 1944. A small chain of venues received a mobile projector and a set of films. Other societies joined by renting a projector on favourable terms, which was then installed in their venue by the organisation.30 Besides being economically lucrative, in-house cinema was considered a more respectable way for the local society to earn money than arranging bazaars and dances. The moral argument of controlling the programming, as the complaint letter from the temperance society in Hammerdal illustrates, was also a factor. In 1948, a decade after Hammerdal decided to cancel its contract with the ­commercial cinema operator and start its own screenings, eleven permanent temperance-venue cinemas in Jämtland were registered with the Ordenshusens ­riksförening. In addition, in twelve localities the OR provided services for ambulant in-house cinema exhibition. In total about a quarter of the total number of rural cinemas in the county were in hands of the OR. If we include film exhibition in the venues of the People’s House, the non-commercial cinema sector in Jämtland accounted for about 30 per cent of the rural cinemas. The Ordenshusens riksförening negotiated with film distributors for all its Jämtland members to secure a fixed number of films. It also managed the programming, except for two societies that preferred to schedule the films themselves. The question of whether to remain independent or register with a national organisation depended on an assessment of which option would give the local society the best competitive edge. Not all local societies were convinced that membership in the Ordenshusens 78

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Aerial view of Hammerdal, circa 1937 (Source: AB Flygtrafik/Jamtli Museum photo archive)

­riksförening or the Folkets husrörelsens riksorganisation would ensure that the latest, preferably Swedish films would be programmed for screening in their cinema before being passed on to the next village. Membership did, after all, involve disclaiming influence over contracts and programmes.31 Film ProgramMEs at Jämtland Cinemas We will now examine in closer detail the film programming and frequency of screenings at four rural cinemas in Jämtland as compared to the five urban cinemas in Östersund. The main sources for our analysis are advertisements in the local newspapers. In the autumn of 1945, the cinemas in Östersund (Röda Kvarn, Metropol, Royal, Sveasalongen and Saga) advertised regularly in the daily newspaper Östersundsposten, as did Lits-Biografen in Lit, Häggenås Biografen in Häggenås, Scala Bio in Fyrås and Biograf Lyktan in Hammerdal. In the eighteen-week period from 30 July to 2 December 1945, the cinemas in Östersund each offered two evening shows and an additional matinee on Sundays. The matinee programme on Sunday would either feature a serial production such as Flash Gordon, an old popular comedy or be an extra screening of the evening programme. There were considerable differences in the regularity of programme change. Röda Kvarn, a cinema owned by the large and vertically integrated film company AB Svensk Filmindustri, changed programme twice a week in August and weekly from Cinemagoing in Sweden in the 1940s: Civil Society Organisations and the Expansion of Rural Film Exhibition

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September through November. An exception was the programme that featured the Hollywood film Bathing Beauty (1944), which was shown non-stop for three weeks in October. Metropol and Royal belonged to the same locally registered j­oint-stock enterprise managed by K. M. Månsson, who had been in the business of film exhibition in ­Östersund since the early 1910s. The two cinemas were different, with Metropol following a similar exhibition pattern to Röda Kvarn while Royal did not change its programmes as often. Saga, part of a chain based in Gothenburg, changed its schedule even less frequently, screening only sixteen films in the eighteen weeks analysed. This offers a sharp contrast to the twenty-nine films which were shown at the Röda Kvarn. At Royal and Saga each programme would run for one to two weeks and the matinee would often be a film that was also screened in the evenings. Like Röda Kvarn, Royal and Saga had a three-week runner each: Svarta rosor (Black Roses, 1945) and Barnen från ­frostmofjället (The Children, 1945). Both films were recent Swedish releases. Sveasalongen held the record in number of films screened with forty titles. Of these, 73 per cent were American productions and only 1 per cent was Swedish. ­American films also dominated (74 per cent) at the Metropol, with Swedish films amounting to 12 per cent. At Röda Kvarn, Saga and Royal the percentage of Hollywood movies was around 50 per cent. Here the Swedish films took a greater share: 31 per cent at Röda Kvarn, 48 per cent at Saga and 19 per cent at Royal. The r­ emaining ­schedules featured films from the UK, Germany, other Nordic countries and the USSR. The provenance can be summed up as follows: 140 feature-length films were screened in the five cinemas of Östersund from August to November of which 62 per cent were American, 21 per cent Swedish and 17 per cent of other origin. Measured in screen time, the total share of Swedish productions was 33 per cent, indicating a slight ­audience preference for national films. Newer films typically stayed longer on the bill. Swedish films reached Östersund soon after their national release; 82 per cent of the Swedish films screened in the local cinemas in the autumn of 1945 had been in distribution less than three months. By contrast 60 per cent of the Hollywood films were older than three months. These figures suggest that it was important for the local audience that the Swedish releases were up-to-date, so that they could keep up with the coverage in newspapers, film journals and other mass media. This was apparently less significant for foreign films. Moreover, in the immediate post-war period, the audience was still accustomed to the consequences of disrupted international trade. Advertisements in the regional press reveal that in the period under consideration, films were also screened regularly (two to three per week) in List, Fyrås, Hammerdal and Häggenås. The cinemas in Lit and Fyrås screened the same films, which can be explained by the fact that they were operated by the same owner, Georg Lindgren, who also had an investment in the Sveasalongen in Östersund. The programmes in Hammerdal and Häggenås were also very similar because both venues were members of the district chain of Föreningen föreningsbiografer, which was set up by the temperance movement (OR).32 The four cinemas had between 200 and 300 seats each. For a better understanding of the business practices of these village venues, we will examine in more detail the programmes of the Lits Biografen in Lit as an example of a small-scale, commercial business, and Biograf Lyktan in Hammerdal as an example of a temperance cinema, which was part of a district chain. 80

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In Lit and in Hammerdal, screenings took place at the weekend. At Lits Biografen, a programme would play twice on Saturday and a new one would run twice on Sunday. The Biograf Lyktan in Hammerdal presented a programme three times per week, once on Saturday and twice on Sunday. Occasionally a new film would be shown on Wednesday. Of the twenty-eight films featured in the Lits cinema programmes, 61 per cent were American, 32 per cent Swedish and the remaining 7 per cent were European and Russian. At the Lyktan, there was a similar pattern: of the twenty-seven film programmes, 60 per cent were American, 30 per cent Swedish and 10 per cent European. In comparison with the cinema programmes in Östersund, these rural cinemas showed about 10 per cent more Swedish productions at the expense of the European and Soviet films. A more marked difference between the programmes at the cinemas in Östersund as compared to exhibition in the smaller communities concerns the delay in time between the films’ initial release in Sweden and their local screening. Of the fifty-five films screened in the small community venues, only one film had been in circulation in the country for less than six months. The rest were older. At the temperance cinema Lyktan, 78 per cent of the films had been around for more than a year and the remaining films between seven months and a year. At the commercial Lits, the lag in time between release date and date of exhibition was less but still considerable: 36 per cent of the films screened had been in circulation for more than a year and 61 per cent between seven months and a year. Cinema and the Civil Movements as Agents of Modernity The boom in cinemas in rural Sweden during and after World War II was interlocked with the persistence of the civil sector, particularly the workers’ and temperance movements. Despite ongoing urbanisation tied to economic growth and the expansion of the maturing welfare state, rural life remained vibrant thanks to people who were engaged in their community, investing time and energy to maintain and revitalise its civic venues. Before the war, grass-roots civil society organisations had spread out in small towns, villages and rural communities across the country and provided business opportunities for small-scale commercial film exhibitors. In this period, some civil society organisations already managed their own in-house cinema as they realised film screenings generated money, which they needed to maintain their property. Many more societies ventured into film exhibition in the early 1940s, inspired by the propaganda of the Folkets husrörelsens riksorganisation and Ordenshusens riksförening. It can be argued that film exhibition indirectly functioned as the sponsor of other activities that took place in the multipurpose venues and which were often considered of greater importance. Especially in the workers’ movement, there was an outspoken ambivalence towards film. Swedish Social Democratic rhetoric has been described as centred on the spoken and written word, while demonstrating a strong scepticism towards images, not least film.33 The genres produced by the Swedish film industry of the 1930s, melodrama and comedy in particular, were neither appreciated by leaders of the labour movement nor by the cultural elite. Though popular with Swedish audiences and hence very profitable, domestic cinema was regularly attacked in the religious press Cinemagoing in Sweden in the 1940s: Civil Society Organisations and the Expansion of Rural Film Exhibition

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and during public meetings set up by the intelligentsia. The most famous of these meetings was a debate in the city concert hall in Stockholm in February 1937 organised by Sveriges författarförening (The Swedish Writers’ Society) at which the concluding remark of the introductory speech by cultural critic and publicist Carl Björkman summed up the prevailing attitude on the part of the country’s intellectual elite: ‘Swedish film, a shame to our culture!’ 34 If cinema lacked cultural legitimacy, how could civil society organisations find it appropriate to campaign for in-house film exhibition in their own venues? In the leadership of the workers’ movement at large there was consensus on what a ‘good film’ should be: the ideal was the social-problem film which seriously engaged with the social issues of the day. As agent for Folkets husrörelsens riksorganisation, Karl Kilbom strove to gain independence from the major film companies by joining forces with other organisations within the socialist movement in an attempt to create a vertically integrated structure for film production, import, distribution and exhibition, thus creating a new cinema with greater cultural credibility. Yet there was also an understanding within Folkets husrörelsens riksorganisation that the popularity of cinema depends largely on the appeal of the stories. The 1940s saw the emergence of a new, more nostalgic representation of the countryside in Swedish cinema, which may be ascribed to the escalating urbanisation and the concomitant depopulation of rural regions. Many film-makers from this period also made an effort to engage with society and brought contemporary conflicts to the fore, not least the clash of values between the traditional way of life in rural areas and more modern lifestyles in the cities. Furhammar describes how 1940s cinema audiences were offered, on the one hand, Hollywood fare that was attractive in its mythologising of urban modernity, and on the other hand, Swedish films that appealed to them by dwelling on contemporary issues related to urbanisation, stories situated in rural settings or told from a rural perspective.35 In the case of the temperance movement and the Ordenshusens riksförening, the film medium was rarely discussed in ideological terms. The only evidence of such a reference in the archival records is with the film När seklet var ungt, which the organisation boycotted because of its offensive representation of the temperance movement. However, the letter from the temperance officer Linus Pettersson in Hammerdal reveals that there was indeed an ideological undercurrent in the movement, which aimed at changing the film offering in rural areas, asking for ‘better’ and more recent films. Did the civil society organisations succeed in providing other than pilsnerfilms and more up-to-date programmes in their cinemas? Were the programmes in the civil society cinemas different from those in the commercial cinemas in rural areas? Were they different from those in the cinemas in the town of Östersund? Our study reveals that the conditions of cinemagoing varied considerably, depending on whether you lived in a city, a town, village or rural community. Östersund, conveniently connected by railway to the commercial film centre of Stockholm, had a varied selection of films on offer in the autumn of 1945. The five cinemas operated differently in terms of intervals for programme changes, kinds of programmes chosen for the matinee time slot as well as the ticket price of matinees. Something they did have in common was a time lag for the feature films screened, in relation to the films’ opening date in Stockholm. 82

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The time lag was not as prominent for the Swedish films, of which most were recent releases, suggesting that audiences in Östersund took part in a national film culture expressed through film journals and other mass media. Our study also reveals that Hollywood films were dominant in all localities. In no cinema did the proportion of Hollywood films fall under 50 per cent. In the rural cinemas, in particular, Swedish films had a large share of the remaining screen time. About 30 per cent of the titles were domestic productions and the remaining films were of European and Russian provenance. If you lived in the countryside, you might see one or two films a week at a cinema in the local multipurpose venue, screened by either a commercial exhibitor or a civil society organisation that typically would also own the venue. Judging from the programmes on offer in the autumn of 1945 at Lits Biografen in Lit and Biograf Lyktan in Hammerdal, the feature film would most likely be an older production that had been in distribution for about a year or more. Seeing old films was the standard, regardless of whether the venue was operated by the society itself or by a small-scale commercial exhibitor. In other words, audiences in Hammerdal, Fyrås, Häggenås and Lit had regular access to films, but were not synchronised with the national film culture, which was shaped by the latest releases in Stockholm. The mapping of cinemas active during the 1944–5 season, along with a closer scrutiny of the conditions of exhibition in the county of Jämtland, demonstrates that cinemagoing in Sweden was not an exclusively or even predominantly urban phenomenon. It was a pervasive and regular activity that was also part of everyday life in localities across scarcely populated rural regions. Small-scale film exhibition companies dominated in the countryside. Their success depended on their negotiations with local civil society organisations on the use of their multipurpose venues for commercial screenings. In the post-war period, they faced increasing competition from the growing number of local civil venues that managed their own in-house cinemas. This article has argued that the involvement of civil society organisations in film exhibition is the key to understanding the paradox of the post-war expansion of cinema in the countryside in a time of escalating urbanisation.

NOTES 1. Leif Furhammar, Filmen i Sverige: En historia i tio kapitel och en fortsättning (Stockholm: Dialogos/Svenska filminstitutet, 2003), pp. 171–4; Jan Reinholds, Bio i Sverige 1900–1975: Marknad för fotografiska skådespel (Lerum: Reinholds, 1987), pp. 16, 54–8. 2. The term cinema is here understood in accordance with its Swedish equivalent (biograf) as used by the Film Owners’ Control Bureau and the Swedish Exhibitors Association. The definition is not bound to a venue, but refers to companies that exhibit 35mm film programmes to a paying audience. A cinema can be permanently tied to a purpose-built venue; it can rent a multipurpose venue for single nights of exhibition or for a longer duration; it can exhibit film occasionally in its own venue; it can also have no venue at all and travel with a tent. 3. The term major cities is reserved for Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmö. In this text, a medium-sized city has a population of more than around 30,000; a small town is situated outside of metropolitan areas and has a population of 2,000–30,000; localities in rural areas Cinemagoing in Sweden in the 1940s: Civil Society Organisations and the Expansion of Rural Film Exhibition

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are populated with around 50 and up to around 2,000 people. There is an overlap between smaller towns and localities (with around 1,000 people); the terms are not precise. 4. Ylva Habel, Modern Media, Modern Audiences: Mass Media and Social Engineering in the 1930s Swedish Welfare State (PhD dissertation, Stockholm University, 2002); Mats Jönsson, Visuell fostran: Film- och bildverksamheten i Sverige under andra världskriget (Lund: Sekel, 2011); Jan Olsson, Svensk spelfilm under kriget (PhD dissertation, Lund University, 1979); Per Olov Qvist, Folkhemmets bilder. Modernisering, motstånd och mentalitet i svenska 30-talsfilmen (Lund: Arkiv förlag, 1995); Jurgen Schildt, Det pensionerade paradiset (Stockholm: Norstedt, 1990); Tytti Soila, Kvinnors ansikte: Stereotyper och kvinnlig identitet i trettiotalets svenska filmmelodram (PhD dissertation, Stockholm University, 1991). 5. The success of Social Democratic hegemony caused outside observers of the 1960s and 1970s to speak of Sweden as a model society that generated a high level of trust among citizens and between citizens and the elite. ‘Concepts such as consensus, collaboration and cooperation were important ideological markers’, writes political scientist Bo Rothstein. He explains: ‘The combination of democratic stability and popular legitimacy, considerable economic growth, a collaborative system of industrial relations, and a uniquely universal and generous welfare state were the central parts of this model,’ Bo Rothstein, ‘Social Capital in the Social Democratic Welfare State’, Politics & Society vol. 29 (2001), pp. 207–41, here p. 209. 6. Furhammar, Filmen i Sverige, pp. 223–226; Per Olov Qvist, Jorden är vår arvedel. Landsbygden i svensk spelfilm 1940–1959 (PhD dissertation, Stockholm University, 1986), pp. 121–5, 312; Kjell Jerselius, Hotade reservat. Spelfilmerna med Edvard Persson (Uppsala: Filmförlaget, 1987), pp. 17–25. 7. Bengt Bengtsson, Ungdom i fara: Ungdomsproblem i svensk spelfilm 1942–62 (PhD dissertation, Stockholm University, 1998); Jonas Frykman, Dansbaneeländet. Ungdomen, populärkulturen och opinionen (Stockholm: Natur och kultur, 1988). 8. Carina Sjöholm, Gå på bio: Rum för drömmar i folkhemmets Sverige (PhD dissertation, Lund University, 2003), p. 262. 9. Ibid. 10. Sveriges biografer 1942 (Stockholm, 1942), p. 95; Sveriges biografer 1956, p. 87. Cinemas that catered to the military are included in the non-profit, civil society category. 11. A list of today’s spatial coordinates for cities, towns and smaller localities provided by Statistiska centralbyrån (Statistics Sweden) was used as starting point for the m ­ atching. A locality has a population of more than fifty. Due to changes in the size of the ­population between 1944 and 1945 and today (where in some cases smaller localities have been incorporated into larger ones), and because of differences in the naming of localities, around 500 of the smaller localities in the cinema register had to be manually detected. This was done by searching internet sites that explore historical geographical sites and by matching common-name locations with the exhibition circuits listed in the register, taking the owner’s residence into account. 12. Per Vesterlund, ‘Den svenska modellen. Arbetarrörelsen staten och politiken’, in Pelle Snickars and Mats Jönsson (eds), Medier och politik. Om arbetarrörelsens mediestrategier under 1900-talet (Stockholm: Statens ljud- och bildarkiv, 2007), pp. 207–44. 13. We only have access to the title of the feature film in the programme in the sources for this study, although the programme would typically include a pre-programme of shorts (commercials or public information films). Also, the proprietor would sometimes air news provided

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by the public radio, after which a newsreel would be shown. The main programme consisted of the feature film. 14. The joint-stock companies with only one cinema have been placed in the category for independents. These were typically companies that had a business in another industry yet operated a single cinema. The sixty-three locations for the travelling tent cinemas that could be found in the register of cinemas are also included in the map. 15. The organisation was actually founded as Folkets husföreningarnas centralorganisation and changed its name to Folkets husrörelsens riksorganisation in 1943. 16. Film contracts were negotiated per season (autumn and spring) and comprised the number of films that would be sent from a distributor for screening during the season. Though film titles were used as selling points in the negotiations, the agreement concerned the number of films and not specific titles. Once the contracts were closed, the next step concerned the scheduling of specific titles and programmes. 17. Suvi Virkamäki, ‘Folkets hus och spelfilmen 1941–1945’, Arbetarhistoria vols 2–3 (2001), pp. 24–30, here p. 24. 18. Ibid., p. 27. 19. Filmo, an abbreviation for Folkrörelsernas filmorganisation (The People’s Movements’ Film Organisation), was formed in 1938 to produce and distribute film (35mm and 16mm). From 1944 it produced feature-length fiction film. A few years later, in 1948, Nordisk Tonefilm also ventured into film production and thus became part of a vertically integrated corporate structure; Vesterlund, ‘Den svenska modellen’, pp. 228–9. 20. Virkamäki, ‘Folkets hus och spelfilmen 1941–1945’, p. 28. 21. ORs arbetsutskott (OR’s working committee), 2 November 1942. 22. Ibid., 10 December 1946. 23. T. H-n, Ny dag, 27 December 1944. 24. The distribution company, Europafilm, apologised and added scenes to the film which altered the degrading representation of the temperance order; ORs arbetsutskott (OR’s working committee), 1 January 1945 and 1 February 1945; ORs styrelse (OR’s steering committee), 11 February 1945; ORs biografsektion (OR’s cinema section), 26 May 1946 and 13 January 1947. 25. Schildt, Det pensionerade paradiset; Ralph Nilsson, Pilsnerfilm: Svensk film 1930–1945 (Kristinehamn: Norlén & Slottner, 2013). Pilsner referred to a kind of light beer, one of the few alcoholic beverages that could be bought freely during the time of rationed alcohol consumption (1914/17–1955). 26. Sven Lundkvist, Folkrörelserna i det svenska samhället 1850–1920 (Uppsala: Sober förlags AB, 1977), pp. 73–5. 27. Historisk statistik, pp. 51–3. 28. Bio Nisses Tältbiografer, owned by John Nilsson, is an example of a travelling tent cinema that toured Jämtland and further north both summer and winter, visiting very small localities. In the 1940s, Nilsson travelled with a truck that could carry benches to seat 250 people. When it was time for the show, a tent was erected behind the truck, attached to it, and the benches were lined up inside. The front seat served as ticket booth and the projector was placed in the back facing into the tent. In 1944–5 the company operated cinemas in Strömsund, Havsnäs and Jämtlands Sikås. Nilsson started touring in the 1910s. His company continued touring until 1964. Source: Sveriges biografer 1944–1945 and material collected for the

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exhibition ‘Bio-Nisses biografverksamhet’ (Ströms hembygsgård, 2007) curated by Camilla Olofsson. 29. Letter to Br. V. Löfcrantz (OR) from Linus Pettersson, Byggnadsföreningen Strålen, 26 April 1937; IOGT arkiv, Riksarkivet Arninge, 11. OR 1943–9, E I.1. 30. Minutes from the founding meeting at Grand Hotel, Östersund, 23 January 1944. IOGT arkiv, Riksarkivet Arninge, 11. OR 1943–9, E I.1 31. IOGT arkiv, Riksarkivet Arninge, 11. OR 1943–9, E I.1; Arbetarrörelsens arkiv och bibliotek, Arkiv 2926: FHR (1900–85). 32. Lindgren also owned a company with Axel Leffler, an ambulatory cinema business that toured fifteen communities in the county. Häggenås-Biografen was owned by Byggnadsföreningen Kettil Jamte u.p.a. and Biograf Lyktan was owned by Byggnadsföreningen Strålen u.p.a.; Sveriges biografer 1944–1945. 33. Pelle Snickars and Mats Jönsson, ‘Introduction’, in Snickars and Jönsson (eds), Medier och politik, pp. 13–47. 34. Furhammar, Filmen i Sverige, pp. 127–8. 35. Ibid., pp. 223–8.

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5 Ch no

Film Title Consumers in the Country: The Culture and Business of Small-Town and Rural Cinemagoing in the Netherlands Author Judith Thissen

At five o’clock on a Tuesday morning in August 1955, the Protestant choir of Kooten, a small village in rural Friesland, got on the bus for their annual outing. After a first halt at the naval base in Den Helder, the day trip continued through the dunes to Egmond aan Zee, where they stopped for lunch and enjoyed the beach. In the afternoon, the choir took a boat tour on the North Sea Canal, admiring the Hoogovens steel plant and the big sea ships. Via Haarlem, the bus reached its final destination: Amsterdam. Here the outing climaxed with a visit to the movies. As a leading Frisian newspaper explained: for most ‘provincials’ a day trip that did not end at the Tuschinki Theater or another cinema in the centre of Amsterdam ‘would not be a proper getaway’.1 Were there no movie theatres in Friesland? Yes of course, but even at the height of the post-war boom in cinemagoing this rural and predominantly Protestant province in the north of the Netherlands counted in total only twenty-five commercial film outlets for a population of around 470,000. Moreover, many of these cinemas were only open two or three days a week and utilised multifunctional halls. For the inhabitants of Kooten, the nearest ‘real’ movie theatre was the Cinema Modern in Drachten 17 kilometres away. During the winter season, there were also ‘film evenings’ in ­Surhuisterveen (7.5 kilometres away), where two café-restaurants each had a hall that was used for screenings by religious, cultural and political associations, but also occasionally by a commercial film exhibitor. Going to the movies in Leeuwarden by bus, moped or car was another option. The Frisian capital (70,000 inhabitants in 1947) had three cinemas with a total seating capacity of 1,600. In addition, films were regularly programmed at the 1,000-seat Harmony hall.2 Was the market situation in Friesland unique? Not exactly, although there were rural regions in the Netherlands that were much better served as we will see. This said, the number of movie theatres per capita and seats per 1,000 inhabitants was much lower across the Netherlands than in other Western European countries. Even the country’s three largest cities – Amsterdam, Rotterdam and The Hague – had fewer cinemas than one might expect considering their population. In the early twentieth century, when the rapid proliferation of permanent cinemas created a revolution in public entertainment, the Dutch already lagged behind and until today, the number of screens remains lower than in most parts of Western Europe. Over the past decade, film historians working on the Netherlands have sought to understand the restrained development of the Dutch cinema market focusing on both economic and sociocultural aspects. As a result, we now begin to grasp the larger dynamics at work in Dutch Film Consumers in the Country

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film history. Particularly striking are indeed the significant geographical differences in cinema attendance, not only between big cities, small towns and rural localities, but also depending on the dominant religion (Protestant/Catholic), secularisation and the degree of industrialisation. This chapter opens with a historical overview of the film exhibition market in the Netherlands until the 1970s, followed by a selected review of the literature on the peculiarities of Dutch film culture. The insights from the existing historiography provide the context for a closer analysis of cinemagoing in the countryside in the Protestant north, focusing on the so-called Veenkoloniën, a peat district in the province of Groningen. This agro-industrial region stood out for its high number of film exhibition outlets and seats, which suggests a close resemblance with metropolitan film culture despite its predominantly rural character. The Early Evolution of the Dutch Film Market In the late 1890s, itinerant showmen introduced the novelty of the moving pictures to large segments of the Dutch population. They toured the country with their mobile theatres during the fairground season (spring–autumn), travelling from one fair (kermis) to the other. During the winter season, some exhibitors set up a semi-permanent show in a concert hall, café-restaurant establishment or public meeting hall, typically in one of the larger provincial towns. Around 1900, moving pictures could also be enjoyed in variété-theatres as part of a mixed-bill programme. However, in the Netherlands, this type of entertainment venue remained a geographically limited outlet for the new film medium as one only found them in Amsterdam, The Hague and Rotterdam. Moreover, in social terms, variety theatres also had a limited reach because the shows were too expensive for the working classes.3 By contrast, the fairs attracted a much broader and mixed public, although primarily coming from the lower segments of society. Hence, the cinema gained the reputation of a fairground entertainment (kermisvermaak), with negative connotations of lowbrow taste and working-class recreation. The first permanent cinema opened in 1906, but in sharp contrast to n ­ eighbouring countries the diffusion was very slow.4 By January 1908, the total number had only increased to seven permanent venues: Amsterdam (1), Rotterdam (2), The Hague (3) and Utrecht (1). Together these four cities had a population of 1.2 million people. It was not until 1910 that a period of substantial growth began, which was spurred by the outbreak of World War I. From 1915 onwards, ticket sales for all kinds of commercial entertainment rapidly increased due to a combination of war-related factors, notably a rise in youth wages, an influx of Belgian refugees and a shortage of coal, which prompted the Dutch to seek entertainment outside their cold homes.5 The growing popularity of moviegoing eventually led to a construction boom of picture palaces, although again on a limited scale and geographically concentrated in the nation’s ­largest cities. Cinema attendance continued to increase during most of the 1920s. In terms of the box office, 1930 was a top year with around 30 million tickets sold.6 ­Nevertheless, compared with other European countries, the average attendance was much lower with 3.8 visits ­annually per capita in 1930, compared to 8 in Belgium, 20 in the United Kingdom and 7 in France.7 88

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During the interwar years, Amsterdam, Rotterdam and The Hague accounted for about half of the total ticket sales, whereas their combined population comprised just under a quarter of the Dutch population.8 This figure suggests that on average people living in these three cities went twice as often to the cinema as those in the rest of the country. However, we must not forget the impact of tourists and other out-of-towners on the box office. For instance, in the 1930s, Amsterdam attracted some 8 million daytrippers per year and many of them went to one of the movie theatres, which were part of the city’s attraction.9 The same goes for the largest cities in the provinces and for market towns in the countryside. In 1930, only 12.7 per cent of the Dutch municipalities (137/1,078) had at least one commercial cinema and only 54 towns (5 per cent) had two cinemas or more.10 This means that people who lived in and near the smaller towns and villages often had to travel quite far to go to the movies or else depended on the visit of a travelling showman and screenings in the non-commercial circuit (like film programmes set up by the Catholic Church). Moreover, in most small towns with a movie theatre, cinemagoing remained a weekend activity, with perhaps an additional screening on Monday or Wednesday. In 1932, less than half the film exhibitors claimed to operate on a daily basis and outside the main cities many movie theatres closed down entirely during the summer months.11 Yet, these national averages hide important regional differences and disregard the fact that 1930 marked the beginning of a new era for small-town and rural audiences. The Post-war Cinema Boom and the Modernisation of the ­Countryside By the eve of World War II, the provision of cinemas outside the largest cities had already improved considerably. In 1938, the Central Bureau of Statistics reported that 109 cinemas (31.1 per cent of the total) were located in municipalities with 5,000–20,000 inhabitants and 24 in communities with less than 5,000 inhabitants (6.8 per cent).12 Drawing primarily on statistics from the Netherlands Cinema Alliance (NBB), the national organisation of film exhibitors and distributors, Karel Dibbets convincingly argues that small-town and rural film exhibition showed a long and sustained growth from the early sound era onwards.13 Between 1930 and 1960, the number of municipalities with a single cinema more than tripled from 83 to 263. By contrast, the number of municipalities with two or more cinemas increased by ‘only’ 37 per cent from to 54 in 1930 to 74 in 1960. Perhaps even more significant, the number of cinemas in Amsterdam, Rotterdam and The Hague stabilised at around 75 venues as early as 1935 (with only a slight increase to 80 in the late 1950s). As Dibbets points out, the lack of building activity in the bigger cities (except in Rotterdam to replace the movie theatres which were destroyed during the air-raid of May 1940) suggests that the metropolitan market for cinemagoing had already reached saturation point in the 1930s.14 The semi-rural segment of the market saw the strongest growth during and after the war. In fact, the German Occupation seems to have prompted the expansion of stationary film exhibition in the Dutch countryside. We witness an explosive growth of permanent movie theatres in larger villages and smaller towns between 1942 and 1944, especially in the northern and eastern provinces. This happened when the NBB Film Consumers in the Country

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temporarily lost its cartel-like control over the market to the Film Guild of the Kulturkammer. After the Liberation, many of the new movie theatres in the country remained in business. The majority were qualified as ‘B-cinemas’, which means that they opened not more than two or three days per week or less, usually on the weekend (hence, the widespread expression ‘weekend-cinema’). When not used for film screenings, these venues usually accommodated a wide range of activities, including theatrical performances and concerts (mostly by local amateurs), dances, gymnastics, political meetings and so on. Most B-cinemas were managed by family-owned regional chains with roots in the business of travelling cinema.15 For instance, in the north, Johan Miedema Jr gained almost a monopoly in small-town and rural film exhibition in Friesland and parts of Drenthe, whereas his brother became a prominent player in Overijssel and Gelderland (see Van Oort in this volume). Similarly, from the 1920s until the late 1960s, the Abeln family programmed under the name Cinema Hollandia a dozen multifunctional halls in the peat districts around Winschoten and Emmen. The Abelns also owned a large hotel-café-restaurant complex with a multipurpose hall in Emmer-Compascuum and a movie theatre in nearby Klazienveen. Other small-town cinemas were set up by newcomers who ventured into film exhibition to profit from the post-war boom in demand.16 The late 1940s and 1950s were the heydays for Dutch film exhibitors. Ticket sales reached an all-time high of almost 90 million in 1946 with an average of 9.5 visits per capita. After the post-war euphoria, the demand shrank but remained much higher than before the war. Admissions fluctuated at around 64 million per year until 1959, when they began to freefall. By the early 1970s, the Dutch went to the movies about twice a year on average. Within less than a decade the film exhibition sector had lost two-thirds of its audience and 170 cinemas had gone out of business. Small, independently-owned venues and movie theatres that belonged to regional chains that operated outside the main urban centres were the main victims. Particularly hard hit were the weekend-cinemas. Their number decreased from 95 in 1960 to 35 in 1970, meaning that fewer and fewer people in the countryside had access to movies in their own neighbourhood. The remaining small-town and rural cinemas struggled to stay in business and many of them eventually closed their doors.17 Those movie theatres that survived the crisis, which deepened even further during the 1980s, were typically owned by a large chain and located in major cities and in medium-sized towns with a regional function as a shopping and leisure centre.18 Nevertheless, as Dibbets points out, in the post-war era, the economic balance in Dutch film exhibition shifted from the country’s biggest cities to ‘the provinces’ (de provincie), which by 1965 accounted for 60 per cent of the national ticket sales.19 More importantly, in this period, small-town and village life in the countryside underwent profound transformations, notably due to the rapid mechanisation of agriculture, industrialisation (to create new jobs), new schools, better roads, increased mobility and access to electronic communication technologies – private telephones, radio and television. As part of this larger process of modernisation, which had its roots in the early twentieth century but greatly accelerated after 1945, the cinema and other media brought ‘the city’ to the towns and villages in the hinterland, making life in the countryside more attractive, especially for young people. 90

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An interview with the mayor of a small town in northern Friesland gives us some insight into the changes of rural life in the post-war era. ‘Wolvega is an agrarian centre, the pig market is one of the largest in the country,’ the newspaper explained, ‘but it also wants to become an industrial centre … . A lot has happened in Wolvega since the war’. Indeed, between 1945 and 1955, the town grew from 4,702 to 5,675 inhabitants, attracting mostly workers from nearby villages but also from further away. New factories, improved roads, the opening of several high schools and a technical school contributed to this success. The housing shortage, and especially the scarcity of good houses, remained a major problem. Like elsewhere in the rural north, hovels were still quite common. Yet, what the town needed most urgently, according to the mayor, was a modern entertainment complex: We are waiting impatiently for a theatre that is well-equipped for film screenings. The ­municipality is willing to sponsor such a venue with an operational subvention, but we will also contribute 50,000 guilders to the building costs, which will be at least 200,000 g­ uilders. We are currently investigating how we can realise our plans and we are not pessimistic.20

The realisation of the mayor’s ambitious plan took a few years, but in 1960 the brand-new 480-seat Asta Theater with a 9x5-metre screen opened its doors and replaced the old 200-seat multipurpose venue, which was turned into a dance hall. Commercial cinema was rarely embraced with the same enthusiasm as by the mayor of Wolvega, although the attitude towards the cinema relaxed in the post-war era because municipal authorities and the churches began to better understand the social, cultural and economic benefits of having a cinema in their town or village. Still, the modernity of the movies reached small-town and rural audiences at different times and in different ways, not only in Protestant regions but across the Dutch provinces. Perpetuating a long history of public suspicion against commercial entertainment, which had its roots in Dutch Calvinism but was widely shared across the denominational and political spectrum, the reception of permanent cinemas typically ranged from cautious approval to straightforward resistance depending on the religious and socioeconomic make-up of the population as well as on municipal politics. To ­understand how these forces shaped the geography of cinemagoing in the ­Netherlands, we will now look at cinema’s position in the broader cultural landscape. Dutch Film Culture and the Forces of Pillarisation A central force in Dutch society for much of the twentieth century was the phenomenon of pillarisation (verzuiling), that is, the breakdown of society into Catholic, Protestant, socialist and liberal pillars. As Karel Dibbets points out, the development of film culture in the Netherlands was hampered by the fact that the cinema did not fit into the existing platforms of public life, which were painstakingly segregated along pillar lines. Each pillar had its own political parties, newspapers, social clubs, schools, etc., but attempts to set up pillar-specific infrastructures for cinema failed.21 The Catholics were the most active force in trying to control film exhibition. Their initial ambition had been to establish a national network of so-called ‘white Film Consumers in the Country

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cinemas’, which would only show films that were formally approved by the Church. However, local attempts to open up Catholic movie theatres usually fell through because audiences preferred what was on offer in commercial cinemas. Moreover, the Catholic initiatives were repeatedly frustrated by the Netherlands Cinema Alliance. Catholic cinemas were seen as unfair competition for the film exhibition business because thanks to their not-for-profit status they were exempted from local amusement tax, while commercial counterparts had to pay up to 30 per cent tax on the box-office returns. After a successful boycott by the film distributors in the NBB, the strategy of the Catholic leadership shifted from full control towards a policy of containment. From the mid-1920s, they no longer opened their own cinemas, but sought instead to minimise the ‘moving picture danger’ by way of censorship, taxation and age restrictions. In sharp contrast to the Catholics, the other pillars did not seek to control the film business. For a brief period during the 1910s, the socialists tried to open ‘red cinemas’, but these attempts failed. In line with their political ideology, the liberals left the cinema to the market. Finally, the Protestant pillar was quite segmented, but the different denominations – from the moderate Hervormden to the orthodox Geformeerden and including the Dutch Lutheran churches – all relied on Calvinism to define their relation with visual culture and entertainment. Hence, they shared a strongly negative attitude towards the film medium and even more so towards the cinema. As a result, like the Catholics, the Protestant pillar had considerable impact on the Dutch cinema market, but in a very different way. In their research on Dutch film culture during the interwar years, John Sedgwick, Clara Pafort-Overduin and Jaap Boter convincingly argue that in predominantly Protestant regions and towns, the development of film culture was curbed both on the supply and the demand side. On the one hand, local authorities would be inclined to impose restrictive measures upon film exhibitors in line with the official policies of the Protestant parties to curtail cinemagoing. On the other hand, many Protestant citizens avoided cinematic entertainment themselves, especially when they belonged to an orthodox congregation.22 However, after 1945, the general trend in the Protestant milieu changed to a cautious acceptance of the cinema, in particular from members of the Hervormde kerk (the largest denomination within Dutch Protestantism). These more moderate Protestants often retained a preference for non-commercial screenings of ‘cultural’ and ‘educational’ films, but they no longer rejected commercial film exhibition outright. In the late 1940s, the Hervormde kerk even began to organise ‘introduction to film’ courses and special screenings to elevate the taste of the Protestant cinemagoers and guide them in their choice of films. This top-down educational project and similar, more bottom-up initiatives (like the Christian Film Action) were mostly directed at small-town and rural audiences. As one of its leaders explained, ‘in terms of film appreciation the countryside is still very much behind and needs to catch up’, adding that in rural regions ‘the church and cultural organisations can do a lot for all the beauty that the Creator had given to the medium film’.23 In many respects, this new discourse on the cinema legitimised what was already happening at the grass-roots level. In the immediate post-war years, youngsters from conservative Protestant milieux often ignored their parents’ advice to avoid the movies and attended commercial cinemas in increasing numbers. 92

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However, within the Protestant milieu, the orthodox churches (Gereformeerde kerken) and other (ultra) conservative Protestant denominations remained fundamentally opposed to commercial cinema and the film medium itself was rejected in almost all its forms.24 This traditionalist attitude, which persists until today in the Dutch Bible Belt, shaped the leisure practices of orthodox believers not only in rural regions but also in the city. A survey conducted in Amsterdam in the mid-1950s revealed that residents with an orthodox Protestant background (Gereformeerden) went to the movies less often than any other religious group.25 Similarly, a national survey carried out in 1955 by the Central Bureau of Statistics shows a negative correlation between churchgoing and cinemagoing among Catholics as well as Protestants, but in no other denomination was the effect as strong as among the Gereformeerden. Respondents who were not affiliated with any denomination were the most frequent moviegoers.26 Because Protestants and Catholics were geographically clustered in the ­Netherlands, the business opportunities for commercial film exhibitors varied greatly across the provinces.27 To give the two extremes: in the first half of the twentieth century, the overwhelmingly Catholic province of Limburg (98 per cent Roman Catholic) in the south had the highest density of cinemas, whereas one found hardly any movie theatres in the ultra-orthodox communities in the Dutch Bible Belt, an area which stretches from the northern part of the province of Overijssel in the north-east of the Netherlands to the province of Zeeland in the south-west. Religion also explained local variations in the provision of cinemas within the Protestant regions. In a preliminary study of film culture in Groningen and Friesland, I used census data to determine the demographic profile of the potential audience in small towns and villages. The first results suggest that the cinema flourished in municipalities in which the Protestant population was highly fragmented but the moderate Hervormden constituted a small majority (25–30 per cent) and formed political alliances with the Liberal Party. In these denominationally heterogeneous towns, the municipal authorities would not seek control over commercial entertainment on the basis of religious identity and moral concerns. On the other hand, when the conservative Protestant minority – often a cluster of several smaller orthodox congregations – was large enough to determine local politics, this had a negative impact upon the film exhibition business and cinema attendance. Beyond PillariSation: Class The historiography of Dutch society in the twentieth century tends to focus on the impact of pillarisation and its demise (depillarisation). Especially among cinema historians, class has been under researched as a deciding factor in everyday life.28 From the perspective of class struggle, pillarisation is first and foremost a top-down hegemonic process imposed by the Protestant and Catholic sections of the bourgeois elite with the aim of structuring public life along mutually exclusive religious and ideological lines. Only the socialist pillar rallied its members on the ground of a shared class interest. The other pillars were, so to speak, ‘vertically integrated’ in socioeconomic terms. Catholic and Protestant leaders in particular sought to conceal class differences within their respective pillars, rallying their constituencies around a shared religious identity. Film Consumers in the Country

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Whereas the political and cultural elite maintained close and friendly contact, the lower classes were encouraged to organise their social lives exclusively within the pillar and to keep apart from people who belonged to other pillars, thus reducing working-class agency outside the confines of the pillar.29 For instance, well into the post-war era, Catholic workers were prohibited to vote for the Social Democratic Party or to join socialist unions under the penalty of excommunication. Instead they were expected to become members of a Catholic workmen’s organisation. While there is no doubt that working-class leisure patterns were firmly contained by the hegemonic forces of pillarisation, this does not mean that working-class audiences were not a force on the Dutch film market. Taking Rotterdam as an example, André van der Velden and I have argued that in the metropolitan context, cinema’s working-class reputation hampered its integration into bourgeois cultural life.30 To explore how the combined forces of class and religion shaped Dutch cinemagoing in the countryside, the remainder of the article looks at the dynamics of film exhibition in the Veenkoloniën, the peat district around Winschoten in eastern Groningen. In sharp contrast to Friesland, cinema attendance in this remote but semi-industrialised region in the extreme north-east of the Netherlands approached metropolitan levels even before World War II, making it an interesting case for cross-regional and urban–rural comparisons.

Small-town cinemas in eastern Groningen Eastern Groningen was known for sharp social contrasts. A small number of rich farmers and factory owners constituted the local elite, which was known for its liberal ideals in politics and modern capitalist practices in farming and business. In a rather unCalvinistic fashion, they showed off their affluence by building large estates in the town centres and alongside the main connecting roads in the area. By contrast, the large working-class population lived in poverty in small cottages or in row houses especially built for the working classes. Among (day) labourers the poverty was often extreme, especially during the winter when there was little work. Until the early 1900s, most workers were employed on the farms or as peat cutters in the high moors, which had been exploited since the seventeenth century as a source of cheap fuel. Initially most of the peat was cut by hand, but like the farm work, peat cutting was increasingly achieved by mechanical means in the early twentieth century. As a result, job opportunities declined, but this was partly compensated by a growing demand for factory workers in the emerging agro-industry (notably sugar beet refineries, strawboard factories and potato flour factories) and in shipbuilding, which developed along the canals that had been dug to facilitate the large-scale exploitation of peat. The area was predominantly Protestant in religious terms and progressive in political terms, either liberal or socialist depending on class. Some rural communities were strongholds of communism. Cinema culture in rural Groningen has been largely ignored by Dutch film historians.31 The main reason for this is that there were very few purpose-built movie theatres, so it seems at first sight that the region followed the Bible-Belt pattern. But this is not the case. In most municipalities, the policy on commercial entertainment was marked by a tolerant laissez-faire attitude. The cinema was welcome as long as film 94

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e­ xhibitors respected local building codes and fire regulations stipulated to guarantee the ­physical safety of the public. Already during the 1920s and 1930s, permanent ­cinemas ­flourished in Winschoten (13,342 inhabitants in 1930 according to the census), ­Stadskanaal (9,659 inhabitants), Veendam (13,383 inhabitants) and the conglomeration ­Hoogezand-­Sappemeer (11,429 and 6,504 inhabitants). A closer look at Winschoten, the largest and oldest town in the Groningen peat district, gives us a more detailed insight into the history of small-town film culture in the region. In the late nineteenth century, the new film medium infiltrated the area via the fairs. More regular screenings started as early as 1911 in the theatre of Hotel Wisseman (later Dommering), after the owner had installed a steam engine to generate electricity in order to include movies in the standard entertainment programme of plays, concerts and other live performances. Hotel Wisseman was a multifunctional entertainment complex, the largest in the region, but not untypical in its cultural and social function. In addition to the 1,000-seat auditorium, which dated from 1899, the building included a ballroom with a small stage, a billiard room, a reading room, a café-restaurant, and a large garden for entertainment in the summer and winter ­(ice-skating). It was not long before the success of Bioscoop Wisseman attracted competitors. From 1912 to 1916, there was a small makeshift movie theatre on the main street, which began under the name Metropole but soon switched to Bioscoop Modern, a name that might be deemed more appropriate for a small-town cinema. During the mid-1910s, Hotel Smid also programmed films in its hall (estimated seating capacity 300), although this does not seem to have been a weekly activity. More serious competition for Wisseman came from a modern, purpose-built 700-seat movie theatre, which opened its doors in late 1915. The new Scala Theater was equipped with the latest conveniences and with luxuries thereto unknown for most people in Winschoten. This is ‘a venue which one only sees in big cities’, boasted the local newspaper with obvious pride. The journalist described the

Main auditorium, Hotel Wisseman-Dommering, Winschoten (Photo courtesy of www.nazatendevries.nl)

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Scala Theater,  Winschoten, around 1918

new theatre in great detail, fascinated by everything modern. Thus, we learn that the façade was brightly lit with two ‘half-Watt lamps each with 3,000 candle power’ and that the lobby was ‘bathing in a sea of light’. This must have produced indeed a stunning effect on audiences in a town that did not yet have electricity.32 In 1927, the Scala was bought by Hollemans, a film exhibitor with roots in the fairground trade, who was expanding his travelling business with a small chain of permanent cinemas. The new owner celebrated the twentieth anniversary of the Scala with a total makeover of the building. Both the façade and the interior were entirely redesigned in line with the latest trends in cinema architecture. Echoing its initial reception in 1915, the discourse about the town’s new ‘film palace’ implied again that cultural life in Winschoten was in no way inferior to the big city thanks to its ‘hyper-modern metropolitan theatre’.33 As far as the film programme was concerned, there was little difference between the two cinemas in Winschoten during the 1920s and 1930s. Like elsewhere in the Netherlands, Hollywood movies constituted the mainstay of the fare, with German films coming second. Tickets in both theatres showed a wide price range (from 15 to 75 cents in the 1930s), which suggests that they aimed at people from all strata of society, rather than favouring a particular social segment of the audience. I did not find any evidence that educational films were programmed on Sundays or Christian holidays in respect of the conservative Protestant minority. In fact, Sunday seemed to have been the best day at the box office with more screenings than on Saturday. The main difference between the two venues was that the Scala Theater was almost exclusively used for commercial screenings, whereas Wisseman remained a multifunctional space. On Thursday nights and occasionally also on other days, the main auditorium was used for professional theatre and music, but also for amateur performances and special events organised by local associations. The Hotel Wisseman complex was ‘multipurpose’ in a political sense too: whoever was willing to pay the bill and respect the furniture could rent the premises. During the interwar years, political 96

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parties and clubs from right to left, including the communists, rented the large hall for big events, especially during elections. The smaller ballroom was also used for political gatherings, although Hotel Smid remained the most popular meeting hall in town. Film exhibition in Winschoten and surroundings was barely interrupted by World War II except in the first and final months. Whereas Jewish exhibitors lost their businesses and lives, the Dutch film exhibition sector as a whole profited from the Occupation as the movies provided a much-welcomed escape from wartime anxieties. What changed was the programme. In late 1941, Hollywood films were banned by the Film Guild of the newly appointed Kulturkammer. Henceforth, the schedule consisted of a mix of German, Austrian and Italian films, with sometimes an older Dutch production. In May 1945, when the nation celebrated the end of the war, Bioscoop Wisseman marked the occasion by immediately switching back to American movies. Its week-long Liberation programme started with Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire starring in Swing Time (1936), followed by the adventure film Gunga Din (1939) and the musical comedy High Flyers (1937).34 During the post-war boom in cinemagoing, Hotel Dommering-Wissemann (renamed after its new owner) and the Scala Theater increased the number of screenings to satisfy the high demand. Hollywood dominated the screen again, but German films continued to be popular, especially teen-pics with idols like Conny Froboess and Peter Kraus. In the 1960s, as cinema attendance rapidly declined, the core business of Dommering shifted from movies to Dixieland and rock-and-roll concerts by local bands, with occasionally a widely-publicised performance by a minor British pop star. Dommering did well with this new business strategy of targeting a teenage audience as it integrated the venue in a youth subculture that was increasingly centred on music and dancing. But it closed abruptly in 1967 after the main auditorium burned down. Without competition and with a growing regional clientele thanks to increased car ownership and the closing of weekend-cinemas, the Scala Theater survived the crisis and remained open until 1991, when its owner moved into a brand new multiscreen cinema.35 The majority of the small-town theatres in the north-east managed to remain in business well into the late twentieth century and some until this day. Key to their survival is that they were locally embedded, family-owned businesses and part of small regional chains that valued independence and service to the community more than sheer profit. Like their parents, the second and third generation tried to keep up with the latest trends in film exhibition, usually in the footpath of the Abeln family who always seemed ahead of the competition. All chains in the region cut back their travelling business and divided their permanent cinemas into multiscreen theatres to give their customers a choice of films. Programming practices were also oriented towards diversification. For instance, the Smoky cinema in Stadskanaal accommodated the local ciné-club once a week so that its members could watch art-house and political films in better conditions than at the local youth centre. In the late 1970s, ciné-clubs were springing up in many places in the countryside, often set up by left-wing youngsters in protest against the low-brow commercial fare in the regular cinemas, where soft porn, karate movies and other exploitation genres helped to maintain the cash flow.36 Innovation came in the form of the ‘service cinema’ concept, which was introduced by the Abelns in 1977.37 At any point during the show and with a just push on the service button, patrons in their theatre in Klazienaveen could call for a waiter who would serve drinks and snacks. The auditorium was equipped with Film Consumers in the Country

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Service cinema Smoky 1, Stadskanaal (Source: Film, 1 May 1983)

little tables, adorned with cosy twilight lamps and ashtrays, thus mimicking a living-room setting. By the early 1980s, most cinemas in eastern Groningen, including Smoky 1 & 2 in Stadskanaal, had switched to the new format to enhance customer experience. It proved a quite successful strategy in the fight against the attraction of the television set and VCR. Weekend-cinemas and travelling exhibition During the interwar period, the threshold for operating a successful permanent cinema was a population of around 10,000 in eastern Groningen. Yet many smaller towns and villages in the region already enjoyed more or less regular commercial film screenings and did not have to wait for the annual fair. Travelling exhibitors served smaller communities like Oude Pekela, Bellingwolde, Vlagwedde, Ter Apel, Beerta, Musselkanaal and Finsterwolde, where they worked in close collaboration with local hotel-café-restaurant owners. Initially, they travelled with their projector and films, but by the early sound era, many multipurpose halls in the region had permanent projection booths. When the local demand was high enough, the make shift cinema would operate on Friday night, Saturday and Sunday matinees and evenings, and in the winter often also on Monday and/or Wednesday evening. In other villages and towns, screenings would be less frequent, at best once a week, but more commonly twice a month. These minor outlets would still be served by a projectionist who would bring along his own equipment. As mentioned before, this interrupted pattern of film exhibition was the standard outside the major cities and towns in the Netherlands. However, cinemagoing in the villages in eastern Groningen already flourished before the war, whereas in most rural regions it was a post-war phenomenon. 98

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Café-Restaurant Schot with the Flora Bioscoop, Ter Apel. Note the film posters and other publicity materials behind the windows to inform potential customers about the programme

Aerial view of the Café-Restaurant Schot and Flora Bioscoop, Ter Apel, with an old grain mill on the upper left (Source: www.oudterapel.nl. Photo courtesy G. Kanninga)

Moreover, the weekend-cinemas in the Veenkoloniën were much larger than elsewhere in the Dutch countryside.38 For instance, the Flora Bioscoop adjacent to Café-Restaurant Schot in Ter Apel had 550 seats for a population of 3,712 inhabitants (1930 census). In Film Consumers in the Country

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Musselkanaal (5,152 inhabitants) movies had been shown in a large multifunctional hall on weekends and Wednesday nights since the mid-1920s. In 1942, the village got a brandnew multifunctional entertainment complex (De IJzeren Klap) with a bioscoop-theater that accommodated up to 600 patrons. Surviving box-office figures from this new cinema indicate that attendance came close to the national average despite the rural surroundings and strong presence of orthodox Protestant churches. Profiting from the extremely high demand for entertainment after the Liberation, it did booming business attracting 60,725 visitors in 1946 and 86,294 in 1947. In the late 1950s, the cinema sold an average of 36,000 movie tickets annually, peaking to 44,835 admissions in 1961.39 Until 1945, most weekend-cinemas in eastern Groningen were set up in privately owned buildings. After the war, many municipalities in the northern provinces invested in the construction of multifunctional village halls as part of their modernisation programme and with the idea that they could thus ensure life in the countryside remained attractive, especially for young people. Liveability was not the only motive. The cinema generated income (via the amusement tax) and public–private partnerships put the town council in the position to have a say in the programming. Usually the municipality would sublet the venue to one of the regional chains, which would then integrate the new weekend-cinema into their travelling circuit, offering the same commercial fare as in their permanent theatres. It seems that most town councils did not interfere with the programming or at least not in too explicit a way, except in Finsterwolde where Soviet films and political documentaries dominated the programme at the ‘people’s house’. This led to complaints because, at the opening in 1955, the communist council had promised that it would be a ‘cultural centre’ for everyone – ‘farm hands and factory workers, tradespeople and farmers, the elderly and the young’ – and regardless of their political views or religion.40 While the situation in Finsterwolde was rather exceptional, the screening of political and explicitly classoriented films had a long tradition in the region. From the 1920s onwards, both the social democrats and the communists used the cinema for propaganda. Typically, the film was part of a larger programme, which included speeches by prominent party members, communal singing of political songs and some kind of ‘Agit-prop’ stage show.41 For instance, in February 1937, some 450 people turned up in a local café-hall in Nieuwe Pekela to listen to ‘comrade Beuzemaker’, the chairman of the Communist Party and watch the Soviet film Lyubov i nenavist (Love and Hate, 1935).42 Newspaper evidence suggests that by the 1930s, such left-wing cultural events had become an integral part of social life in the Veenkoloniën and that they only began to decline in popularity in the 1960s. Conclusion How to explain this lively film culture in eastern Groningen and the high provision of cinema seats, far above the national average?43 If we look at the demographic makeup of the population, three factors seem to have positively influenced the business opportunities for film exhibitors and the demand for motion-picture entertainment in Winschoten and surroundings. First, among the Protestant population, those who belonged to the moderate Reformed Church (Hervormden) were in the majority. The rest of the religious landscape was extremely fragmented with many independent Protestant congregations (for instance, 100

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Stadskanaal had over fifteen Protestant churches), with some Catholics and Jews. In addition, the census reveals very high rates of secularisation – typically around one-third of the population, more than twice the national average (14.4 per cent in 1930).44 Second, a considerable part of the working-class population in the northern peat districts consisted of relatively recent migrants who had come to work on the farms, in the peat industry or factories. Social coherence in the new towns and villages that had emerged with the peat industry was less pronounced than in old farming communities and its inhabitants seem to have been less sensitive to pressures from the pillarised society. In his study of unschooled workers in Groningen and Friesland, sociologist Jan Haveman described the lower segments of the working class in the Veenkoloniën as a proletariat that rejected vested authorities, tending to left-wing extremism in politics and membership of sectarian Protestant denominations if they were religious.45 Third, voting patterns reflected the socioeconomic profiles of the population and the tendency towards secularisation with the Social Democratic Party and the liberals dominating local politics. This political constellation translated into a tolerant attitude towards commercial film exhibition. The local authorities did not seek to regulate commercial entertainment on ideological grounds. Licences were granted provided that the owners complied with safety regulations and building codes. Sunday shows were not an issue, neither were public screenings of Soviet and other communist films. Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925), which caused great concern among Dutch mayors and was prohibited in many Dutch towns, was shown without any interference by the local authorities in towns like Veendam and Winschoten.46 That said, in some municipalities in eastern Groningen, we find no commercial film venues before World War II. This situation, which is very similar to that in Friesland and other rural regions in the Protestant provinces, requires a case study in itself. However, a first examination of census data and election results suggests that the cinema did not play a role in public life when conservative Protestants formed a significant minority, in which position they not only influenced everyday life but also local politics. In such contexts, at least until 1940, the mayor often refused to grant a licence for commercial film exhibition or he would prohibit shows on Sunday – the best day at the box office. This dependence on the attitude of municipal authorities may explain why film exhibitors in the Veenkoloniën hesitated to invest in the construction of purpose-built movie theatres: the outcome of the next election could ruin their business almost overnight. By operating in existing multifunctional halls and continuing the ambulant cinema mode of the early days (except that only the projectionist and films travelled), they reduced the risk associated with doing business in an area in which a considerable segment of the population remained opposed to the film medium or at least to commercial film screenings. After the war, film exhibition business boomed all over eastern Groningen. Many halls that had been served occasionally by a travelling cinema were turned into ­weekend-cinemas, while existing weekend-cinemas switched to daily screenings. Even among the ultra-conservative Protestants, resistance to cinemagoing seemed to have lessened because we see new venues opening in localities where there was no evidence of commercial film exhibition in the 1920s and 1930s. In the post-war period, the religious milieu no longer had such a great influence on how people spent their free time. Peers rather than parents determined leisure preferences. Consequently, youth culture – in mainstream and subcultural forms – became the dominant force with which the film exhibitors had to reckon. In the margins of mainstream film culture, a politicised Film Consumers in the Country

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­ orking-class cinema culture developed in some multifunctional halls, notably in the w communist municipalities and later also in the milieu of the ciné-clubs. However, in sharp contrast to the reception of the cinema among the ­metropolitan middle and upper classes, I found no evidence that the cinema was considered a ­specifically working-class entertainment in eastern Groningen, neither before nor after the war. In this rural context, its identity was first and foremost defined in terms of its relation to modernity and the modernisation of the countryside. The cinema was perceived as an urban or even metropolitan institution and experience. Depending on ideological orientation and religious affiliation, this close association with a modern, urbanised lifestyle could have positive or negative connotations, with at the extreme end the unqualified condemnation of cinemagoing by the ultra-conservative orthodox Protestants. Finally, a crucial aspect of film exhibition in the Veenkoloniën is the resilience with which the local chains adapted to changing market conditions. Although more research is needed to establish the exact economic dynamics of rural and small-town film exhibition in the Netherlands, as a group the film exhibitors in the peat district seem to have fared better than their colleagues elsewhere in the Dutch countryside. Of course, they could continue to build upon what had already been established in the interwar years, but they also cautiously avoided taking big financial risks despite booming business in the immediate post-war era. Most new theatres in the region were multifunctional community centres built with public funding rather than private money. The local chains renovated their venues, but did not seek expansion. Without exception the cinemas in the Groningen peat district remained small, independent ‘pop-and-mom’ businesses and the families continued to combine permanent cinemas with the travelling film business until the weekend-cinemas were no longer profitable. In sum, the operational flexibility which had once been imposed upon these countryside film exhibitors by the specific conditions of the ‘Protestant market’ offered a long-term advantage because they could adapt the scale and scope of their businesses quite easily to the shrinking demand when cinema attendance began to decline. NOTES

Parts of this chapter, in particular the historiographical overview of the debate about Dutch film culture, were published in an earlier version in Judith Thissen, ‘Understanding Dutch Film Culture: A Comparative Approach’, Alphaville Journal of Film and Screen Media vol. 6 (Winter 2013) (www.alphavillejournal.com).

1. ‘Amsterdam betekent voor “provincialen” meestal: Artis, rondvaarten en plezier’, Leeuwarder courant, 12 March 1955, p. 13. 2. Information based on the Cinema Context Database (www.cinemacontext.nl). 3. Ivo Blom, ‘De eerste filmgigant in Nederland. De snelle verovering van Nederland door Pathé’, Jaarboek mediageschiedenis vol. 8 (1997), p. 131. 4. For a comparison with Belgium, see Guido Convents and Karel Dibbets, ‘Verschiedene Welten. Kinokultur in Brüssel und in Amsterdam 1905–1930’, in Corinna Müller and Harro Segeberg (eds), Kinoöffentlichkeit/Cinema’s Public Sphere (1895–1920) (Marburg: Schüren Verlag, 2008), pp. 148–54. 5. André van der Velden and Judith Thissen, ‘Spectacles of Conspicuous Consumption: Picture Palaces, War Profiteers and the Social Dynamics of Moviegoing in the Netherlands, 1914– 1922’, Film History vol. 22 (2010), pp. 453–62. 102

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6. Karel Dibbets, ‘Het bioscoopbedrijf tussen twee wereldoorlogen’, in Karel Dibbets and Frank van der Maden (eds), Geschiedenis van de Nederlandse film en bioscoop tot 1940 (Houten: Het wereldvenster, 1986), p. 245. 7. Karel Dibbets, ‘Het taboe van de Nederlandse filmcultuur: Neutraal in een verzuild land’, Tijdschrift voor mediageschiedenis vol. 9 no. 2 (2006), p. 46 (Table 1). 8. Dibbets, ‘Het bioscoopbedrijf tussen twee wereldoorlogen’, pp. 244–5. 9. J. Nikerk, ‘Onderzoek naar de economische beteekenis van het ontspanningsleven in Amsterdam’, Tijdschrift voor economische geografie vol. 34 no. 6 (1943), pp. 84–7. 10. Karel Dibbets, ‘Bioscoopketens in Nederland: Economische concentratie en geografische spreiding van een bedrijfstak, 1928–1977’. Master’s thesis, University of Amsterdam (1980), pp. 24–5 (Table 3.1.1). 11. Ibid., pp. 17 and 24 (Table 3.1.1). 12. Centraal bureau voor de statistiek, Statistiek van het bioscoopwezen 1939, waarin mede opgenomen gegevens omtrent de filmkeuring (The Hague, 1938), p. 9. 13. Dibbets, ‘Bioscoopketens in Nederland’, pp. 18–19. 14. Ibid., p. 19. There was enough overcapacity to absorb the increased demand in the immediate post-war years. A comparison between ticket availability and actual ticket sales in 1938 in Amsterdam, Rotterdam and The Hague shows that on average only one-third of the seats were occupied. Statistiek van het bioscoopwezen 1939, p. 18 (Table 6). 15. Dibbets, ‘Bioscoopketens in Nederlands’, pp. 43, 49. 16. Ibid., p. 58. See also, Jan Mooibroek, Bewegende beelden – witte doeken. Van kermistent tot bioscooptheater Stadskanaal (Stadskanaal: Streekhistorisch centrum, 1998). 17. Dibbets, ‘Bioscoopketens in Nederland’, p. 73. 18. The decline in attendance came to a halt in the 1970s, thanks to a series of Dutch box-office hits, including Blue Movie (1971) and Turks Fruit (1973). Between 1980 and 1985, cinema attendance plunged again by half to stabilise at an average of one visit per year for another decade. A slow rise set in during the late 1990s due to the combined effect of the opening of multiplexes and a boom in Dutch film production. See Judith Thissen, ‘Les dynamiques historiques de l’exploitation des films en salle aux Pays-Bas’, in Laurent Creton and Kira Kitsopanidou (eds), Les salles de cinéma: Enjeux, défis et perspectives (Paris: Armand Colin/Recherches, 2013), pp. 47–51. 19. Dibbets, ‘Bioscoopketens in Nederland’, pp. 72, 74. ‘De “Provincie”’, Film, 1 November 1965, p. 3. 20. Leeuwarder courant, 11 June 1955, p. 5. 21. Dibbets, ‘Het taboe van de Nederlandse filmcultuur’. 22. John Sedgwick, Clara Pafort-Overduin and Jaap Boter, ‘Explanations for the Restrained Development of the Dutch Cinema Market in the 1930s’, Enterprise and Society (2012), pp. 657–58. 23. A. R. van Dijk, quoted in ‘Platteland heeft kans film in goede banen te leiden: Voorlichting en vorming zijn daarbij van groot belang’, Leeuwarder courant, 20 April 1959, p. 6. 24. Exceptions were made for scientific films, documentaries that gave a purely photographic representation of reality or historical events (without the use of professional actors), ­animation films and fairy tales (again on the condition that no professional actors were used). Jan Hes, In de ban van het beeld. Een filmsociologisch-godsdienstsociologische verkenning (Assen: van Gorcum, 1972), p. 94. See also, P. Jongeling, ‘Kanttekeningen: Het voorzichtig verdrag’, Gereformeerd gezinsblad, 30 July 1948, p. 198. 25. Sedgwick et al., ‘Explanations for the Restrained Development of the Dutch Cinema Market in the 1930s’, pp. 26–7. 26. Vrijetijdsbesteding in Nederland, Winter 1955/1956 (Zeist: Centraal bureau voor de statistiek, 1957), vol. 3, quoted in Hes, In de ban van het beeld, p. 165. Film Consumers in the Country

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27. Hans Knippenberg, De religieuze kaart van Nederland: Omvang en geografische spreiding van de godsdienstige gezindten vanaf de Reformatie tot heden (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1992); Jaap Boter and Clara Pafort-Overduin, ‘Compartmentalisation and Its Influences on Film Distribution and Exhibition in the Netherlands, 1934–1936’, in Michael Ross et al. (eds), Digital Tools in Media Studies. Analysis and Research. An Overview (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2009), pp. 55–68. 28. Judith Thissen and André van der Velden, ‘Klasse als factor in de Nederlandse filmgeschiedenis. Een eerste verkenning’, Tijdschrift voor mediageschiedenis vol. 12 no. 1 (2009), pp. 50–72. 29. Arend Lijphart, Verzuiling, pacificatie en kentering in de Nederlandse politiek (Amsterdam: J. H. de Bussy, 1982). 30. In schematic terms, the argument goes as follows: in the big cities, large segments of the middle classes stayed away from the cinema or at least did not embrace the new entertainment like their counterparts in neighbouring countries because the social experience of the cinema did not conform to vested norms of bourgeois respectability. Van der Velden and Thissen, ‘Spectacles of Conspicuous Consumption’. 31. There is however a decent overview compiled by local amateur historian Jan Mooibroek, Bewegende beelden, which I used for my case study in addition to census data, newspapers and the academic historiography on the region. 32. Winschoter courant, 29 October 1915, quoted in Mooibroek, Bewegende beelden, pp. 48–9. 33. Mooibroek, Bewegende beelden, p. 50. 34. Advertisements Bioscoop Wissemann, Winschoter courant, 15 and 24 May 1945. 35. The Hollywood was built with the support of the municipality. It had three screens and a total seating capacity of 335. A fourth screen was added in 1996, bringing the total seating capacity to 440. It remained in business until 2008. Since then the nearest commercial cinema is Smoky (three screens) in Stadskanaal, which is owned and operated by the Abeln family. 36. ‘Het Groninger filmcircuit’, Nieuwsblad van het Noorden, 20 October 1978, p. 35. 37. Mooibroek, Bewegende beelden, p. 117; ‘Nieuwe bioscopen: Smoky 1 en 2 – Stadskanaal’, Film, 1 May 1983, p. 8. 38. According to the Central Bureau of Statistics, around 80 per cent of the cinemas in communities with less than 5,000 inhabitants had less than 400 seats. Statistiek van het bioscoopwezen 1939, p. 24 (Table 9). 39. Mooibroek, Bewegende beelden, p. 106. 40. Ibid., p. 128; ‘In Finsterwolde volksgebouw geopend’, Waarheid, 18 April 1955, p. 3. 41. See for instance, ‘Met den rooden auto op reis’, Het volk, 22 and 26 February, 6 March 1926, p. 1. 42. See for instance, ‘Twee uitstekende vergaderingen in het Hoge Noorden’, De tribune, 17 February 1937, p. 4. 43. For instance, in Winschoten the provision was one seat per fourteen persons, compared to the national average of one seat for forty-eight inhabitants (1930s), whereas in the villages in the Veenkoloniën the provision was even higher (six to ten inhabitants per seat). 44. Mostly these were former members of the Hervormde Kerk. See Knippenberg, De religieuze kaart van Nederland, p. 230. In communist strongholds like Finsterwolde and Beerta over half of the population reported no religious affiliation (census 1930). 45. Jan Haveman, De ongeschoolde arbeider. Een sociologische analyse (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1952), pp. 143–4. Peat workers in particular were widely seen as a subcultural community that lived economically and socially on the margins of society, clustering in certain streets and neighbourhoods. 46. ‘De Potemkin film’, De tribune, 10 December 1926.

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6 Ch no

Cinema Title and Social Life in the Rural Gironde: Insights from an Oral History Project Author Corinne Marache

After the invention of Lumière’s cinematograph, it wasn’t long before travelling showmen arrived with their projector and a set of films in the many towns and villages of rural France. As elsewhere in Europe, the early days of film exhibition were dominated by fairground entertainment. In the big cities and medium-sized towns the cinema disappeared from the fairgrounds around 1910 when Pathé and Gaumont established the first permanent movie theatres.1 After World War I, we witnessed a similar development in the smaller towns. By the mid-1930s, most French small towns had at least one purpose-built movie theatre, which was typically perceived as the architectural and cultural landmark of the community’s urban modernity.2 However, permanent film exhibition did not push ambulant cinema out of the market. On the contrary, travelling shows in multifunctional village halls, cafés and inns remained popular in the countryside for many decades. Following Richard Maltby’s appeal for a cinema historiography ‘from below’, we propose a micro-historical analysis of film culture in a specific local setting.3 Thus this chapter deals with the history of cinemagoing in the Gironde, a département in the south-west of France. Its focus is on film exhibition and the experience of cinemagoing in the small towns, villages and hamlets in the rural region east of Bordeaux from the late 1910s until the 1960s. Our analysis is based primarily upon an oral history survey carried out in 2013 with the help of the Groupe de recherches archéologiques et historiques de Coutras (GRAHC), a local historical association that is active in the small town of Coutras.4 With the information provided by our witnesses, complemented by evidence from regional newspapers and municipal records, we seek to understand the place of the cinema in rural society. How did the movies come to the small towns and villages in the Gironde? Who were the film exhibitors? Where did they rent their films? When did people go to the cinema and how often? How did they get there? Did cinema interest the youth in particular, or did it attract all age groups? To what extent did the films contribute to the cultural awakening of the rural population? These are some of the questions that help us to understand how the cinema – the ‘seventh art’ – was perceived and experienced beyond the big city of Bordeaux. In the first section, we look at the history of ambulant showmen and their business practices. The second section deals with the emergence and development of permanent film exhibition in small towns in the Gironde.5 After a closer examination of the programming practices in Coutras in the late 1940s, we shift the focus from the exhibitors to their patrons. By analysing audience responses to the cinema on the basis of the Cinema and Social Life in the Rural Gironde

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oral history project, we seek to determine to what extent films and the experience of cinemagoing functioned as a window on the wider world for rural dwellers and how the cinema fitted into the broader entertainment landscape of rural society. Ambulant cinema in the villages Although few villages in the Gironde had a permanent cinema, they were not deprived of regular film showings. From the 1930s onwards, and especially after World War II, most rural communities were regularly visited by itinerant showmen who toured from village to village with their projector and films. We did not find any business records or newspaper reports relating to these travelling shows, but we obtained nevertheless a fairly good insight into the world of ambulant film exhibition thanks to interviews with two travelling projectionists. Both had a regular circuit in the Gironde in the 1940s and 1950s.6 Guy Mondon (born 1928) started in the film exhibition business in 1943, at the age of fifteen.7 The young man worked for a family of projectionists who had fled Paris during the Occupation. They were based at Villefranche-de-Longchat, a small village situated in the wine-growing region between Libourne and Bergerac. Every week they showed films in their home village as well as in Saint-Christophe-des-Bardes, Saint-Antoine-sur-l’Isle, Saint-Christophe-de-Double and Puisseguin (a circuit of 113 kilometres in total). For five years Mondon worked for the successive owners of this struggling little business and then he set up his own circuit in 1948. On the advice of a friendly engineer, he bought second-hand equipment in a specialised shop in Bordeaux. After his circuit had been validated by the CNC (National Centre of the Cinema), he was in business. Mondon used both commercial venues and village halls for his screenings. In the first case, he dealt directly with the entrepreneurs whose premises he used, typically innkeepers and owners of cafés. When he used the village hall, the dealings were more formal as he had to negotiate with the local council and needed permission from the municipal authorities. Sometimes it was the mayor himself who asked Mondon to include the village in his circuit. After elections, new councils sometimes questioned the existing contract, but this was rather an exception. When he used the village hall, Mondon had to pay a rental fee to the municipality. When he set up his show in a café or inn, he would get the space for free because the proprietor would benefit from the increased sale of drinks and food. In the early 1950s, Mondon travelled about 230 kilometres each week. His circuit took him to Chamadelle (in a café), Saint-Christophe-de-Double (in the back room of a café), Saint-Antoine-sur-l’Isle (in a café), Les Églisottes (first in the village hall and after that in Café Métreau near the station), Puisseguin (in the village hall) and on Sundays to the village hall of Les Artigues-de-Lussac. In later years, he also visited S­ aint-Seurin-sur-l’Isle on Sundays, initially setting up his show in Café Videau and later in the municipal hall. The size of the localities that he visited varied considerably. The smallest village on the circuit was Saint-Antoine-sur-l’Isle, which had only 430 ­inhabitants; the largest was Les Églisottes with a population of nearly 1,900. Only villages and towns that did not have a permanent cinema welcomed travelling film exhibitors. Sunday screenings were in the afternoon, but on other days they generally took place in the evenings, usually at 106

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nine o’clock. Each locality was visited on a fixed day and time. Thus going to the cinema became a regular feature of everyday life. Sometimes a mayor requested extra screenings, but this was quite rare. More often screenings were cancelled during local foires and festivals so that planned activities would not suffer competition from the cinema. Guy Mondon showed films seven days a week, regardless of the season and weather. Like most of his competitors, he initially travelled by bicycle with a little cart in which he transported his equipment, which consisted of a projector, a screen, an amplifier and a loudspeaker. After a few years, he bought a scooter, which made his life much easier. When he arrived on the site, he had a routine. First, he would black out the windows because the halls had not been designed for film screenings. Then the chairs had to be put in place. Usually the chairs were provided by the innkeeper or belonged to the village hall, but in some places he rented them from a company in Libourne. In the winter, Mondon often had to buy wood to heat the room. It took about twenty minutes to set up the projector and make the room ready. Normally he would arrive at the end of the afternoon or in the early evening to arrange everything. Before the show, he would either eat at his own expense when he was renting the village hall or he would be invited for dinner by the innkeeper whose premises he used. Initially, his mother assisted him. After that he worked alone for a few years until he married and his wife joined the small business. The second projectionist we interviewed was Georges Usureau. His account resembles that of Mondon’s on many points, except that he came from a family that had been in the film trade for more than two decades. His father, Jean Usureau, had started out as a film exhibitor just after the Great War in the bastide town of Monségur, where he organised screenings in the covered marketplace with his wife accompanying the films on the piano. Over the next decades, the Usureau family built up a chain of permanent cinemas in small towns in the Gironde and Dordogne, while remaining active in the field of

The covered market of Monségur, where Jean Usureau showed films in the late 1910s

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ambulant film exhibition. In addition, they ran a company in Bordeaux called S.V.P. Cinéma, which sold all the equipment necessary for movie theatres, including screens, projection and sound systems, curtains and seats. During World War II, Jean Usureau assigned a part of his travelling cinema circuit in the Gironde to his son Georges and the business in the Dordogne to a nephew. Georges travelled to Duras on Monday night, Pellegrue on Wednesday night and Gensac on Saturday night. Working ­conditions varied considerably. In Duras, a small town with about 1,300 inhabitants, Georges Usureau rented the village hall from the municipality, but it was not at all adapted for film screenings. Therefore he projected the films from the outside through a window. As a makeshift projection cabin he used an old van, which was stored in a local garage. Every week, some members of the audience would arrive early and assist him with installing this unusual dispositif. Making do and helping out were part of the experience of rural cinema. An inhabitant of Coutras remembered that when he went to the movies for the first time in the late 1920s, the screening took place in a hangar.8 Permanent cinemas: Marketing modernity in small towns While travelling projectionists served the smaller rural communities, the dominant viewing context for small-town audiences was the permanent cinema. Most small towns in the Gironde had one purpose-built movie theatre. Some had two, but this was an exception. Many of the venues were successful right from the start and remained in business for decades. Others found it difficult to survive or closed within a few years. The Usureau family operated several cinemas in the southern part of the Gironde. In 1934, Jean Usureau opened his first permanent cinema in Monségur, where he had started out his career as an ambulant film exhibitor. The 200-seat Eden had a double balcony and included a dance hall. Its architecture was distinctly modern in style and set the tone for the other movie theatres of the Usureau chain.9 In the late 1940s, the family built new cinemas in Cadillac (Lux), Langon (Florida) and La Réole (Rex). This expansion took place in the context of a post-war improvement frenzy in the countryside, which led in many small towns to a building boom that was wholeheartedly encouraged by the local authorities.10 Some of the movie theatres that were opened in this period were rather spacious for a small-town cinema, like the 500-seat Lux cinema in Cadillac, a small town with around 2,800 inhabitants. Jean Usureau also expanded his business in the Dordogne, where he opened cinemas in Neuvic, Thiviers and Mussidan. He trained the staff for these venues himself Eden cinema, Monségur, 2013 (Courtesy Cinéma Eden) 108

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and then gave them the responsibility of the day-to-day management. All his movie theatres were equipped and furnished by his own store. Usureau even opened a factory in Mussidan that made cinema seats. In fact, throughout the post-war era, the family was involved in the development and the maintenance of many other theatres in the Gironde and Dordogne because S.V.P. Cinéma had no competitors in the region until the early 1960s. Thus, the Usureaus played a considerable role in the expansion of rural cinema in the south-west of France. Typically, only the openings of new movie theatres in the Gironde are well documented. Hence, is difficult to give a precise history of small-town film exhibition in this region. Combining information from the interviewees, municipal records and local newspapers, we managed to reconstruct in somewhat more detail the history of film exhibition in Coutras, a market town with a population of about 5,500 inhabitants.11 Coutras is situated on the bank of the Dronne close to where it joins the river Isle. From 1852 it had a railway station that linked the town to Bordeaux and Angoulème and after 1857 also to Périgueux. Coutras served as commercial and administrative centre for the surrounding villages and hamlets, but also exported manufacturing and agricultural products beyond the region. Rural industrialisation began in the late nineteenth century in this part of the Gironde because of the many watercourses and the waterpower coming from there. Coutras had a textile mill, a metal factory and a large distillery. On the outskirts stood the Laubardemont factory, a former industrial mill, where until 1955 oil was produced for the Dutch company Calvé using peanuts imported from Senegal via the harbour of Bordeaux. In 1934, the factory had 550 employees, a number that declined to 200 in 1953.12 The first regular films screenings in the municipality of Coutras seemed to have been organised by American soldiers during World War I. On Saturday nights, they projected films in the hydroelectric power station of Abzac, a neighbouring village. After the Americans left, one Monsieur Lavaud, a local resident, decided to continue the weekly screenings at the Hôtel du Lion d’Or, a large hotel-restaurant near the Coutras railway station. Because he wanted to develop this apparently successful activity, Lavaud asked the town council for permission to build a cinema on a piece of land which he owned in the town centre, not far from the Lion d’Or. Permission was granted without difficulty in 1923. The new cinema was built in a sober ­neo-classical style which recalled the architecture of the first purpose-built cinemas of the 1910s. It had two auditoria, which could each accommodate about 200 people. The construction of the Comœdia, as the theatre was called, should be understood in the broader context of the modernisation and urbanisation of rural France. After World War I, many small towns in the French countryside were undergoing an architectural ­makeover to shed their rural image and differentiate them from the surrounding villages. Municipalities built new schools, community halls, post offices, sports facilities and other public buildings. They also invested in electrification, water and sewer systems, paved streets and new squares.13 Cinemas were integral to this transformation process. Unlike the Comœdia theatre in Coutras, their architecture was often marked by a resolutely modern style, like the many art deco cinemas that opened in the 1920s and 1930s. As architectural historian Eléonore Marantz-Jaen points out, during the interwar period, cinema buildings became powerful symbols of urban modernity in rural France.14 Cinema and Social Life in the Rural Gironde

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An example of 1930s modernism: T   he municipal salle des fêtes and cinema of Saint-Laurent-du-Médoc (Gironde)

Le Sully – municipal cinema and salle des fêtes, Coutras, circa 1960

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The Comœdia was the only permanent film exhibition venue in Coutras until the late 1950s, when the socialist mayor decided to build a municipal cinema and salle des fêtes on the site of the former fairground area on the outskirts of the town. Le Sully opened in 1957 and was resolutely modern in style. The management of the new hall was entrusted to the owners of the Comœdia, probably for practical reasons and to avoid accusations of unfair competition. Comœdia remained in business as an independent movie theatre until it closed down in 1983, when the crisis in cinema attendance was at its worst in France.

Pop-up cinemas As in large cities, film exhibition in rural France varied greatly. Not only were there the established travelling circuits, independent regional chains and small businesses like the Comœdia, but films were also shown in more informal settings. We also see this in and around Coutras. For instance, after World War I, the local parish priest began organising film shows for children on Sunday afternoons. For two sous the children could attend the show and receive a piece of barley sugar as an extra treat. These screenings were held in an old building and continued until the end of the 1930s. In the late 1940s, the Sud-Ouest, the main regional newspaper in the Gironde, listed three cinemas in Coutras. In addition to the Comœdia, films were screened at the Moulin Bleu, a local dance hall, and in Les Charmilles, a community hall in a nearby hamlet. Similarly, in 1950s, the dance room of the Tivoli bar-restaurant in Coutras occasionally functioned as a makeshift theatre. Most likely these were ‘illegal’ screenings given by travelling film exhibitors who operated outside of CNC regulations. All in all, it seems that these ‘pop-up cinemas’ were rarely successful. Several of the people we interviewed mentioned their ephemeral nature.

Film programMEs and other entertainments Film exhibitors in the Gironde rented most of their films in Bordeaux, where all the main distribution companies had an office. Many went there every week to return the films that they had been showing and collect a new set for the next week. The Usureau family would rent copies for several weeks because they circulated the same programme in all the theatres that belonged to their chain, thus benefiting from economies of scale. Guy Mondon also rented films from France Distribution. A salesman would visit him every now and then, so that he could choose from the catalogues. However, his choice was limited by block-booking practices: ‘if we wanted to have the good films, the most recent ones, we were obliged to take some less well-known ones as well’. Most small-town cinemas offered one screening in the evening on weekdays, while on Sundays there was an additional matinee (sometimes also on Saturdays). The programmes listed in the Sud-Ouest give us a good impression of the films that were shown. An analysis of the titles listed for the cinemas in Coutras in 1948 reveals that the large majority of films were French (65.5 per cent).15 Second came American films (25 per cent), followed by British (6 per cent) and Italian productions (3.5 per cent). In terms of genres, the main categories were drama (37 per cent), comedies (23 per cent), fairy tales (16 per cent) and Cinema and Social Life in the Rural Gironde

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adventure films (8 per cent). Very few titles were recent releases. Only three films (out of eighty-six) were less than a year old and another ten titles were between one and two years old. All the recent films were French productions, with the exception of the neo-realist film Sciuscià (Shoeshine, 1946; released in France in 1947). In total, over half of the films (52 per cent) were either made during the war (22 per cent) or in the 1930s (30 per cent). In other words, the time lag between the national release and the screening in Coutras was considerable. However, based upon our oral history project, it seems that audiences did not consider this much of a problem. Our respondents simply emphasised that new films came out in the big cities first and later in the countryside. In their perception, the programmes in the rural countryside did not differ greatly from those shown in the metropolitan cinemas. Film programmes were publicised by the local and regional press, which simply listed the titles of the feature films, sometimes adding a few lines of extra information when the film was a national box-office hit. Film exhibitors did not advertise in the newspapers. They made publicity by putting billboards with film posters in front of their theatre. In the case of travelling shows, the publicity would appear in the village hall or inn on a board that belonged to the projectionist and which remained in place from one week to the next. The feature was the main attraction, but people also remembered enjoying the shorts that were shown during the pre-programme. A typical bill would start with a non-fiction film (about twenty minutes) about foreign countries, French regions, different trades, etc. Sometimes, the documentary was followed by a cartoon. Then came the newsreel with national and international news, which was often keenly anticipated because not everyone read a newspaper or had a radio. The first part of the programme would end with film trailers and advertisements for local businesses and national products (like La Perdrix household soap). All this was before the intermission, which lasted about fifteen minutes. A live entertainment act sometimes performed during the break (a singer, juggler, magician or mime artist). In the 1950s, this practice seems to have been widespread.16 People generally remained seated during the intermission. The u ­ sherette would pass down the aisles selling all kinds of sweets, like barley sugar, c­ andies, peanuts and ice-creams. According to our respondents, no drinks were sold in the auditorium. However, there was often a café in the lobby or next door. Some c­ inemas had an outside terrace. When screenings were held in cafés or inns, it is probable that many customers arrived early or stayed on after the show for a drink or for dinner because otherwise there was no incentive for the owner to allow these screenings from which he derived no direct income in the form of rent or from a share in the ticket sale. Many cinemas in the rural Gironde were not only used for film screenings but also accommodated other cultural and social activities. This was the case in the multifunctional salles des fêtes and in the regular movie theatres. For instance, the programme of the Comœdia in Coutras featured musicals and variety theatre during the winter season. Popular attractions were the troupes of Tichadel, Barret and Valmy. In 1948, Maurice Lambert of the Folies Bergères starred on its stage in a comic show called Cupidon fait la loi. In addition to professional theatre, the Comœdia accommodated local amateur performances, like violin and piano concerts by local youngsters and dances organised by the town’s rugby team.17 Similarly, in Monségur, the annual ball of the local firemen was held at the Eden cinema.18 In the towns, villages and hamlets, where the travelling shows were held in the municipal or church hall, the screenings were part of an even wider range of activities, such as dances, dinners and amateur 112

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entertainments. In other words, the cinema not only offered commercial entertainment, but had a broader function as a social space and centre of communal life. A window on the world Our oral history project revealed that most audience members did not care very much about what was shown at the cinema. The very fact of going to the cinema was more important than the actual film programme, which was of secondary consideration. The cinema offered first and for all the opportunity to go out as a family or to gather with friends and share a few moments’ relaxation in a place especially designed for ­leisure. Such places were still relatively rare in the countryside, especially in ­comparison with the commercial entertainment infrastructure that had developed in cities like Bordeaux, Angoulême or Libourne. In the rural Gironde, there was not much of a choice when looking for an evening’s entertainment. In most villages, there was one single film to watch every week or two weeks, while in the small towns the choice was at best between two or three shows. Moreover, tickets were cheap and hence the price did not present an incentive to wait for a better film to spend one’s money. Finally, a ­considerable segment of the rural population was probably less informed than ­metropolitan audiences about the latest films, famous stars and other motionpicture news, although this changed during the 1950s thanks to the growing attention paid to the cinema in magazines aimed at the rural youth (see Leventopoulos in this volume). But sometimes people did care about the movie. There could be long queues for hit films and people would buy their tickets in advance to be sure of getting a seat. Most of our interviewees endorsed the view that part of the attraction of the cinema was its association with modern life and urban culture. However, at the same time, they rejected the notion that films had actually changed their behaviour and thoughts, for instance by influencing the way they dressed and talked or their relation to other people. In our survey, many responded categorically ‘no’ to the question of influence. Others replied with ‘moderately’ or ‘somewhat’. Only a few people believed that the cinema had fostered their cultural openness in an important way. ‘Yes, it brought windows on the world and knowledge, a culture,’ one couple explained.19 When questioned about specific actors who had impressed them, French names predominated, notably Fernandel, Raimu, Jean Gabin and Bourvil. Hollywood stars were often referred to as a group. When asked for specific American actors, interviewees would mention John Wayne or Marlon Brando. Actresses were usually cited second. We did not find any particular antagonism towards American films. The respondents who liked Hollywood movies sometimes regretted the stereotypical narratives. All in all, specific films or actors seem not to have played a decisive role in their lives. Nevertheless, the more general impact of the cinema should not be underestimated. Many French productions offered a glimpse of Paris and metropolitan modernity, whereas Hollywood offered a glimpse into the American Dream. Travelogues opened up the world with images of faraway places and newsreels informed rural audiences about national and international events and trends. Moreover, the very activity of going to the cinema was associated with urban life and the modernisation of the countryside. Thus the cinema contributed to the cultural awaking of rural society, together with other media (the Cinema and Social Life in the Rural Gironde

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press, radio and, later, television) as well as schools and other educational activities. It was one element in a broader process of sociocultural transformation. Audiences and attendance patterns Who exactly went to the cinema in the rural Gironde? There are no surveys or statistics about cinema attendance in the period we studied, but the oral history project again offers some insights. According to our respondents, people would typically go to the cinema with friends or siblings. Quite remarkable from today’s perspective, young children (under the age of ten) rarely went to the cinema. Parents did not take them and commercial cinemas did not target children with special matinees until the 1950s, when these were organised on a more or less regular basis for schoolchildren, either at the request of the teachers or the local council. While adults went regularly to the cinema, it nevertheless seems that adolescents made up the bulk of the audience. The youth had more free time to spend on leisure than married couples with children. Their favourite place would be on the balcony, away from the suspicious eyes of the older generation (although girls were sometimes accompanied by a chaperone). Many respondents recalled how the cinema facilitated encounters with the other sex and they emphasised the important role that these outings to the cinema (but also to balls and other public festivities) had played in their love lives. In the intimacy of the dark, boys and girls found the ideal spot to cement a relationship. Newlyweds often went as much as possible to the cinema in the knowledge that family life might soon limit their leisure activities. Typically, most people in the audience were locals, but the screenings also attracted patrons from the surrounding area, notably from communities that were not (or no longer) served by travelling cinemas. During the interwar years, it was not unusual to walk several kilometres to attend a picture show. In the 1950s and 1960s, the mobility of youngsters increased significantly as they were able to buy bicycles and motorbikes. It was also in this period that the phenomenon of travelling cinema gradually died out due to the competition from television. Henceforth villagers had to travel further if they wanted to see a film on the big screen. There was yet another category of people who travelled long distances to the cinema. Some respondents remarked that the town worthies often avoided being seen in the local venue. They would either not go to the movies at all or would attend cinemas in larger cities like Libourne or Bordeaux, where there was a better choice of films and where they were part of a more anonymous audience. The popularity of the cinema and cinema attendance were defined by many factors. First, the rhythms of agricultural life had a considerable impact upon the film exhibition business. In villages and towns where a large part of the population worked in agriculture, the cinema attracted more customers in the winter when farm work slowed down. This can be seen in the frequency of shows in Coutras in 1948. Their number was higher in the autumn and the winter (respectively 26 per cent and 30 per cent) than during the spring and summer (respectively 24 per cent and 20 per cent). The two film exhibitors we interviewed agreed that both travelling and permanent cinema suffered from rises and falls in attendance due to the season and the weather. 114

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Competition from other entertainments was another important factor. Itinerant theatrical troupes, like the Théâtre Ferranti, sometimes toured the region and set up their ambulant wooden playhouse on the local fairgrounds for a few days or more. Their arrival was a real event in the countryside and would draw people from a wide distance. Travelling film exhibitor Guy Mondon recalled that his takings dropped sharply when the Ferranti theatre was in town.20 Also we should not forget that, although the recreational opportunities were more limited than in the big cities, certainly in the realm of commercial entertainment, there were still plenty of things to do in the villages and small towns. The regional newspapers reveal a wide range of activities: fêtes foraines and other local festivals, parades, balls and sports events (football or rugby matches, basketball, bicycle races). In Coutras alone there were twenty-four foires in 1930. Some respondents confessed that they liked foires and balls better than going to the cinema. The movies fascinated them, but in the cinema they had to sit still, keep silent and concentrate on the story on the screen. They were not used to this and they wanted to dance and laugh. Clearly, they liked more ‘kinetic’ forms of recreation and playful social interaction with other youngsters or peers. This was especially the case for people who lived and worked on the farms, often quite isolated from the bustle of village and small-town life. Finally, going regularly to the cinema was confined to a short, well-defined period during the lives of the people we interviewed: when they were teenagers and young couples without children. This may well explain why many of our respondents insisted that most people they knew seldom went to the cinema. At the end of their lives, they seem to have forgotten the number of visits that they and their friends made to the local cinema and which kept the business of both permanent movie theatres and itinerant showmen profitable in the French countryside until the television set made its entrance in many rural households. NOTES 1. For Bordeaux, see Pierre Berneau, ‘Le cinéma des origines: Les débuts du spectacle cinématographique: Bordeaux’, in 1895. Revue d’histoire du cinéma vol. 4 (1988), pp. 18–32. 2. Corinne Marache, ‘Les petites villes, pôle de dynamisme en milieu rural? L’Exemple aquitain, milieu XIXe–début XXe siècle’, Histoire urbaine (March 2006), pp. 93–114. 3. Richard Maltby, ‘On the Prospects of Writing Cinema History from Below’, Tijdschrift voor mediageschiedenis vol. 9 no. 2 (2006), pp. 74–96. 4. The oral history project was organised in two stages. First we conducted about fifteen interviews (some in small groups) with people who lived in the area’s small towns or countryside during the period under consideration. On the basis of these interviews, we developed a questionnaire to complete our study. Some of those interviewed were found with the help of the GRAHC (Groupe de recherches archéologiques et historiques de coutras – http://grahc.free .fr/accueil.html, accessed 17 September 2016). Forty people between the ages of seventy-five and ninety-five were interviewed individually or in small groups about their cinemagoing experiences. In addition, twenty-five people filled in a questionnaire. 5. Small towns are not only defined by size but also by their economic, administrative and cultural function for the surrounding villages and hamlets. In terms of size, they typically had no less than 1,000 inhabitants and no more than 6,000 inhabitants. See Marache, ‘Les petites villes’, pp. 94–5.

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6. Guy Mondon, who lives in Saint-Denis-de-Pile, was born in 1928, the son of a road mender, and was a travelling projectionist from 1949 to the early 1960s. Interviewed on 26 April 2013. M. Georges Usureau was born in 1927 in Monségur, and was first a travelling projectionist, then manager and designer of many cinema theatres in south-west France (1943–65) and in the south-east (1965–2003). Interviewed on 24 May 2013. 7. Paradoxically, World War II prompted the expansion and the professionalisation of ambulant film exhibition in France, especially in the countryside. In 1941, the German authorities prohibited the indigenous 17.5mm format and imposed the conversion to 16mm upon the 3,500 film venues that were equipped with the Pathé-rural projector. This compulsory standardisation facilitated the circulation of copies and thus fostered the expansion of film exhibition in small communities across the French countryside. See Claude Forest, Les dernières séances: Cent ans d’exploitation des salles de cinema (Paris: CNRS, 1995), pp. 63–4, 79. 8. Interview with P. R., member of the GRAHC, 15 May 2013. 9. The Eden never closed its doors. Since the 1980s, it has been run by a voluntary association and today offers about a dozen screenings per week, www.cinema-eden.com/news/seanceart-essai.html, accessed 20 July 2014. 10. Hélène Tierchant, Aquitaine, 100 ans de cinéma (Bordeaux: L’Horizon chimérique/Centre régional des lettres d’Aquitaine, 1991), pp. 148–9. 11. The information about film exhibition in Coutras is based upon a study by Christophe Métreau for an exhibition about the history of cinemagoing in the town and from the ­interviews with members of the GRAHC. Five people, men and women aged from seventy-six to ninety, took part in these interviews. They were accompanied by David Redon, president of the GRAHC. I thank them all for their precious help. 12. Marache, ‘Les petites villes’, p. 97. 13. For a detailed account, see ibid., pp. 108–14. 14. Eléonore Marantz-Jaen, ‘Architectures de cinémas. L’Expérience et les réalisations d’Eugène Chirié (1930–1939)’, Rives méditerranéennes (2003), pp. 95–112, and Eléonore Marantz-Jaen, ‘Architectures de cinémas’, Rives méditerranéennes (online publication), http://rives.revues.org/84, accessed 30 June 2014. See also Francis Lacloche, Architectures de cinémas (Paris: Éditions du moniteur, 1991). 15. Information is missing for about fifty days in the year. Also, for some films we could not ascertain the year of release or the country of production. Out of ninety-seven films counted, only eighty-six could be used in our study. Thanks to Michel Dubernet and Marie-Claude Gautrias for their help with this compilation. 16. Tierchant, Aquitaine, p. 152. 17. Information provided by Mr Métreau. 18. Interview with Mr Usureau. 19. Questionnaire of Mr and Mrs F., 29 May 2013. 20. Sylvie Latrille, Daniel Plazer, Le théâtre Ferranti. Histoire d’un théâtre ambulant (Porchères: Éditions La cause du poulailler, 2012).

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7 Ch no

Far Titlefrom Swinging London: Memories of Non-Urban ­Cinemagoing in 1960s Britain Author Matthew Jones

While British film production flourished during the 1960s, with both the gritty ‘kitchen sink’ dramas and the hedonistic ‘swinging London’ films drawing critical praise, film exhibition in the United Kingdom continued its steady decline. As Dickinson and Street note, ‘By 1960 the cinema had lost two-thirds of its 1950 audience; in the next decade it lost half of what remained.’1 While in 1960 there had been 3,819 cinemas in the country, by 1969 that number had fallen to 1,581, with the annual audience reducing from 475 million to 215 million over the same period.2 The blame for this is most often apportioned to the rise of television, but demographic trends, including the relocation of large numbers of people to the suburbs, certainly played a part. The resultant cinema closures and rising ticket prices had a significant effect on the cinemagoing experience in Britain’s towns and cities, but their consequences for rural and small-town audiences, whose access to films was often already limited before the industry’s economic problems manifested, are less clear. Specific statistics about rural cinema closures do not appear to have been kept, but a general picture can be pieced together from existing data and trends established in earlier decades. Historically, British cinemagoing has been a predominantly urban phenomenon. In the 1940s, Moss and Box observed that only 15 per cent of rural cinemagoers attended at least once a week, while the figure for people living in a town of 300,000 people or more was 37 per cent.3 Indeed, half of the population of rural Britain never went to the cinema at all, compared to a quarter in the most populated regions.4 During the 1950s, when the collapse in cinema admissions began, the smallest cinemas, which seated 500 people or fewer and which were disproportionately situated in rural areas, saw a slower decline in attendance than their larger counterparts.5 However, despite holding onto their audiences for longer than other venues, there was still a 29 per cent reduction in the number of small cinemas during the 1950s.6 This was slightly higher than the average figure across all venue sizes, which stood at 25 per cent.7 Even though rural cinemas seem to have experienced a less radical drop in admissions, it is clear that they ‘never attained the prosperity of town cinemas and that starting from a more precarious initial position have had to succumb in greater numbers’.8 Those rural and small-town cinemas that did not succumb and which persisted into the 1960s were often unable to update their infrastructure to take advantage of new trends that afforded greater profitability to venues in the nation’s cities. Stuart Hanson has observed that the splitting of auditoria to accommodate more than one screen, a practice that gathered pace during the 1960s, ‘was initially confined to large premier city centre venues due to the cost’.9 As such, the 1960s Far from Swinging London

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saw a ­continuation of the pattern of declining audiences and venue closures in rural Britain, though it is difficult to be precise about the severity and extent of these trends in particular regions, and it found cinema owners lacking the resources to replicate the changes that were staving off disaster in Britain’s urban venues. During the 1960s, there were usually no cinemas in very small, rural communities and many cinemagoers visited nearby towns in order to watch films.10 The number of cinemas operating in a community was largely dictated by the size of the local population, but most small towns appear to have been limited to just one. These cinemas were, as Hanson notes above, only equipped with a single screen and audiences seem largely to have divided them into two categories, the more comfortable venues and their cheaper cousins, known colloquially as ‘fleapits’. While these static exhibition spaces were certainly the norm, there was also at least one mobile film screening operation in place. Large parts of rural Scotland were served by the publicly subsidised Highlands and Islands Film Guild, which transported projectors between many of the country’s most isolated communities in order to enable films to be screened in village halls, schools and other such public sites. These visits were largely arranged on a fortnightly basis, following rigid circuits that were only interrupted due to poor weather and other unforeseen circumstances. They often saw a documentary screened alongside a popular Hollywood or British feature. The Guild also delivered their equipment to occasional local festivals, where film screenings would sit within a broader programme of community events. As the decade progressed, the Guild saw its audience decline in much the same way as more traditional cinemas did. It gradually closed its various circuits, reducing the number of communities that it visited, and in 1970 its activities ceased altogether. However, while these sorts of ventures were significant in the regions in which they operated, they were not the norm and have been discussed in more detail elsewhere.11 This chapter is instead concerned with the more usual cinemagoing experiences of most rural British audiences, which involved visiting static, single-screen cinemas in the closest town to one’s home. To discuss the nature of rural cinemagoing in 1960s Britain, this chapter uses the memories of audiences in such communities, which have been collected through the ‘Cultural Memory and British Cinema-going of the 1960s’ project. This project aims to shed light on the social and cultural history of Britain through an exploration of the habits, rituals and experiences of cinemagoing. In this sense, it explores c­ inemagoing as an activity that can reveal information about the behaviour, tastes, choices and identities of ordinary people. Since 2013, the project has collected memories of 1960s cinemagoing from over 700 respondents.12 All respondents were asked to complete a detailed questionnaire about their experiences and their memories of cinemagoing, while many were also invited to take part in an interview. At the time of writing, the interview stage of the project has only recently begun, and consequently this chapter draws exclusively from the questionnaires of the eighty-two respondents who identified themselves as people who lived in ‘a smaller community (village or rural area)’ during the 1960s. While official definitions of the term ‘rural’ could have been provided to respondents to ensure parity, the project’s interest in the lived experiences of 1960s cinemagoers meant that it was preferable to understand how respondents thought of their own communities, rather than what they understood of how official bodies might define them. As such, the definition of ‘rural’ that is used in this chapter is necessarily 118

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diffuse. What is under discussion is not necessarily the experiences of people in areas that would unanimously be identified as rural, but rather the experiences of people who identified their own communities in this way. Outside of this interest in place, the questionnaire itself is broad in focus, inviting memories relating to the types of cinemas that were visited, their architecture, the people with whom one went, food and drink in the cinema, preferences for genres, stars and directors, ephemeral material that surrounded the release of a film and so forth. Particularly useful for this chapter are questions about the locations of and journeys to local cinemas, but information about the nature of rural cinemagoing has been provided by respondents in all sections of the questionnaire. The analysis of a large collection of memories drawn from a range of audience members will inevitably cause methodological problems. In search of objectivity, questions are often raised about topics such as sampling, representation and statistical significance. These are certainly valid concerns if one’s aim is to use the data to draw firm conclusions about the experiences of a clearly defined population. However, this is not the aim of the memory work that this project engages in. Objectivity and perfect samples are elusive since we cannot know with any clarity the demographic make-up of the cinemagoing population of 1960s Britain. Not all sectors of society visited the cinema with equal regularity, a fact that Spraos has observed in the tendency for 1950s British cinemagoing to be a predominantly working-class activity.13 As such, perhaps what should be aimed for is the collection of a significant number of memories from across different areas of society in order to represent the different types of cinemagoing experiences that took place, be they frequent or infrequent, common or unique. This clearly erodes the value of any quantitative data that could be derived and indeed this chapter will not offer statistical information about the audiences it addresses. Instead, it focuses on trends that emerge within the qualitative data. To facilitate this, the qualitative analysis software Nvivo has been used. This program allows the researcher to divide the dataset according to respondents’ demographic features, for example, by isolating the memories shared by rural cinemagoers. It also enables the tagging of specific ideas, themes and trends within the memories, which are themselves rendered searchable by keyword. As a result, Nvivo enables the more thorough identification of broad tendencies, but this is not without its own problems. Using Nvivo in this way ultimately relies on the coding of data and the keyword searches performed by the researcher, which leaves it open to the same biases as any other mode of qualitative analysis. Consequently, the conclusions of this chapter are inevitably informed by both the memories themselves and my own sense of what these memories tell us about rural cinemagoing in 1960s Britain. The software certainly allows key themes and issues to be tracked through the data, but whether it takes us any closer to the type of objectivity that some critics of this type of work desire is questionable. It is also instructive to ask what is lost through such an approach as well as what is gained. Taking this broad view across the dataset risks distancing the researcher from the unique and individual character of each cinema experience. As such, this chapter employs a hybrid approach, seeking to identify general trends while also allowing these tendencies to be narrated in the voices of individual audience members. In doing so it quotes directly from specific memories of particular experiences, films and cinemas, but also locates these memories within the broader trends in the complete dataset. Far from Swinging London

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For the purpose of contextualisation, when a respondent is quoted in the discussion below, their sex and age at the end of 1969 is provided. While many of the experiences discussed relate to earlier years in the decade, it is not always possible to know exactly how old a respondent was when an event occurred due to the imprecision of memory and so it is hoped that this general indication of each respondent’s age will suffice. As such, the material that this chapter reports reflects a version of the 1960s as it has been constructed in memory. This is not unproblematic for the cinema historian since, as Annette Kuhn has observed in her comparable study of 1930s cinema m ­ emories, ‘­particular questions arise concerning the evidential status of accounts which rely on remembering – and thus also on forgetting, selective memory and hindsight’.14 The stories and reminiscences recounted to the project thus represent ‘memory texts, or recorded acts of remembering’ that do not necessarily reflect ‘the past “as it was”’, but rather a highly subjective and constructed account of it.15 This encourages us, following Kuhn’s lead, to consider memories ‘not only as data but also as discourse, as material for interpretation’.16 In these terms, this chapter will discuss how people in smaller c­ ommunities experienced the cinema during the national collapse of exhibition that occurred in the 1960s, but the resulting picture of the decade will also reflect how they tell these stories now, at a particular time (2013–14) and in a particular environment (which Kuhn terms the ‘research encounter’).17 In exploring these memories, the chapter will address three key themes, namely access to cinemas, the extent to which 1960s films were felt to relate to everyday rural life, and the ways in which the conditions of rural cinemagoing were seen by respondents to shape the character of the experience itself. Accessible and Inaccessible Cinema Journey times to the nearest cinema that respondents describe vary, ranging from ‘5 minutes on foot’ (15, female) to ‘nearly an hour by walking across the fields and catching the bus’ (20, female), but the majority of respondents seem to have taken between twenty and forty minutes.18 As many of these trips were made on foot, meaning that a journey of half an hour would imply a distance of up to 2.5 kilometres, the suggestion made by some respondents that cinemas were located in larger, nearby towns rather than rural villages seems accurate. This corresponds with John Spraos’s observation from 1962 that: [A] typical Urban District contains less than 10,000 people and is normally surrounded by a Rural District with a larger, though more thinly spread, population. The cinema of the area would be located in the small town over which the Urban District Council presides. But its patronage area would extend well over into the surrounding Rural District or Districts.19

Indeed, one respondent noted that ‘most towns had at least one [cinema] unless it was a small market town’ (17, female), indicating that it was not only villages that sometimes had no cinema but slightly larger communities as well, so trips to bigger population centres were common for residents of both.20 While many respondents recall travelling to the cinema on foot or by public transport, others had the relative luxury of access to a car. Indeed, there is little mention of 120

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any other mode of private transportation in the memories, despite the popularity of bicycles and mopeds elsewhere in Europe at this point. There were 5.8 million cars registered in Britain in 1960, but by 1970 this figure had nearly doubled to 11.4 million.21 The boom in automobile ownership was not confined to the cities and is reflected in the number of rural audience members who remember driving or being driven to their nearest cinema. This in turn put the cinema within easier reach of those who had previously found it less accessible. While Kelly, Norton and Perry suggest that the car and the rise of television were responsible for a ‘spiral of decline’ in US cinemagoing, the picture in rural Britain seems to be more complicated.22 Indeed, one respondent who lived in ‘rural Cornwall’ noted that ‘by the time I was dating in 1965, most of the boys I knew had access to a car’, making the nearest cinema, which would otherwise have taken half an hour to reach by public transport, and only then ‘if the bus was on time’ (21, female), a more viable location for a date.23 Many other respondents recall being driven to cinemas by their parents, while one in particular remembers living in an area of Wales that was ‘too rural to take the bus’ (5, female) and, as a result, borrowing her grandfather’s car to make the thirty-minute drive to her nearest cinema.24 However, while increased car ownership enabled many in Britain’s more remote communities to attend cinemas in local towns with greater ease, this did not necessarily equate to an increase in ticket sales. Many rural respondents remember visiting the cinema once or twice a month, but a sizeable number went less frequently. Car ownership made cinemas more accessible for rural respondents, but did not produce an audience that attended habitually, as cinemagoers had done in Britain’s cities in earlier decades. Perhaps as a result of its increasingly important role in cinema attendance, the car also holds a prominent place in memories of this activity. For example, when one respondent from North Yorkshire went to see the British, French and Italian coproduction, Monte Carlo or Bust! (1969), which was being shown alongside The Italian Job (1969), the day was memorable not because of the films themselves but because ‘I slammed the car door on my Dad’s thumb as we arrived’ (11, female).25 In some instances, cars were also sites of cinema memories long after the trip to the cinema itself, with one respondent describing how ‘I still know most songs from the films I saw at that time, so [I] guess we must have sang them in the car going on holiday’ (12, female).26 Cars were not solely instrumental to rural cinemagoing during the 1960s as they often became spaces in which cinema memories were formed and resurfaced. Of course, this was only true of those cinemagoers who could afford a car or whose family could. While one respondent quoted above had access to her grandfather’s car and so was able to drive for thirty minutes to see films, others in this community without cars would likely have found making this journey on foot a deterrent, or else would have been dependent on potentially infrequent, inconvenient and unreliable public transport. As one respondent whose family ‘were not well off enough to own a car’ (22, female) notes, her cinemagoing diminished once she moved to a more remote location with fewer public transport connections.27 Another described how ‘going to the cinema was not easy because […] I was dependent on public transport to get [to] the nearest cinema which was 13 or so miles away and we had no car’ (18, male).28 As such, while car ownership did indeed make cinemagoing more convenient for many rural audience members during the 1960s, for others things remained unchanged. Far from Swinging London

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The general picture that emerges from the questionnaires is of small-town cinemas as places that could often be reached on foot or by public transport, but which were increasingly accessible as cars become more affordable. Although the 1960s is understood as an era when Britain’s cinemas were closing in large numbers, precipitated by decreasing attendance figures, in the memories of rural communities, ­cinemagoing remained a stable, if not always entirely convenient, activity. It is perhaps likely that the pattern that Spraos observed in the late 1950s and early 1960s, which saw small-town cinemas retaining audiences reasonably successfully (even if they closed in greater numbers than their urban counterparts), is a result of the increasing mobility of audiences in nearby communities that lacked cinemas of their own.29 Film Preferences and the Rural ‘Real’ Memories of particular 1960s films are now often not as clear as memories of the social experience of seeing them. However, respondents were able to recall broad categories of films that they enjoyed. These preferences were largely similar across Britain, with rural audiences showing no clear distinction from urban dwellers. A broad range of genres was enjoyed, with traditionally popular categories, such as comedies, epics and adventure films, remaining in favour. War films maintained a respectable following, as did horror and science fiction, but the latter two were somewhat niche. The memories reflect patterns of consumption that favoured mainstream Hollywood productions, which were noted for being ‘engaging stylish films [that] knew how to put a narrative together’ (20, male), and to a lesser extent British films.30 However, these preferences reveal little about the specificity of rural and small-town audiences since they were not unique to them. Audience preferences become more relevant in relation to British films that made significant use of urban environments, which would have been unfamiliar in the day-to-day lives of rural audiences. Such films formed the basis of two distinct trends in 1960s British cinema, the ‘swinging London’ films and the ‘kitchen sink’ dramas. The swinging London films usually ‘pivot around single young women (and sometimes men), defying convention as they try to fulfil their ambitions and find romance in a modern and uniquely unconventional London’.31 They offered glamorous glimpses of the lives supposedly lived by young, beautiful and often wealthy people in the capital, but frequently contained reasonably explicit warnings about the moral and emotional dangers that such lives entailed. This cycle of films was both critically and commercially successful, with Darling (1965) and Blow-up (1966) winning a total of five Academy Awards, four BAFTAs and the Grand Prix, then the highest prize of the Cannes Film Festival, between them. Such films were watched by rural audiences with a keen sense of how different London seemed to their own communities. One respondent noted that they depicted an ‘unknown way of life and also nothing like that could be seen on television’ (23, female).32 Another recalled that ‘I didn’t like London or Northern accents – so different from West Country ones! Not having a TV meant I wasn’t used to them and didn’t know much about the “swinging London scene”’ (21, female).33 Despite characterising this ‘scene’ in swinging London films as unfamiliar, very few rural respondents recall being concerned about the frequently decadent lifestyles that were 122

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Julie Christie enjoys the glamour of swinging London in Darling (1965) (BFI National Archive)

depicted. One did remember that she ‘wasn’t so keen on Alfie [1966] because of his treatment of women’, but conversely ‘was very impressed by Blow-up’ (32, female).34 Indeed, many seem to have been curious about, or even envious of, these films’ cosmopolitan characters. One recalls that ‘Living in a rural location, life just wasn’t anything like the London scene, which I would like to have been part of, but was too shy and reserved’ (23, female).35 Another respondent saw a connection between these films and his desire ‘to live in London’, even if their content did not always ‘fit my preferred image of life in the big city!’ (20, male).36 As such, the swinging London films were sometimes aspirational for rural cinemagoers, even though they represented a very unfamiliar world. Prior to the swinging London films, British cinema saw a cycle of gritty ‘kitchen sink’ dramas, such as Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960), A Taste of Honey (1961) and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962), which has been discussed as ‘a kind of renaissance’ that saw ‘new voices, new film-makers’ taking prominence.37 These films brought what Julia Hallam and Margaret Marshment have described as ‘social realist aesthetics’, which were grounded in ‘the British documentary movement of the 1930s’, to the nation’s cinema screens.38 They were set largely in working-class communities in the north of England and focused on supposedly ordinary families and social issues such as teenage pregnancy, homosexuality and the pressures of family life. The social-realist aesthetics that Hallam and Marshment

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The urban landscape of northern England in A Taste of Honey (1961) (BFI National Archive)

describe were, as James ­Chapman suggests, evident in the films’ ‘stark black-andwhite cinematography and their use of natural lighting and real locations, often utilizing the back streets, canals and workshops of grim northern industrial towns’.39 For Chapman, this produced a ‘rather sordid image of everyday life in the provinces’.40 This harsh, urban landscape contrasted with both the depictions of London that appeared in cinemas in the following years and the types of environments inhabited by many rural Britons. However, many rural cinemagoers recall that these images of the industrial north of England felt familiar and in some sense ‘real’. Some argued that they were ‘too much like real life’ (21, male),41 that ‘I could get gritty realism in real life’ (18, female),42 or that ‘I had a real life [and] didn’t need to see it on film’ (24, male).43 Others were more positive, recalling that: ‘Partly cinema was escapism, whereas the films like Saturday Night and Sunday Morning brought a view of real life home to people like me who otherwise had not experienced it.’44 This connection between kitchen sink dramas and reality was also expressed by other rural cinemagoers. One recalled that ‘I liked these films because they depicted real life for many people. They lived their lives in the same sort of setting I did and I knew people who were very similar in many ways’ (22, female).45 Another noted that ‘They were about real life, what was really happening, here and now. They appeared more realistic than the “fairy tale” type of film, i.e. Mary Poppins

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[1964] or The Sound of Music [1965]’ (14, female).46 One of these respondents lived in the Thames Valley during the 1960s, another lived in Derbyshire, while a third began the decade in Greater London before moving to Derbyshire and then Monmouthshire. In other words, they were located outside of the northern cities featured in the kitchen sink dramas. As such, their discussion of the ‘real’ in these films might perhaps suggest that the social issues tackled by kitchen sink dramas were as much a reality for rural cinemagoers as they were for those in northern cities. In any case, while the metropolitan landscapes and lifestyles of swinging London seemed very distant, rural audiences had little trouble identifying with the urban characters of the kitchen sink films. The Experience of Small-town Cinemagoing There is a tendency in the responses to explain the character of rural cinemagoing by contrasting it with its urban counterpart. Respondents often framed their answers with reference to how their physical environment either left them at a disadvantage in terms of cinema or shaped their experiences differently to those of city dwellers. While this must be viewed with a degree of scepticism, since many rural respondents remained in smaller communities throughout the 1960s and so had little basis for comparison, these memories do reveal something of how rural cinemagoing was experienced and imagined as an activity that differed from its urban counterpart. Respondents recall that films were slow to arrive in rural communities. Some small-town cinemagoers have memories of reading film reviews in the national newspapers and periodicals, largely published in London, some time before the films themselves were available to watch locally. Respondents report these periods extending to a number of months. Rather than being frustrated by such delays, they instead tend to discuss them as periods of excitement and anticipation. One describes a ‘really big event’ in their childhood: My grandparents took me to see The Sound of Music – we had waited for what seemed like ages for it to come to our small town cinema, and when it did finally arrive the queues right up the street were astonishing. There had been a lot of talk, and what I suppose we now term as ‘hype’ about this film beforehand, so by the time it came to our town we were more than ready to see what it was all about. The general buzz of excitement from the audience, before the film started, was proof that it really was something extra special (6, male).47

This sense of excitement was clearly generated, at least in part, by the long period in which rural cinemagoers anticipated the film before they were able to see it. Of course, The Sound of Music is a special case given the praise that it received from reviewers and the extraordinary level of publicity that surrounded it. Other such special events, like watching the Olympic Games or ‘the 1966 World Cup in colour’ (10, male) at a cinema, were met with similar excitement.48 However, films released with less fanfare were often also significant conversation points in rural ­communities. Another respondent recalls that ‘Being from a small community the films were talked about like TV programmes are today’ (10, male).49 While this

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might also have been true in urban areas, where people often waited for films to be released in local cinemas after they had been shown in first-run venues, the anticipation produced by the delayed arrival of a film is certainly one means by which rural audiences now distinguish their cinemagoing from that which took place in larger cities. While cinema might have provided a topic of discussion for people in rural communities, it also provided them, alongside newspapers, radio and television, with a way to connect with and understand the world outside their own locality. As one respondent explains, ‘I was a child, from a small village, everything outside of that world appealed to me’ (6, male).50 Even at his very young age, cinema offered this respondent exposure to the way life was lived beyond his local area. Moreover, it wasn’t only the content of films that provided such connections to the world, but also cinemagoing itself. One respondent described how You felt that this was joining with an activity that people all over the country or all over the world were also participating in, rather than being isolated in a very rural place and having to make one’s own amusements’ (13, female).51

The cinema offered her a way to share in the same films and experiences enjoyed by audiences in London or New York. While audiences in Britain’s cities and large towns might also have felt this sense of connection, perhaps its appeal was of greater significance in the country’s most rural locations, where some respondents reported feeling isolated. Another way in which the realities of rural film exhibition shaped how the cinemagoing experience is remembered is through the relatively limited choice of films that respondents recall being available. This can be attributed to the fact that audiences often only had access to the films shown at a single local venue, as discussed above, while city dwellers frequently had more choice. As one rural respondent notes, ‘The only cinema I went to for most of the time was a small local cinema in the large Sussex village where I was brought up’ (22, male).52 This individual was consequently only able to see the films chosen for exhibition there. Another respondent revealed that the swinging London films were ‘outside my experience, didn’t get the chance to see these until later (partly linked to the unavailability of film to me living in a small village)’ (19, female).53 Similarly, a further respondent recalls that ‘There were a lot of monster films which you had to sit through when taken to the cinema by your boyfriend. Small towns had little choice of film’ (19, female).54 This is contrasted with the urban cinemagoing experience by a respondent who moved from a rural area ‘to Portsmouth where I had a huge choice of cinemas, ranging from luxury to “fleapit” and I reveled [sic] in being able to go to films twice a week’ (22, male).55 The implication of these memories is that rural cinemagoers’ ability to exercise choice in the films that they saw was restricted by the limited number of exhibition spaces accessible to them. Audiences in such areas might well have been excited by the prospect of seeing films that they had read about in the London press months earlier and might also have enjoyed feeling connected to audiences elsewhere in the country and the world, but these pleasures were shaped by the exhibition context in which their cinemagoing took place. 126

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Conclusion There are many stories that could be told about 1960s cinemagoing in rural and smalltown Britain. Each of the project’s 82 respondents from smaller communities has their own experiences to share and their own understanding of the role those experiences played in their everyday lives. The geography, demographic make-up and economy of each small town and village shaped the nature of the local audiences’ exposure to cinema in unique ways. While the general trends within the memories discussed above can certainly tell us something of this population’s cinemagoing experiences, they also reveal much about the ways in which these experiences are now recounted and used to produce particular images of and messages about rural life in 1960s Britain. For example, while cinemas were certainly shutting down in significant numbers, respondents tend to describe access to film as being dependent on transportation rather than on the closure of venues. As such, rural cinemagoing is recalled as a precarious activity, but this is presented in relation to mobility rather than economics. Similarly, aspects of the cinemagoing experience that were common to many urban and rural communities, such as the delay in a film’s arrival at a venue close to one’s home or the excitement and discussion that some screenings generated, are now used by rural cinemagoers to distinguish their experiences from those of their urban counterparts. In this sense, the ways in which urban and rural experiences of cinema were imagined to differ can be related to the response to the swinging London films, since both framed big cities as glamorous places that operated differently to small towns. Shaped by the limited choice that small-town cinemas offered and the sense of isolation that was sometimes felt in such communities, rural cinemagoing is now remembered to have had a very different character than it did in places such as London, Manchester and Edinburgh. As such, memories of cinemagoing provide rural audiences with a means of identifying the unique character of their own experience of 1960s Britain, even though in reality these differences might have been smaller than they appeared. Moreover, while cinema was able to provide its rural audiences with a connection to the wider world, a sense of anticipation, a topic for discussion and a point of differentiation from urban communities, it was predominantly seen as a source of reasonably priced entertainment. The social, political and economic aspects of cinemagoing were, after all, products of the fact that people went to cinemas to have a good time (as well as to get out of the cold and to see friends and family). As one respondent notes, ‘films either had to be funny or big and colourful – either way, they needed to lift you into a wonderful world far away from rain-sodden mid-Wales!’ (19, female).56 Cinemagoing meant different things to different people, but the various aspects of its significance were folded into the experience of watching enjoyable films. While several respondents described the cinema as pure escapism, their memories often reveal that this wasn’t always the case. While ostensibly escaping from their everyday lives in the darkened auditoria, these audiences also confronted and negotiated various aspects of their own realities. This was sometimes done in relation to the images on screen, as with the kitchen sink dramas, but it was also present in the character of the experience itself and the journeys taken to and from the cinema. The story of 1960s cinemagoing in rural Britain may be shaped by the perception that life in smaller communities was radically different to life in the big city, but in both types of community cinema was a cocktail of economics, politics, shifting social attitudes and, perhaps most importantly, fun. Far from Swinging London

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NOTES 1. Margaret Dickinson and Sarah Street, Cinema and State: The Film Industry and the Government, 1927–84 (London: BFI, 1985), p. 277. 2. Alan Burton and Steve Chibnall, Historical Dictionary of British Cinema (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2013), p. 18. 3. Louis Moss and Kathleen Box, The Cinema Audience: An Inquiry Made by the Wartime Social Survey for the Ministry of Information (London: Ministry of Information, 1943), p. 260. 4. Ibid. 5. John Spraos, The Decline of the Cinema: An Economist’s Report (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1962), p. 83. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid., p. 96. 9. Stuart Hanson, From Silent Screen to Multi-screen: A History of Cinema Exhibition in Britain since 1986 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), p. 119. 10. Spraos, The Decline of the Cinema, p. 158. 11 See Ian Goode, ‘The Place of Rural Exhibition: Makeshift Cinema-going and the Highlands and Islands Film Guild (Scotland)’, in Karina Aveyard and Albert Moran (eds), Watching Films: New Perspectives on Movie-going, Exhibition and Reception (London: Intellect, 2013), pp. 263–78. 12. This project was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and is supported by University College London’s Department of History. The archive of memories that has been collected by its director, Melvyn Stokes, and research associates, Matthew Jones and Emma Pett, will be made publicly available in 2016. References in this chapter to the files held by the project will be designated by the acronym ‘CMBC’ (for ‘Cultural Memory and British Cinema-going of the 1960s’) and the project code number under which the relevant document is stored. All such references in this chapter refer to the respondents’ questionnaires. 13. Spraos, The Decline of the Cinema, p. 22. 14. Annette Kuhn, An Everyday Magic: Cinema and Cultural Memory (London: I. B. Tauris, 2002), p. 9. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid. 18. CMBC 0050; CMBC 0090. 19. Spraos, The Decline of the Cinema, p. 158. 20. CMBC 0513. 21. Rüdiger K. W. Wurzel, Environmental Policy-making in Britain, Germany and the European Union: The Europeanisation of Air and Water Pollution Control (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), p. 92. 22. Terence Kelly, Graham Norton and George Perry, A Competitive Cinema (London: Institute of Economic Affairs, 1966), p. 16. 23. CMBC 0198. 24. CMBC 0531. 25. CMBC 0108. 26. CMBC 0490.

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27. CMBC 0092. 28. CMBC 0231. 29. Spraos, The Decline of the Cinema, p. 83. 30. CMBC 0294. 31. Moya Luckett, ‘Travel and Mobility: Femininity and National Identity in Swinging London Films’, in Justine Ashby and Andrew Higson (eds), British Cinema, Past and Present (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 233–45. 32. CMBC 0507. 33. CMBC 0198. 34. CMBC 0416. 35. CMBC 0507. 36. CMBC 0002. 37. Samantha Lay, British Social Realism: From Documentary to Brit-grit (London: Wallflower Press, 2002), p. 57. 38. Julia Hallam and Margaret Marshment, Realism and Popular Cinema (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), p. 45. 39. James Chapman, Cinemas of the World: Film and Society from 1895 to the Present (London: Reaktion Books, 2003), p. 254. 40. Ibid. 41. CMBC 0065. 42. CMBC 0336. 43. CMBC 0160. 44. CMBC 0097. 45. CMBC 0183. 46. CMBC 0428. 47. CMBC 0438. 48. Ibid. 49. CMBC 0112. 50. CMBC 0006. 51. CMBC 0368. 52. CMBC 0145. 53. CMBC 0164. 54. CMBC 0061. 55. CMBC 0145. 56. CMBC 0164.

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PART III ALTERNATIVE EXHIBITION ­PRACTICES

PART NO. PART TITLE PT LINE 2

8 Corporate Film Shows and the Initiation of Rural Audiences to Ch no Film and Consumer Culture in Switzerland Title Yvonne Zimmermann Author

The clichés of Switzerland as a country of mountains, alphorns, chocolate and cheese tend to obscure other aspects of the ‘home of Heidi’, such as the fact that ­Switzerland was among the first and most industrialised countries in Europe. In the nineteenth century, textile mills, machine factories, food plants and c­ hemical and pharmaceutical corporations settled largely in the northern, eastern and ­south-western parts of the nation. Covering only 30 per cent of the country, these urbanised and densely populated main flatland areas contrasted with the sparsely populated mountainous alpine region that constitutes 60 per cent of the total ­surface. As with every cliché, there is thus a grain of truth in the ones recounted above: Switzerland is a country of mountains with a robust agricultural and ­handicraft tradition, if only on the one hand. Among the many points of intersection between industrial centre and rural periphery, the encounter of corporate film shows and rural audiences will be under scrutiny in this chapter. Switzerland is taken as a case in point to examine the role of the private industry in building and maintaining non-theatrical film culture in rural areas and remote mountain regions. From the 1920s to the introduction of television in the 1950s, travelling film shows organised by private enterprises, mainly from the food and consumer goods industry, were key agents in bringing film to rural communities and classrooms. Rural audiences are central to understanding the manifold interlocking of education and entertainment, of film culture, consumer culture and citizenship that helped spread and implement modern life in rural Switzerland. Bearing in mind that the conception of historical audiences inevitably remains to some extent a construction and an abstraction, as Frank Kessler reminds us, rural audiences will be examined from a historical-pragmatic perspective that considers the interrelations between institutional framing, exhibition and film form.1 Such an approach to historical spectatorship focuses on reconstructing the dispositif in which films were screened and viewed in order to account for historically specific modes of exhibition, audience address and reception.2 In this way, the social experiences of moviegoing in rural areas will be reconstructed and related to moviegoing in urban and suburban regions. This approach allows extracting the singularities of nontheatrical film culture as it was provided by corporate film shows. For that matter, the focus is on two audience groups: on women and on children. These two groups were the main target audiences and thus at the core of corporate attention. How corporate film shows catered to these audiences is one of the questions this chapter sets out to answer. Corporate Film Shows and the Initiation of Rural Audiences

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Ambulant cinema and non-theatrical film culture Just like in neighbouring countries, fixed-site cinemas mushroomed in cities and larger towns in Switzerland from 1906 onwards and began to establish cinema as a separate ‘cultural series’ of moving-image practice, to draw on a term and concept that André Gaudreault suggested to account for the manifold cultural fields and traditions in which cinematography emerged and evolved in the 1890s and 1900s, among them stage entertainment, photography, magic lantern shows and illustrated lectures.3 The institutionalisation of the cinema as the signature site of film consumption in urbanised regions, however, did not stop moving images from being (and even becoming) part of a variety of cultural practices beyond cinema. And notwithstanding the establishment of fixed-site movie theatres, rural audiences in smaller villages and remote regions continued to rely on travelling cinemas that would bring films to people. Yet, with the introduction of fixed-site movie theatres as the standard site of film exhibition and business model of the film industry, ambulant film exhibition would no longer be a profitable enterprise for commercial providers. There is, of course, no rule without an exception: Innkeeper Willy Leuzinger from Rapperswil, for that matter, started to show films in his public house in 1906 and from 1919 to 1942 toured the north-eastern parts of the country with a standard international film programme line-up that he would complement with actualities and local films that he shot himself to attract local audiences.4 Apart from this regional peculiarity, however, travelling cinemas and road shows operated on a non-commercial basis beyond commercial movie theatre circuits. In other words, after World War I, itinerant film exhibition for rural audiences was conceptualised and practised not as a business, but as an educational tool and a marketing strategy. Compared to moviegoers in urban regions, rural audiences were targeted for different reasons and addressed in different ways by institutions that were not part of the commercial film industry. Among the institutions that engaged in ambulant film shows was the Schweizer Schul- und Volkskino (Swiss school and people’s cinema). Founded in 1921, this nonprofit organisation operated a travelling film service that provided even remote villages devoid of movie theatres with so-called ‘good’ films in the sense of the Kinoreformbewegung (cinema reform movement). Committed to the idea of fighting ‘bad’ films (read entertaining fictions) with ‘good’ films (read instructive documentaries, among them many sponsored films, and morally uplifting story films), the Schul- und Volkskino organised about 1,100 screenings in 500 to 800 communities annually in the 1920s, with entrance fees ranging from 1.00 to 1.50 Swiss Francs.5 After a decade of being almost unchallenged in non-theatrical film distribution and exhibition, the organisation faced competition from the food and consumer goods industry that hit the road showing corporate films for free. Training and entertaining rural consumers: Maggi Food Corporation Seen in a larger research perspective that includes not only the film medium but screen practices more generally, corporate investment into reaching rural audiences long predated the educational initiative taken by the Schul- und Volkskino. A case in point is the

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Maggi Food Corporation, producer of still well-known soups and seasonings. Founded in Kempttal near Zurich in 1886 by Julius Maggi, an immigrant from Italy, the company was probably the first food corporation in Switzerland to tour the country with corporate films. But when Maggi launched travelling corporate film shows in 1921, the corporation already looked back on a long tradition of slide-illustrated travelling lectures. These lecture tours were introduced in combination with factory visits at the turn of the century with the aim of bridging the gap between producer and consumer that industrialisation and urbanisation had brought about in the second half of the nineteenth century. The industrial revolution not only changed food production and market structures, but also altered traditional food consumption patterns. Malnutrition, especially among factory workers, became a major economic and social problem that threatened political stability and the national economy and propelled the development of the medically-based science of nutrition. Bourgeois circles cooperated with Maggi to install a food education programme called rationelle Volksernährung (efficient alimentation of citizens).6 On the other hand, food scandals constantly threatened the consumers’ trust in the quality of industrially processed food. Thus, Maggi’s travelling lectures and film shows pursued not only advertising goals, but also served as a tool to educate consumers in the spirit of the rationelle Volksernährung. The lectures familiarised both children and adults with the latest ideas about healthy diets. New eating habits had to contribute to the economic, political and social stability of a nation that underwent fundamental changes caused by industrialisation.7 This strategic alliance between public interest and private interest can be considered as a prime example of the interlacing of citizen education and consumer education. Maggi’s lectures took place during the winter. From November to March, representatives of the corporation toured the French- and German-speaking parts of Switzerland and organised shows in classrooms, gyms, parish halls and municipal localities. There were two shows a day: one in the afternoon for children who attended the spectacle under supervision of their teachers and one in the evening for adults. Announced in the local press and in grocery stores, the shows were free and lured audiences with an additional attraction: a soup tasting. The first part of the slide-illustrated lectures focused on the industrial production of Maggi goods, whereas the second part was dedicated to the farming estates Maggi hung on to for marketing reasons even when they were no longer profitable. Maggi was very keen to display its roots in agriculture in order to evidence the natural qualities of industrially processed food. The afternoon show for pupils consisted of an additional patriotic lecture on national geography and history.8 Such lessons in civic education were a prerequisite for the private industry to get access to classrooms and children, the most desirable target audience since they would be the customers of tomorrow and the best lure to attract mainly female audiences to the evening shows. As young Anna Winiger writes in her school essay on a Maggi lecture in the rural village of Kleinwangen on 23 February 1910: At half past eight at night Mister Hattemer gave a lecture on the preparation of the tasty Maggi soup, which was very well attended by women and daughters. My mother and our maidservant were there too and they had nothing but praise for it. They also liked the soup that was served very much.9

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Maggi toured urbanised and rural areas alike until the corporation gave up its travelling lectures and film shows altogether, but audiences in (sub-)urban and rural regions were specifically addressed, depending on their living space and situation. Newspaper ads in the local press that accompanied Maggi representative Mr Hattemer’s lectures in Kleinwangen, a small village in the countryside of the canton of lucerne, explicitly spoke to ‘families in the countryside’, advising them to use Maggi’s seasoning to spice up thin broths.10 Accordingly, instant soups were advertised to ‘country people’ in times when, ‘because of pending work, cooking time needs to be reduced, and in vegetable offseasons’.11 In rural areas, the percentage of people working in agriculture was still high and many farmers were self-supporters. At this point, introducing industrially produced food to rural regions was the goal – a goal that Maggi pursued quite successfully by aligning modernisation and industrialisation with familiar, traditional and patriotic values. To return to Anna Winiger’s report on Maggi’s slide-illustrated lecture: The schoolgirl shows little interest in the industrial processing of food, but is more enthusiastic about Maggi’s farming estates, the ‘harvested carrots, beans, potatoes, onions and cabbages’, the ‘abundant and well tilled meadows and fields’ and the ‘magnificent and prizewinning cows and oxen’. Winiger also describes in detail and with exaltation the ‘travel through beloved and beautiful Switzerland’, a virtual travel by means of slides that covered the catalogued landmarks of Switzerland.12 The picturesque Tour de Suisse was followed by a slide-illustrated travel in time to the glorious medieval past of the country that illustrated the founding myths of the nation state. There is no doubt that it was for this lesson in history and geography, in patriotism and citizenship that private corporations such as Maggi were granted access to public classrooms. It is noteworthy that Maggi started to use film instead of the coloured slides on lecture tours in 1921, i.e. in the very same year that the Schweizer Schul- und Volkskino launched its travelling film service.13 Maggi’s first film was produced by Eos Film Basel and had two parts: part one was called Die industriellen Betriebe der Firma Maggi in Kempthal: Die Herstellung der bekannten Maggi-Produkte (The Industrial Works of Maggi Food Corporation in Kempttal: The Fabrication of Maggi’s Famous Products); part two, Die landwirtschaftlichen Betriebe der Firma Maggi in Kempthal: Viehzucht, Futterbau, Getreidebau, Gemüsebau (The Farming Estates of Maggi Food Corporation in Kempttal: Stock Breeding, Cultivation of Grain and Vegetable).14 Even though the film is presumed lost, the titles provide enough information to show how deeply the film was indebted to and prefigured by the lantern slides tradition.15 The only novelty of the ‘new’ film medium, for that matter, was movement, which would turn the still images into ‘living pictures’. The introduction of film did not lead to a major change in Maggi’s use of media for marketing purposes. Slides were still widely in use after 1920. Instead, Maggi’s investment in film meant an extension of the corporate Medienverbund (media mix): The ‘new’ film medium was integrated into established media practices such as the travelling lecture tradition. In this regard, the scope of André Gaudreault’s notion of ‘cultural series’16 can fruitfully be widened both temporally, to consider later periods than early cinema, and conceptually, to account not only for ‘cultural series’, but also for ‘institutional series’ and the variety of institutional practices moving images were part of beyond commercial cinema circuits, i.e. non-theatrical institutional practices that include corporations, classrooms, unions and the state. 136

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Attracting rural audiences with homeland portrayals Maggi invested in patriotism once more when in 1929 the company revised and extended its roadshow programme. In addition to the ‘classical’ corporate film on industrial food production and farming estates, Maggi launched in-house production of homeland portrayals, i.e. so-called Heimatfilme, to round off and lighten up the shows.17 These short documentaries of an average running time of fifteen minutes stood in the tradition of the slide-illustrated lessons in national geography and history that had delighted pupils like Anna Winiger. The films portray the most attractive Swiss (mountain) regions such as Central Switzerland, Bernese Oberland, Valais, Ticino, Grisons and Mount St Gotthard. From 1938 onwards, when Maggi switched from 35mm to 16mm in film production and exhibition, the films were shot in colour. Of course, colour was an attraction in itself if we keep in mind that it was yet to become standard in feature-film production.18 The Heimatfilme were directed by Paul Boesch, head of the marketing, film and photography department, who worked with Maggi from 1928 until his retirement in 1963. Boesch’s films are best described as Kulturfilme (cultural films) in which the corporation’s presence is discreet but distinct, achieved through product placement. Bergheimat (1934) is a good example to outline the character of Maggi’s homeland portrayals. Credited as a ‘Heimat-Film der Fabrik von Maggis Nahrungsmitteln in Kempttal’, Bergheimat is devoted to the alpine landscape and inhabitants of the Upper Valais.19 After a poetic description of the remote Rhône valley in the first title, the film displays the natural beauties of the region, among them the famous Matterhorn, captured in the best light with clouds passing by and with a picturesque chapel in the foreground. The film then portrays the hard daily life and work of the local peasants. Throughout the whole picture, we never get a glimpse of industrial food production. Instead, Maggi is shown in two product placements: with the herd boy having a Maggi soup for lunch while sitting on a mountain top and enjoying the view, and with the arrival of the federal post in the mountain village by means of mules that carry boxes of Maggi products on their back. Maggi used these Heimatfilme in the shows to bestow the corporation with a national image. This was achieved by linking stereotyped national iconography – such as the Matterhorn, symbol of Switzerland, with which the film also closes – to the name of Maggi; and by associating characteristics deemed typically ‘national’ like rural traditions and modern achievements such as the federal post and the railway network with the corporation, thus branding Maggi ‘Swiss’.20 Most notable is the way the homeland ­portrayals inscribe commodities organically into the traditional landscapes to ‘­naturalise’ them. On screen, both landscapes and commodities could be consumed visually. In this respect, the films served as one of the training grounds for both a new commodity culture based on visual culture and a new visual culture based on commodity culture.21 Corporate film shows trained rural audiences in particular to integrate modern ­commodities in a symbolic (mountain) landscape and in this way prepared spectators to integrate industrial goods into their real living environment too. Through symbolic landscape, the rehearsal of visual commodity consumption was emotionally attached to civic concerns of patriotism. The iconography of alpine rural traditions perfectly matched the spirit of the Geistige Landesverteidigung (mental self-defence of Corporate Film Shows and the Initiation of Rural Audiences

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the country) that in the 1930s emerged as a political and popular response to the threatening rise of fascism in neighbouring countries. To distinguish the nation from fascist regimes, the Geistige Landesverteidigung propelled the cultivation of cultural, social and political values that were claimed to be ‘typical’ national features, properties and qualities – among them agricultural traditions and mountains.22 Thus, Maggi attracted audiences with a carefully composed programme, a wellbalanced mix of information and entertainment, with a special focus on national and regional interests that could be read by contemporary audiences as a corporate commitment to the country, thus further reinforcing the consumers’ emotional bond to the corporation. For rural populations, seeing their living environment projected on the screen, the homeland portrayals could even take on the status of local films – and thus present an additional attraction for rural audiences through self-recognition, i.e. the recognition of one’s own ‘placeworld’.23 Maggi’s road shows would start with a short lecture on a healthy diet and Maggi products, followed by the screening of the first part of the corporate film on the industrial fabrication at Maggi’s. The highly popular soup tasting was scheduled in the break. After that, the second part of the corporate film on Maggi’s farming estates was screened, followed by the highlight of the film programme: the latest Heimatfilm. This programme formula was very stable and lasted until Maggi abandoned ambulant film shows in the early 1960s. It is remarkable that during the whole period up to then, Maggi’s travelling shows included only silent films. They would feature live commentary, usually from cameraman Paul Boesch himself, and be accompanied by recorded music.24 So in Maggi’s ambulant film shows, early cinema’s decidedly performative exhibition mode continued to exist until the early 1960s. With its ‘eventformula’ combining live performance, multimedia entertainment and audience participation, Maggi attracted up to 1,200 people to an evening show in the late 1920s.25 Afternoon shows were attended by an average of 400 pupils in 1929/30.26 In 1932, the corporation reached 300,000 children and adults with travelling film shows and soup tasting in grocery stores.27 The popularity of the shows outlasted World War II: up to 900 bowls and spoons had to be cleaned after a screening in 1953.28 It is noteworthy that the shows were highly popular both in rural and in urbanised regions that Maggi targeted with equal vigour. Reports on shows in the Large Casino Hall in Berne, the capital city of Switzerland, in 1953 and in the Kaufleuten Saal in Zurich, the financial centre and the country’s largest city, in 1955, evidence Maggi’s strategy to include all regions and segments of the population in the German-, the French- and, less consistently, also in the Italian-speaking parts of the country, irrespective of their degree of urbanisation and modernisation.29 The canton of Zurich, for example, with its highly industrialised urban centre, its densely populated suburban outskirts and a rural hinterland rooted in agriculture, would be treated to sixty film lectures for children and adults from October 1929 through February 1930.30 The secret of the success of Maggi’s film shows in regions where adults had easy access to permanent movie theatres was most likely the alternative model and experience of moviegoing that Maggi offered. By providing regional and local Heimatfilme in colour for free, the corporation presented a line-up that diverged from standardised international film programmes in commercial cinema but still entertained, although in a different way. Travelling corporate film shows combined life and media presentations while directly 138

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addressing audiences and stimulating audience participation. Alternative modes of exhibition and collective audience reception turned the shows into social events. They created a public sphere that, for women in particular, was among the scarce public spheres they were granted access to (e.g. women were not allowed to vote until 1969 on a federal level). More gender-specific research on cinema attendance would be needed to establish a reliable claim, so it is only a guess that these non-theatrical movie shows arranged by the private industry were more popular with women than with men not only – and probably not even mainly – because of the subject matter of the shows and the products advertised that often specifically targeted housewives (prominently food and detergent), but because they allowed women a space to gather. The many instances of massively female crowds that not only Maggi, but also Sunlight and, in Germany, Dr. Oetker and Henkel pulled with film shows in the 1930s and 1950s need further exploration.31 If for audiences in urban and suburban regions with easy access to movie theatres corporate film shows offered an alternative to theatrical cinema, they had a different status for audiences in rural areas deprived of fixed-site cinemas, at least as long as individual motorisation was low. In these regions, itinerant corporate cinemas, together with the Schweizer Schul- und Volkskino, were the dominant animators of film culture. They provided rural inhabitants with rare opportunities to see films. Therefore, film culture in the countryside was to a large extent corporate film culture. Film socialisation through corporate road shows The cultural and social impact of travelling corporate film shows for rural audiences can hardly be overestimated. In the 1950s, the shows not only vitalised but dominated non-theatrical popular film culture when the Geigy Corporation, a chemical company, joined the food and consumer goods industry in hitting the road with corporate films to promote its pest-control products with two especially redesigned and equipped vans to be used as exhibition hall and cinema hall.32 Corporate ambulant cinemas played a crucial role in the socialisation of rural inhabitants (both children and adults) with the film medium. Before commercial travelling cinemas went out of business when fixed-site movie theatres were introduced in the first decade of the twentieth century, these enterprises followed established traffic routes and stopped in cities, small towns and villages with populations large enough to ensure an audience that paid off the operating expenses. Remote mountain regions were left out. Therefore, in the 1920s and 1930s, corporate road shows often provided populations in these regions with their very first contact with film. In this regard, the report of a Maggi representative on film shows that took place in two isolated villages in the Lower Engadin (canton Grisons) in 1934 is illuminating: My arrival in Tarasp turned into a village event. The mayor received me at the schoolhouse and offered me his support. The screening for students was attended by the priest, the teacher and some ‘village elders’ who carefully followed the show and also enjoyed their bowl of soup. In Manas [called Vnà today], I was eagerly awaited. To my astonishment, the bells of the small church rang at the beginning of the show! Everybody came. Few of the participants had ever seen a film before.33

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This account reveals a striking asynchrony in the introduction of moving images even in a highly industrialised country in Western Europe, an uneven modernisation that goes hand in hand with an uneven mediatisation and media literacy and that illustrates the need to write many cinema histories alongside the ‘classical’ history of cinema to account for the variety of experiences of cinemagoing depending not only on geography, but also on gender, age, class and race.34 But for rural audiences, moviegoing was not only an experience of a peculiar simultaneity of non-simultaneity: it differed in essence. Instead of growing up with Hollywood cinema and movie stars, with international film culture and its standardised repertory of feature fictions, inhabitants of rural and remote areas counted short corporate films – most of them documentaries – of national, regional or even local appeal among their first and most frequent encounters with film. The media biographies of rural audiences were deeply imbricated in non-theatrical film culture. Yet, this also accounts for how film experience available to children, irrespective of whether they grew up in cities or in the countryside, was institutionally framed. In most cantons, children under sixteen were denied access to commercial movie theatres, even if accompanied by adults.35 Legislation on film and cinema was introduced in Switzerland on cantonal level in the 1910s under the influence of the Kinoreformbewegung with the aim of protecting children from the ‘morally and physically corrupting’ effects ascribed to so-called Schundfilme (‘trash’ movies). Afternoon programmes curated for children proved unsuccessful because of a lack of cooperation between cinema owners and educators. The latter opposed not only certain films deemed ‘detrimental’ (i.e. most fiction films) but cinema as an institution and propagated the inclusion of educational films as a teaching tool in classrooms to control the medium and its effects on children.36 Being virtually excluded from commercial movie theatres, children under sixteen could only experience film via non-theatrical exhibition. Since child film socialisation could only take place beyond the theatrical business, school and noncommercial exhibitors had privileged access to child audiences – a circumstance that attracted institutions with diverse agendas to invest in non-theatrical film culture, among them, as we have seen, Maggi Food Corporation, but also other enterprises most notably from the food and consumer goods industry such as Suchard, Steinfels, Wander and Nestlé. While addressing them as (future) customers and citizens, these institutions provided children with film literacy exercises and media expertise at the same time. A striking example of a corporation catering to children’s entertainment (and media education) is Nestlé’s Fip-Fop-Club, a film club for children aged five to fifteen founded in 1936 that provided several generations with the first experiences of the delights of movie consumption, film fandom and audience community.37 THE Dominance and decline of travelling corporate film shows Corporate film shows were far from marginal and deeply affected the activities of the Schweizer Schul- und Volkskino – a fact that speaks of the dimension of ambulant corporate film shows and their economic impact in non-theatrical film culture in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. The Schul- und Volkskino began to suffer from the competition from the food and consumer goods industry in the 1930s. The non-profit organisation was 140

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not able to compete with the private industry that brought regional films to people for free and – as an additional attraction – lured audiences with popular giveaways such as a bowl of soup, a bar of chocolate or a bar of soap.38 The rural population, so the Schulund Volkskino moaned, was fully supplied with Landschaftsfilmen (films on national landscapes) for free and hence not willing to pay for similar presentations.39 Resorting to political measures in 1941, the Schul- und Volkskino called for government r­ estriction of travelling corporate film shows. In line with federal film policy that preferred indirect control and influence to direct intervention, federal administration rejected the proposition.40 As a consequence, the travelling cinema service of the Schweizer Schul- und Volkskino was fundamentally reorganised, renamed Schweizer Filminformation Suisse and relaunched in 1949 as a travelling corporate film service.41 The adaptation of the originally reformist Schul- und Volkskino for the private industry evidences the economic pressure exerted by travelling corporate film shows in the field of non-theatrical exhibition. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, however, the era of large-scale travelling corporate film shows came to an end. The reasons were manifold. Marketing underwent fundamental changes at that time: Maggi, like many other corporations, outsourced advertising to external PR agencies.42 By then, the spread of consumer culture and the implementation of modern life in rural regions, both aims of the travelling film shows, were well advanced not only because of the increased circulation of goods, but also of people. In this respect, it is informative to take a sideways glance at Maggi’s marketing practice with degustation cars. The motorisation of the field sales force started in the 1920s. It launched Maggi’s ‘rolling propaganda’ with vans equipped with built-in soup kitchens that toured the whole country – a practice that the corporation also introduced in Belgium, France and the Netherlands.43 Before World War II, which put a temporary end to this activity, the degustation cars would mainly target the local inhabitants of remote mountain areas. This is evident from a corporation report on a stop made by Maggi’s soup kitchen on wheels in two small mountain villages in the Upper Valais in 1938 which stated that the vans attracted ‘young and old and even the postman’.44 When the degustation cars hit the road again in 1951, a shift in focus appeared:45 Travelling alpine regions during the hot summer months a good decade later, the target audience was no longer solely the rural population, but also – and foremost – tourists, i.e. those from urban and suburban areas who had fled the heat of the city and sought refuge in the mountains. As Maggi’s company newspaper explains: Successful propaganda needs people. And one looks for people where one can find them. Therefore, we altered the course of our degustation vans and followed the people up into the coolness where even in summertime there are hardly any Suppenchaschper [Soupy-Kasper].46

The vans followed the streams of tourists on tracks and wheels, traversing valleys and crossing alpine passes to stop at camping grounds, holiday colonies and boy scout camps. Fuelled by mass motorisation, mass tourism was about to expand into the countryside, no matter how remote, and so was mass consumption. Obviously, mass motorisation and the resultant flow of people and goods hybridised urban and rural spaces and were responsible for this shift in Maggi’s focus. Corporate Film Shows and the Initiation of Rural Audiences

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Maggi degustation car in the village of Gadmen, 1952 (Courtesy of Nestlé Historical Archives, Vevey)

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The post-war era also brought significant changes in the field of media. If rural people found moving images scarce in remote mountain areas and occasionally still novel into the early 1930s, they would have lost their status as an attraction in themselves by the late 1950s. Writing in 1961, Fritz Müller, author of the Maggi chronicle, comments on the aforementioned film shows in the Lower Engadin in 1934 as follows: In the mountain villages of this high valley, they [the film shows] were an event that was discussed in the entire valley, and the population was vividly involved in. Who by any means was able to leave home participated in the event. Today, it is delightful to hear what our representative reported about it.47

The way rural audiences reacted to film in 1934 appeared amusing and outdated in 1961, a mode that belonged to a past in which the film medium was still a crowd puller for its own sake and its exhibition a rare event. Also Nestlé indirectly referred to the loss of the exclusivity of the medium when the corporation closed the Fip-Fop-Club in 1959. The circulation letter to Fip-Fop members explains the discontinuance of the club as follows: Twenty years ago it was an event for a child to go to a film show. Today it is a matter of course for you to sit in the dark theatre. At home, television is invading slowly, but irresistibly, replacing radio, keeping you permanently informed on world affairs and catering for distraction.48

If, to a considerable extent, it was competition from television that caused corporations to abandon the tradition of travelling film shows, it was also television that opened up the new potential for advertising in 1965 when TV commercials were granted a permanent place in public broadcasting in Switzerland. Maggi was among the corporations to take this first opportunity on 1 February 1965 to place a spot on Swiss television.49 Television adapted two of the characteristics that had made travelling corporate road shows a success with rural audiences: it brought popular media culture to people’s homes and sweetened information and education (both citizen and consumer) with entertainment. Alternative cinemagoing experiences, ‘other’ cinema histories During the first half of the twentieth century, corporate travelling lectures and film shows bridged the gap between industrialised centre and agrarian periphery. Inscribing commodities in visual culture, they brought the images and the imaginary of mass consumption into the countryside and prepared rural audiences for modern life. In this way, they played an important part in the modernisation of the rural and mountainous areas of Switzerland that had remained agricultural while the Mittelland was already highly industrialised. In other words, corporate film shows spread media culture and citizen education to expand consumer culture and thus made up for a delay in modernisation and mediatisation in rural regions. If corporate investment in non-theatrical film culture was a vehicle for national development in rural areas, it is important to notice that it was socially slanted towards women and children. Thus, it relied on the Corporate Film Shows and the Initiation of Rural Audiences

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consent of two sections of the population that traditionally would be less mobile than men and have limited access to public spheres. If this chapter takes Switzerland as a case in point to explore the role of the private industry in building and maintaining non-theatrical film culture in rural areas and remote mountain regions, it is important to acknowledge that ambulant film shows run by corporations were not peculiar to Switzerland. As briefly alluded to above, corporations in Germany also hit the road in the first half of the twentieth century to train audiences in (and with) consumer culture, media culture and citizenship. If nowhere scrutinised in any detail, marginal notes on this practice can be found in a few academic works from the field of public relations and film history. According to these sources, Maggi Germany operated a slide-illustrated travelling lecture service similar to the one in Switzerland that most probably developed from the practice of sales representatives who at the turn of the twentieth century visited retailers, trimmed shop windows, organised soup tastings and equipped opinion leaders such as doctors, midwives, clergymen and teachers with information material. In 1905, the tastings were coupled with slide-illustrated lectures, and in 1925, Maggi Germany most probably launched its first film to illustrate the lectures.50 Dr. Oetker, another food corporation, toured the country with buses from 1926 onwards to bring instructive advertising films to potential, i.e. predominantly female, customers. In 1930, the buses were equipped to project sound film.51 Henkel also travelled Germany to advertise its number one detergent brand Persil and to screen its feature-length sound film Wäsche – Waschen – Wohlergehen (Laundry – Washing – Well-being), produced by Ufa in 1932, in rented cinemas in urban areas, but also in remote corners of the country.52 As in Switzerland, World War II interrupted this marketing practice. Henkel took it up again in the early 1950s until the introduction of television advertising in Germany in 1956 while Dr. Oetker dispensed with itinerant film shows after the war and invested directly in television spots. This cursory transnational sideways glance brings to the fore a striking parallel practice and development in Switzerland and Germany and underlines the importance of acknowledging, including and studying – from a transnational perspective – industry as a relevant institution in the history of film and cinema. By industry I mean the non-film industry, i.e. corporations for whom film was (and is) not a commodity and business in itself as for the film industry, but who understood (and understand) cinema as useful cinema, i.e. as an instrument to achieve commercial aims unrelated to the film and cinema business.53 In an essay that tackles the question of ‘How Can Cinema History Matter More?’ Richard Maltby argues for a linkage of the economic, industrial and institutional history of the cinema with the sociocultural history of its audiences. For cinema history to matter more, Maltby claims, it must be apprehended and written as a social history of a cultural institution.54 Maltby writes with theatrical cinema in mind, but, as this chapter has hopefully shown, it is the non-theatrical field that demonstrates more clearly how closely cultural history, social history and business history are bound together. For cinema history to matter more, it must therefore also venture into film and cinema in the expanded field.55 In these ‘other’ cinema histories, whether we call them parallel, parallax or alternative, there is rich material to be excavated that will unfold the variety and diversity of cinemagoing experiences and contribute to a better understanding of how moving images helped create our past and present. 144

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NOTES

This essay is partly based on and develops some material from Yvonne Zimmermann, ‘Training and Entertaining Consumers: Travelling Corporate Film Shows in Switzerland’, in Martin Loiperdinger (ed.), Travelling Cinema in Europe: Sources and Perspectives (Frankfurt am Main and Basle: Stroemfeld/Roter Stern, 2008), pp. 168–79.

1. Frank Kessler, ‘Viewing Pleasures, Pleasuring Views: Forms of Spectatorship in Early Cinema’, in Irmbert Schenk, Margrit Tröhler and Yvonne Zimmermann (eds), Film – Kino – Zuschauer: Filmrezeption/Film – Cinema – Spectator: Film Reception (Marburg: Schüren, 2010), pp. 61–73. 2. On historical pragmatics, see Frank Kessler, ‘Historische Pragmatik’, Montage AV vol. 11 no. 2 (2002), pp. 104–12. On a re-interpreted and developed notion of the dispositif as a tool to describe the decisive aspects of film reception, see Frank Kessler, ‘The Cinema of Attractions as “Dispositif”, in Wanda Strauven (ed.), The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded (­Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006), pp. 57–69. 3. On Gaudreault’s theory of ‘cultural series’, see André Gaudreault, Film and Attraction: From Kinematography to Cinema, trans. Timothy Barnard (Urbana, Chicago and Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2011 [2008]). 4. Mariann Lewinsky, ‘Schweizer-Cinema Leuzinger, Rapperswil (SG): Aktualitätenfilmproduktion und regionale Kinogeschichte der Zentral- und Ostschweiz, 1896–1945’, KINtop: ­Jahrbuch zur Erforschung des frühen Films no. 9: Lokale Kinogeschichten (2000), pp. 64–80. See also the website ‘Filmarchiv – Leuzinger’, www.filmarchiv-leuzinger.ch/tour/home/index .xhtml, accessed 25 February 2014. 5. Schweizer Schul- und Volkskino (ed.), Rationelle Film-Propaganda durch den Schweizer Schulund Volkskino Bern und Zürich (Bern [1929]). 6. See Jakob Tanner, Fabrikmahlzeit. Ernährungswissenschaft, Industriearbeit und Volksernährung 1890–1950 (Zürich: Chronos, 1999), pp. 89–126. 7 See Yvonne Zimmermann, ‘Heimatpflege zwecks Suppenpromotion. Zum Einsatz von Lichtbildern und Filmen in der Schweizer Lebensmittelbranche am Beispiel von Maggi’, Zeitschrift für Unternehmensgeschichte vol. 52 no. 2 (2007), pp. 203–26. 8. H. Hattemer Sr, ‘Propaganda von Anno dazumal … Erinnerungen eines Ehemaligen’, Hauszeitung der Fabrik von Maggis Nahrungsmitteln (Kempttal), April 1953, pp. 53–5. 9. In Aufsatzheft der Schülerin Anna Winiger, V. Klasse, Kleinwangen, Schuljahr 1909/10 (Archiv des Vereins ‘Alt-Hofdere’, Hochdorf [Switzerland]), reprinted in Yvonne Zimmermann, ‘Maggis Wandervortragspraxis mit Lichtbildern. Ein Schulmädchenreport aus der Schweiz von 1910’, KINtop: Jahrbuch zur Erforschung des frühen Films nos 14–15: Quellen und Perspektiven (2006), p. 55. 10. Hochdorfer Anzeiger, 19 February 1910. 11. Ibid., 5 March 1910. 12. Aufsatzheft der Schülerin Anna Winiger. 13. Fritz Müller, Maggi-Chronik. 2. Teil, 1912–1947 (Winterthur, 1961), pp. 71, 78. 14. Schweizer Schul- und Volkskino (ed.), Schweizerischer Lehrfilm-Katalog no. 2 (1923), 18/13. 15. See Yvonne Zimmermann, ‘Vom Lichtbild zum Film. Anmerkungen zur Entstehung des Industriefilms’, Montage AV vol. 15 no. 1 (2006), pp. 74–88. 16. See Gaudreault, Film and Attraction, pp. 64–5. 17. Müller, Maggi-Chronik, p. 141. Corporate Film Shows and the Initiation of Rural Audiences

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18. Vom Edelweiss zur Kastanie (1938) was the first colour film produced in house. See Müller, Maggi-Chronik, p. 254. 19. With a running time of more than thirty minutes (35mm), Bergheimat is by far Boesch’s longest homeland portrayal. 20. Maggi pursued a similar marketing strategy in its overseas branches and branded itself as a national enterprise wherever it operated. In France, for example, Maggi presented itself as a French corporation, whereas in Germany, it marketed its products as German goods. This strategy of flexible corporate identity in terms of nationality differs from corporations that branded themselves ‘Swiss’ to export their goods like chocolate or watches. 21. On the role of exposition and world’s fairs as a training ground and laboratory for a new commodity-based visual culture, see Tom Gunning, ‘The World as Object Lesson: Cinema Audiences, Visual Culture and the St. Louis World’s Fair, 1904’, Film History vol. 6 (1994), pp. 422–44. 22. See Josef Mooser, ‘Die “Geistige Landesverteidigung” in den 1930er Jahren. Profile und Kontexte eines vielschichtigen Phänomens der schweizerischen politischen Kultur in der ­Zwischenkriegszeit’, Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Geschichte vol. 47 no. 4 (1997), pp. 685–708. 23. On the concept and history of ‘local film’ as a marketing strategy, see Stephen Bottomore, ‘From the Factory Gate to the “Home Talent” Drama: An International Overview of Local Films in the Silent Era’, in Vanessa Toulmin, Simon Popple and Patrick Russell (eds), The Lost World of Mitchell & Kenyon: Edwardian Britain on Film (London: British Film Institute, 2004), pp. 33–48; Vanessa Toulmin and Martin Loiperdinger, ‘Is It You? Recognition, Representation and Response in Relation to the Local Film’, Film History vol. 17 no. 1 (2005), pp. 7–18. On the notion of ‘placeworld’ as ‘the socially manifested recognition of “being in the world” that has its origins in geographic space’, see Eric Gordon, Gene Koo, ‘Placeworlds: Using Virtual Worlds to Foster Civic Engagement’, Space and Culture vol. 1 no. 3 (2008), pp. 204–21. 24. See Bg., ‘Suppe für Pugerna. Ein neuer Maggi-Film’, Hauszeitung der Fabrik von Maggis Nahrungsmitteln (Kempttal), January 1951, pp. 8–9 and ‘Filmpropaganda’, ibid., February/March 1953, pp. 25–6. 25. Müller, Maggi-Chronik, p. 153. 26. Ibid., p. 141. 27. Ibid., p. 181. 28. ‘Filmpropaganda’, p. 26. 29. Ibid., and ‘Gril Abende in Zürich’, Hauszeitung für das Personal der Maggi A.G. (Kempttal), June 1955, p. 76. Maggi toured the Italian-speaking part for the first time in 1927. See Müller, Maggi-Chronik, p. 125. 30. Ibid., p. 141. 31. On Sunlight film shows, see Yvonne Zimmermann, ‘Training and Entertaining Consumers: Travelling Corporate Film Shows in Switzerland’, in Loiperdinger, Travelling Cinema in Europe, pp. 168–79; on Dr. Oetker travelling film shows, see Hans-Gerd Conrad, Werbung und Markenartikel am Beispiel der Markenfirma Dr. Oetker von 1891–1975 in Deutschland (Berlin: wbv, 2002), pp. 165–70; on Henkel’s itinerant cinema, see Ralf Forster, ‘Werbung im Wirtschaftswunder. Glücksbringer: Ein Henkel-Farbfilm von 1955/56’, in Filmblatt vol. 14 no. 40 (Summer 2009), pp. 51–60. 32. On Geigy’s ‘travelling circus’, as the initiative was called in house, see Yvonne Zimmermann, ‘Target Group Oriented Corporate Communication: Geigy Films’, in Museum für Gestaltung Zürich (ed.), Corporate Diversity: Swiss Graphic Design and Advertising by Geigy 1940–1970 (Baden: Lars Müller Publishers, 2009), pp. 48–57. 33. Müller, Maggi-Chronik, p. 204 [my translation]. 146

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34. For a pertinent example of how race influenced cinemagoing in the American South see Robert C. Allen, ‘The Place of Space in Film Historiography’, Tijdschrift voor mediageschiedenis vol. 9 no. 2 (2006), pp. 15–27. 35. See ‘Bericht des Bundesrates an die Bundesversammlung über das von Herrn Nationalrat Dr. Zimmerli und Mitunterzeichnern im Nationalrat eingereichte Postulat betreffend Revision von Art. 31 der Bundesverfassung (am 26. Mai 1925)’, Bundesblatt vols 77/2 no. 22 (3 June 1925), pp. 545–85. See also Roland Engel, Gegen Festseuche und Sensationslust: Zürichs Kulturpolitik im Zeichen der konservativen Erneuerung (Zurich: Chronos, 1990); Paul MeierKern, Verbrecherschule oder Kulturfaktor? Kino und Film in Basel 1896–1916 (Basel: Helbing & Lichtenhahn, 1993); Beatrice Weber-Dürler, Kinovorführungen und andere Schaustellungen unter den Zürcher Gesetzen über das Hausierwesen (1880–1980) (Zurich: Neujahrsblatt der Gelehrten Gesellschaft, 2004). 36. See Anita Gertiser, ‘Schul- und Lehrfilme’, in Yvonne Zimmermann (ed.), Schaufenster Schweiz: Dokumentarische Gebrauchsfilme 1896–1964 (Zurich: Limmat, 2011), pp. 383–471. 37. See Yvonne Zimmermann, ‘Nestlé’s Fip-Fop Club: The Making of Child Audiences in Non-commercial Film Shows (1936–1959) in Switzerland’, in Schenk et al., Film – Kino – Zuschauer, pp. 281–303. 38. Minutes of the steering committee of the Schweizer Schul- und Volkskino, 18 February 1936 (Schweizer Medieninstitut für Bildung und Kultur, Bern). 39. Annual report of the Schul- und Volkskino (1933/5) (Schweizer Medieninstitut für Bildung und Kultur, Bern). 40. Minutes of the steering committee of the Schweizer Schul- und Volkskino, 31 January 1941 (Schweizer Medieninstitut für Bildung und Kultur, Bern). 41. Ibid., 22 August 1949 and 14 September 1949. 42. R. M., ‘Wendepunkt in unserem Werbewesen’, Hauszeitung für das Personal der Maggi A.G. (Kempttal), November 1958, pp. 195–6 and Rudolf Farner, ‘Unsere Werbeagentur Dr. Rudolf Farner stellt sich vor’, Hauszeitung für das Personal der Maggi A.G., ibid., pp. 196–8. See also Hartmut Berghoff (ed.), Marketinggeschichte. Die Genese einer modernen Sozialtechnik (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2007). 43. See Bg., ‘Rollende Propaganda’, Hauszeitung der Fabrik von Maggis Nahrungsmitteln (Kempttal), November/December 1953, pp. 165–7. 44. ‘Der Maggi-Suppenwagen’, in Fabrik von Maggis Nahrungsmitteln (ed.), Mitteilungen aus Kempttal no. 35 (1938), n.p. 45. Maggi also practised this ‘rolling propaganda’ with vans equipped with built-in soup kitchens in Belgium, France and the Netherlands. 46. ‘Propaganda 1000 Meter höher’, Hauszeitung der Fabrik von Maggis Nahrungsmitteln (Kempttal), August/September 1952, pp. 129–31, here pp. 130–1 [my translation]. ‘Suppenchaschper’ (Swiss German for Suppenkaspar) is a chapter in Heinrich Hoffmann’s children’s picture book Struwwlpeter published in 1845. It tells the story of a boy named Suppenkaspar who refuses to eat his soup and starves within a few days. 47. Müller, Maggi-Chronik, p. 204 [my translation]. 48. ‘Divers. Rundschreiben an die Mitglieder des Fip-Fop-Clubs’, Circulaires publicité 1959 Suisse Nestlé [no further data available] (Archives historiques de Nestlé, Vevey) [my translation]. 49. ‘Maggi im Reklamefernsehen’, Hauszeitung für das Personal der Maggi A.G. (Kempttal), January 1965, p. 9. 50. See Harriet Sihn, Die Geschichte deutscher PR im wirtschaftlichen Bereich. Die Firma Julius Maggi, Master’s thesis (Mainz: Johannes Gutenberg-Universität, 1995), pp. 46–9 and A79–A82. Corporate Film Shows and the Initiation of Rural Audiences

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The four-act silent film with the title Die Maggi-Werke in Singen am Hohentwiel (Maggi Works in Singen at Hohentwiel) was produced by Deulig Germany and originally had a length of 1,132 metres. 51. Conrad, Werbung und Markenartikel, pp. 165–70. 52. Forster, ‘Werbung im Wirtschaftswunder’, p. 51. 53. Useful cinema (Gebrauchsfilm in German) has recently emerged both in Europe and in North America as a productive research field for the study, preservation and presentation of ‘ephemeral’ or ‘orphan’ films, i.e. neglected moving images such as science and industrial films, educational films, newsreels and home movies. Anthologies of pioneering studies are: Vinzenz Hediger and Patrick Vonderau (eds), Films That Work: Industrial Film and the Productivity of Media (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009); Charles R. Acland and Haidee Wasson (eds), Useful Cinema (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2012); Devin Orgeron, Marsha Orgeron and Dan Streible (eds), Learning with the Lights Off: Educational Film in the United States (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). 54. Richard Maltby, ‘How Can Cinema History Matter More?’, Screening the Past, http://tlweb .latrobe.edu.au/humanities/screeningthepast/22/board-richard-maltby.html#fn1, accessed 3 August 2014. See also Richard Maltby, ‘On the Prospect of Writing Cinema History from Below’, Tijdschrift voor mediageschiedenis vol. 9 no. 2 (December 2006), pp. 74–96. 55. The term ‘expanded cinema’ emerged in the experimental film movement in the 1960s and refers to moving images within the art scene. See Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1970).

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9 Ch no ‘Coming up This Weekend’:  Ambulant Film Exhibition Title in the Netherlands Author Thunnis van Oort

In the standard film-historical narrative, the travelling cinema show gradually disappeared during the 1910s when permanent cinemas became the dominant form of film exhibition. However, as several contributions to this volume reveal, ambulatory movie presentation proved to be a small but stable and resilient category of film exhibition in rural regions, from the south of France to the north of Sweden. Despite a high population density and relatively short distances between small towns and the more remote hinterlands, this was also the case in the Netherlands. Well into the 1960s, travelling exhibitors were active in Dutch villages and hamlets and some managed to keep afloat in the 1970s despite increasingly difficult market conditions. In fact, while cinema attendance in general was decreasing from the mid-1950s onwards, the business of travelling showmen remained surprisingly stable for about another decade. Thus an analysis of ambulatory film exhibition offers a distinctive perspective on the urban–rural dynamics in Dutch film culture as well as an insight into the underlying economics. There are few publications about the travelling cinema after its heydays, except for a small number of studies that focus on travelling shows organised outside the for-profit film sector.1 The present chapter takes a different perspective and examines travelling exhibitors who specialised in commercial shows. These firms operated within the infrastructure of regular film exhibition in the Netherlands, which is attested to by their membership of the Netherlands Cinema Alliance (NBB), a cartel-like organisation that regulated the Dutch industry on the national level. Uncommonly, the NBB united distributors and exhibitors into one single trade organisation, exerting a powerful control over the market.2 My research is based on records from the NBB archives and other primary sources such as local newspapers. This material allows the combination of ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’ perspectives. On the one hand, I look at the national organisation and regulation of travelling cinema exhibition by the NBB, in particular the territorial partitioning of the country into exclusive zones of operation. On the other hand, I will examine the exhibition and programming practices of individual entrepreneurs and discuss how these practices shaped film reception on the local level. The chapter is set up as follows. First, I will delineate the transition from the classical travelling cinema in tent shows to the new ambulant film exhibition that developed during the 1920s. Then I will focus on the period directly after World War II, when, in the context of growing competition between permanent and travelling cinema, the ‘Coming up This Weekend’:  Ambulant Film Exhibition in the Netherlands

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NBB imposed new regulations on travelling film exhibitors. Finally, I zoom in on the locations and programmes where they were active to give an insight into the moviegoing experiences of rural audiences. Classical travelling cinema versus modern ambulant cinema The story of the travelling cinema giving way to the fixed-location cinema is a recurring motif in early film historiography, often integrated into a biological growth metaphor demonstrating how film had evolved from early childhood to maturity. In one of the earliest popular film histories published in the Netherlands (1926, second edition in 1928), journalist Luc Willink opens his account in this vein: Gradually one forgets that film has had a childhood, as weak and helpless as any newborn baby. No, even weaker and more helpless because the film had no mother, watching over her. Guardianship over the poor orphan came much later, when the film had almost grown into an adult. Whoever sees today’s great movie palaces with their pompous and sometimes imposing facades, excellent equipped cinemas, with large orchestras, where everything is taken care of […] struggles to imagine the time when film travelled in wagons from fair to fair, to astound city folks and countrymen alike with their ‘talking and singing’ images.3

Less than two decades after the travelling cinema formed the main channel for commercially successful film exhibition in the Netherlands, it was already remembered as a phenomenon that belonged to the past. Nevertheless, the fairground (kermis) legacy has haunted the medium’s reputation for a long time, infusing it with a lingering taste of low brow entertainment (kermisvermaak). Although since the 1970s film historians have started to debunk the finalist perspective on early cinema as a primitive development stage, the notion of the travelling cinema quickly phasing out after the rise of permanent movie theatres has never lost its pertinence.4 In the landmark history of Dutch cinema up until World War II, Frank van der Maden situates the transformation from travelling to fixed-location cinema in the early 1910s.5 This roughly corresponds with the larger European trend as observed by Joseph Garncarz, although in Germany and elsewhere in Europe the rise of the permanent cinema was some years earlier.6 Van der Maden acknowledges that some travelling entrepreneurs continued their business in areas that lacked sufficient clientele for permanent cinema exhibition ‘even’ up until 1940. His argument that the travelling fairground cinema disappeared as the primary locus of cinema exhibition is not at stake here. Still, travelling cinema did continue throughout the twentieth century for much longer than the 1940s, although it did change its appearance, no longer using tent shows but travelling from hall to hall. For the sake of clarity, I propose to reserve the term ‘travelling cinema’ for the classic phenomenon in the period until circa 1910 and use ‘ambulant cinema’ for the successive variant, which differed from its predecessor in several respects.7 In the classic opposition between travelling and permanent cinema, the travelling exhibitor harvested the economic value of a number of purchased films by showing them to a large, ever-changing audience of incidental moviegoers, located within an 150

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extended geographical area. With the increase in demand, film production rose globally, permitting a distribution system in which film copies (and the rights to screen them) were rented out instead of directly sold to individual exhibitors. This system enabled the rise of the permanent movie theatres in large cities and small towns with sizeable populations. These venues would offer a weekly changing programme (more frequent changes were unusual in the Netherlands) to a more or less stable, primarily local audience.8 Before this rise of the permanent cinema, Dutch film exhibition in fixed locations was limited to a small number of so-called variété-theatres, which were all located in metropolitan areas. Economic historians Han Baudet and Jan Willem Drukker analyse the economic logic behind the demise of the travelling cinema.9 They argue that in contrast to the permanent cinema, travelling cinemas suffered significant restrictions in the maximum number of seats. Too large a tent show would drive the cost level of transportation to unacceptable heights. While transportation costs weighed heavily on the budget of these entrepreneurs, staying in one place much longer than a week was rarely an option. Since they served mostly small towns and villages, the novelty of the programmes would soon wear out because they catered to a limited potential audience, except in the larger cities. Also, travelling cinemas were more dependent on seasonal factors. In the Netherlands, the season of fairs began in the spring and ended in the autumn. Typically, a fair lasted between three days and a week.10 Classical travelling cinema was not exclusively limited to shows in tents and pavilions. Mostly during winter, operators rented auditoriums for indoor screenings, often in multipurpose buildings. Van der Maden shows that in the early 1910s, the first generation of Dutch film exhibitors, that is the fairground operators, was pushed out of the film exhibition sector by a new generation of entrepreneurs. This second generation had no links with the ambulant fairground economy. Many of the newcomers, especially in small towns, came from the local entertainment and leisure business. Before turning to film exhibition, they had been operating a café-restaurant complex with a multipurpose hall that they rented out to travelling theatre and music companies, as well as to local clubs and societies for meetings, balls and amateur performances. However, exploiting the new film craze proved much more lucrative.11 In the face of growing competition from permanent movie theatres, most operators of travelling cinemas simply switched back to operating another fairground attraction. Some of the leading names remained active in the film industry. Jean Desmet turned to film distribution and operated several permanent cinemas. Willy Mullens turned to film production.12 A few of the tent show operators, such as A. D. Riozzi (active until 1938) and D. J. Schouten (active until 1955), remained in business for several decades, but they were pushed to the margins of the market, that is to areas with a low population density and to some regions where for religious reasons permanent cinema was economically less viable because of the high concentration of orthodox Protestants. The well-documented history of Carl Welte’s travelling cinema, a small family business, exemplifies the gradual marginalisation of travelling cinema. Welte (1873–1922) and his wife came from German fairground families and were active in film exhibition from 1907 onwards in the northern provinces of the Netherlands, where they had previously toured with a swing carousel. During the fairground season, the Weltes ‘Coming up This Weekend’:  Ambulant Film Exhibition in the Netherlands

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travelled from fair to fair with their tent show. Welte’s ‘Cinematograph’ was housed in a pavilion that required a 20x8-metre plot at the Winschoten fair of 1907. The façade in art nouveau style was partitioned into three arches. The left arch housed the huge Gavioli organ, the centre formed the entrance with the box office and to the right was the ‘locomobile’, the steam engine that was an attraction in itself.13 In the winter months, the Weltes set up their projector for several weeks in a local hall in one of the larger towns. Initially, they served not only villages but also regional commercial centres like Kampen, Zuidlaren, Winschoten, Steenwijk, Bolsward, Franeker and Dokkum.14 Welte had an agreement with competitor Schouten to divide the territory: the one would travel in Friesland when the other visited Groningen and Drenthe, and the next year they swapped routes.15 Despite repeated efforts, Welte never managed to get a foothold in Leeuwarden and Groningen, the provincial capitals where permanent cinemas soon became the prime venues to watch films. In 1912, Welte tried to catch up with the new trend and opened a permanent cinema in Hoogezand, which he operated until 1918. However, the travelling cinema remained the family’s core business and his son continued it. During the 1920s, however, market conditions forced Welte Jr out of the small towns and he concentrated his activities on the extremely rural periphery of Friesland, travelling by motorboat ‘Lillie’ from village to town, pitching his tent at annual fairs. The lavishly decorated pavilion that the Welte family used in the heyday of their business had been traded in for a more modest tent.16 Illustrative of the end of this type of ambulant cinema entrepreneur is the fact that Carl Welte Jr and his wife were hired in the 1930s by their immediate and much more successful competitor, Johan Miedema, to run a permanent cinema in the town of Emmen. Miedema and his brother Jac, whose father had started out as a travelling exhibitor, had built up a chain of permanent and semi-permanent ‘weekend’ cinemas in the northern and eastern provinces, pushing the Welte family more and more into the margins. After the war, Welte Jr abandoned the travelling tent show altogether and operated a permanent cinema in Zuid-Laren, once the top location of their fairground business because of the famous annual horse market.17 While the generation of Welte and other fairground families were relegated to the margins of the travelling film exhibition sector, a new generation of operators, such as Johan and Jac Miedema, came to see ambulant cinema as an extension of their permanent cinema enterprise. The new ambulant shows differed in several respects from their precursors. For one, these entrepreneurs no longer had tent shows but presented their programmes in pre-existing buildings, mostly in hotel-café-restaurants with a multipurpose auditorium and multifunctional halls operated either by the local municipality, the church, or by some leisure club or association. Put differently, only the projector, the films and the projectionist travelled from venue to venue. In fact, from the 1930s onwards, permanent projectors were often installed on site in those halls where shows were programmed on a weekly or bi-weekly basis. From the perspective of rural audiences, this was a considerable change. The use of multipurpose buildings turned cinemagoing in villages into a more regular leisure activity and a less festive and out-of-the-ordinary event than it had been in the past when one had to wait for the annual or bi-annual fair. As Karel Dibbets argues, this transformation may well have stimulated the integration of film culture into rural life.18 152

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However, on the basis of the available evidence it is hard to assess how changing exhibition formats shaped the local reception of the medium. Moreover, the rhythm of fairs and other annual festivities probably remained significant in the new ambulant cinema business. At the same time, our sources suggest that, especially after 1945, commercial screenings in multipurpose buildings became not only more frequent, but were also economically integrated into the mainstream of film distribution and exhibition. Systematic analysis of industry practices is needed to confirm this hypothesis. It goes without saying that the classic strategy of buying film copies, which Baudet and Drukker consider a defining element of the travelling cinema business, was abandoned for the ubiquitous rental system. This was the case for newcomers like Miedema as well as for the first generation of travelling exhibitors who were still active during the 1920s and 1930s, like Carl Welte Jr.19 Nevertheless, considering the relatively large ‘debris’ of old films circulating on the Dutch market compared to markets abroad, it is likely that every now and then ambulant operators secured the rights for self-owned copies, deploying the classic travelling cinema strategy of ‘wearing out’ films for geographically widespread audiences.20 This was certainly the case in the non-commercial ambulant cinema circuit. For instance, the same Catholic mission films were screened for many years in the Catholic parts of the Netherlands.21 Diverging business interests Although in retrospect ambulant cinema may seem a marginal phenomenon, it was viewed with suspicion by film exhibitors who operated permanent movie theatres. According to the 1926 annual report of the NBB, one of the hot issues that year had been the allegedly unfair competition from ‘occasional’ exhibitors who screened films in towns and villages with a permanent cinema.22 From the perspective of the latter, the ambulant film exhibitors circumvented the overhead costs associated with the operation of a permanent movie theatre. Moreover, while the local cinema owner faced such risks as bad weather conditions and the competition from ‘sports events and other whims of the audience’, the ambulant operator could take advantage by only organising screenings when business was supposed to be at its best, like for instance during annual fairs and other festivities. The request to regulate and limit ambulant cinema met with strong resistance from the film distributors, who constituted a powerful group within the NBB.23 From their standpoint, restrictions on ambulant cinema were undesirable because such measures would harm their business in the many smaller cities and towns that had no permanent movie theatre. Moreover, in towns with only one cinema, ambulant exhibitors could screen those titles that were not booked by the (otherwise monopolistic) local exhibitor. For many years, the issue lingered on the agenda of the NBB. In 1939, Loet Cohen Barnstijn, the nation’s leading distributor, explicitly stated that ambulant cinema was the only way to reach those markets where distributors could not sign a contract with a local exhibitor.24 He made this remark in response to a complaint by a local cinema owner who claimed that ambulant exhibitors screened ‘very attractive films’ that damaged his business. These and similar complaints recorded in the NBB reports suggest that ambulant cinema remained a force of considerable commercial impact on the Dutch market well beyond the classical period. ‘Coming up This Weekend’:  Ambulant Film Exhibition in the Netherlands

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The distributors succeeded in postponing restrictive regulation for years. In the 1920s and 1930s, the protests against ambulant film exhibition came mainly from smalltime operators outside the larger cities, who were numerous but not very powerful within the association because most of them operated only a single venue (integration into larger regional chains did not occur on a significant scale until after World War II).25 The first restrictions of ambulant cinema were part of a larger effort to regulate the market in the midst of the economic recession of the 1930s. In 1935, the NBB proclaimed a moratorium on new cinema operations, meeting the exhibitors’ demands to curb competition. The opening of a new permanent cinema was only allowed after close scrutiny of the local competition.26 Ambulant cinema operators for their part had to specify to the central NBB office which towns and villages they would visit.27 After a long debate, it was decided that ambulant exhibitors could organise a maximum of twenty-four screening days per year in the same municipality. No more than eighteen of these screening days could be held in the same building. This rule was further restricted if there was a permanent cinema, in which case only twelve screening days were allowed annually.28 Ambulant cinema after World War II: Regulation of the trade World War II and its direct aftermath was in some respects a pivotal point in the development of ambulant cinema. The German occupational administration restricted travelling cinema to save fuel and probably also because this type of exhibition was more difficult to control than permanent cinemas.29 After the Liberation, the NBB almost immediately took measures to protect the business of permanent film exhibitors. The market was in a state of chaos. The demand for film was exceptionally high, but projectors and copies were difficult to obtain, since a lot of screening equipment had been confiscated during the war. In addition, many movie theatres had suffered war damage. In this context, any moonlighter with a working projector and a collection of films – perhaps even a single film – could make good money and, judging from the annual reports, enough rogue exhibitors were active to make established entrepreneurs and the NBB nervous. A map composed by the NBB marks around 200 villages and towns visited by ambulant film exhibitors in 1946.30 This document shows the scope of ambulant film exhibition as a widespread phenomenon. And we can safely assume that only the officially sanctioned ambulant screenings were marked on this map, but that many more occurred in this period. In August 1948, the pre-war regulations of ambulant cinema were tightened. Ambulant exhibitors were no longer allowed to screen films in municipalities with a permanent cinema, unless they complied with several conditions that often reduced the competitiveness of their show. New films could only be screened at least three months after their national release and only if the film was not booked by the local exhibitor. Distributors were only allowed to rent films to ambulant cinemas for locations specified in advance to the NBB. So both ambulant operators and their distributors were put under quite strict control.31 To compensate for these stringent rules, the maximum number of screenings in one particular location was raised from twenty-four to thirty days. This meant that ambulant exhibitors could organise bi-weekly screenings and programme additional shows during holidays and fairs. 154

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Two years later, the NBB implemented an even more complex system to regulate the market. A new, hybrid administrative category of cinema exhibition was created: besides the ambulant cinema and the permanent cinema (‘category A’), a ‘permanent cinema category B’ was created. This hybrid category followed from the success of ambulant cinema. Due to the growing popularity of moviegoing in small towns and rural areas, thirty screening days per year were often insufficient to satisfy the demand. At the same time, in most cases the market was still too small to justify the operation of a movie theatre on a day-to-day basis. Moreover, for permanent cinemas the NBB statute stipulated the requirement of a built-in projection room with a fixed projector and this was too expensive for most small venues. The type B cinema filled the gap. It did not require a separate projection room and to qualify as a type B cinema, the venue had to operate between 31 and 124 days per year, that is on average at least every fortnight and at most two or three days a week.32 In practice, this typically translated into the socalled ‘weekend bioscoop’, a semi-permanent venue where each Saturday and Sunday screenings were organised by the same exhibitor. The frequency could fluctuate per season, with fewer shows during summer and extra shows during local festivities and (school) holidays. Some exhibitors added screenings on Friday or Monday evenings, or provided shows for children on Wednesday afternoons when schools were closed. Besides the regular permanent cinema (‘A’) and the B-type operation, the NBB recognised a third category simply called ‘travelling cinema’ (which in this chapter is dubbed ‘type C’). The main difference between type B and C was the number of screenings: a maximum thirty days per year. The business formula was generally the same, using similar types of multipurpose buildings. Figures and patterns After the war, the NBB started publishing statistics in its annual reports on cinema attendance. Because ambulant cinema was a separate category in the data presentation, this allows the opportunity to analyse some long-term trends in ambulant cinema exhibition. Since type B cinema was considered part of permanent cinema for administration purposes, there are only separate attendance statistics for type C ambulant cinema. Since changes in the collection or categorisation of data are not explained in the reports, some trends can be biased, complicating interpretation. Nevertheless, the statistics demonstrate some clear developments. In the run-up to the creation of the administrative category of the weekend cinema, the NBB initiated a partition of the country into zones of influence for the various ambulatory cinema operators. This partition provides us with a unique snapshot of the geography of ambulant cinema in the late 1940s.33 Sixteen ambulant operators, whose territory varied between one single location (Schouten) and 53 locations (Centrale Bioscooptrust), served a total of 312 municipalities.34 Most entrepreneurs operated one or more permanent cinemas in addition to their ambulant business. The larger players in this market operated veritable chains that integrated all three forms of exhibition, permanent cinemas (category A), weekend-cinemas (category B) and travelling operations screening on a less-than-weekly basis (category C). A minority of the smaller operators were ‘survivors’ with their roots in the classical travelling cinema, such as Schouten and Welte. ‘Coming up This Weekend’:  Ambulant Film Exhibition in the Netherlands

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A closer analysis combining the data from the NBB with statistics about the degree of urbanisation provided by Dutch Bureau of Statistics (CBS) reveals that ambulant cinema was clearly a rural phenomenon.35 We can observe some preliminary patterns of geographical expansion of the various ambulant operators’ territories. Especially in the north and east, the territories are quite sharply demarcated. The brothers Johan and Jac Miedema each claimed extensive regions in the provinces Friesland, Overijssel, Drenthe and Gelderland. In the north-east, Abeln also had a clearly defined territory. In the province of Noord-Holland, the firm Kok & Co. was dominant, while Mabi claimed a small terrain in the southern extremity of the country. Finally, the firm Bio-onderneming Zeeland monopolised the south-western province of Zeeland. The rest of the country shows a more mixed picture, where most entrepreneurs operated around a particular centre, but their territories (partly) overlapped. In densely populated areas such as the province of Zuid-Holland several operators were indeed active in close proximity. The absence of any ambulant cinema operation on the islands Goeree-Overflakkee and Schouwen-Duiveland can be explained by the orthodox Protestant character of this specific region.36 The statistics for the 1960s and 1970s are unfortunately too biased to be of any use, so they do not give us much insight into the decline of ambulant film exhibition.37 By 1979, the ambulant cinema category disappeared as a distinct statistical category in the NBB annual reports, confirming the end of this type of film exhibition. Exhibition and Programming Practices: The example of Jac Miedema The overall image that we get from the statistics of ambulant cinema as a rural phenomenon is confirmed by the evidence we have from individual businesses. This section will zoom in on individual operators, principally Jac Miedema. His father, Swier Miedema (1871–1928), opened his first permanent cinema in the northern town of Meppel in 1915. His sons Jac (1897–?) and Johan (1901–1993?) soon joined the family business. During the 1930s, the Miedemas built an actual cinema chain – which was uncommon in the Netherlands during that period – transforming several of the ambulant cinema locations into (semi-)permanent cinemas.38 The Miedemas specialised in small-town cinemas. In 1942, the brothers divided the enterprise. Johan Miedema controlled eleven cinemas in the northern territory in Friesland and Jac ran ten in the eastern provinces Overijssel and Gelderland. During the 1940s, his brother’s cinema park grew to nineteen in total, most of which were weekend-cinemas. Four cinemas operated on a daily basis, of which only one was located in a larger city, the Luxor cinema in Deventer (around 46,000 inhabitants in 1950). Deventer, which was also the seat of the company, was the only town where he experienced direct competition from other cinemas. Besides the weekend-cinemas (type B), Miedema operated an ambulant cinema (type C), servicing the most rural areas with screenings every fortnight or less frequently. Only Miedema’s A cinemas were located in purpose-built theatres. For the ambulant operations (types B and C), he rented halls in cafés, restaurants and hotels. The fact that the bulk of Miedema’s enterprise was located in this kind of venue determined the identity of his company. This is clearly illustrated by his letterhead logo, depicting a projection beam in front of a building that has the word ‘Hotel’ written on 156

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top of it. The use of existing buildings that were not recognisable as movie theatres presumably had an impact on cinema’s local reception as a cultural institution, diminishing its aura of urban modernity. This de-emphasising of the movie theatre as a distinct cultural institution can also be seen in Miedema’s abstention from explicitly ‘branding’ his small-town cinema chain. Although Miedema usually displayed his family name in the newspaper advertisements for his screenings, he privileged the name of the local hotel venue rather than his own. Thus people did not go to see a film at Miedema’s ambulant theatre, but at Hotel-Restaurant ‘De Sluis’ (Dieren) or Bioscoopzaal Hotel Jansen (Dinxperlo). Whereas most of Miedema’s permanent cinemas operated under the name Luxor Bioscoop, none of his weekend-cinemas received such a recognisable cinema label. All halls rented by Miedema appear to have been privately-owned, commercial venues. Miedema did not rent spaces from the municipality, church or local associations. Other ambulant cinemas operated in both commercial and (semi-)public venues. For instance, the Gofilex company, a commercial enterprise with its roots in the Catholic ‘Social Action’, organised screenings in Catholic community halls, mainly in the south of the Netherlands. Miedema used a standard rental contract aimed at restricting the competition. The contract explicitly prohibited the proprietor of the building from renting out his hall to other film exhibitors. In the contract Miedema also tried to secure the auditorium for use during lucrative days of festivities, when other parties (musical companies, local associations, etc.) would also want to rent the site for their activities.39 The rent was calculated as a percentage of the box-office takings (maximised at 20 per cent by NBB regulations since 1949), avoiding the risk that during sparsely attended evenings the rent would be higher than the gross takings. Revenue from concession stands and cloakrooms were privileged to the landlord.40 The standard contract of the NBB (1949) stipulated that the ambulant cinema operator should be given the opportunity to leave his equipment safely on the premises. This clause suggests that in some cases, the only genuine ambulant factor was the travelling operator himself. With respect to Miedema, we know that for his weekend-cinemas, he appointed local managers to supervise the show and organise the local advertising. Often this would be the manager of the hotel or café where the screenings took place. This practice had several advantages: it reduced travel costs, and the local manager was present throughout the week and closer to his audience than the travelling operator. And because the rent was a percentage of the total box-office takings, the manager was motivated to attract as many patrons as possible. It is not yet clear whether these local managers were trained to operate the projector or whether a projectionist was sent in. We do know that in 1946 Miedema kept an ‘extensive’ staff on the payroll for his ambulant operation.41 Larger operators such as Gofilex and Centrale Bioscooptrust probably also employed staff, but some of the smaller entrepreneurs must have worked alone or with a small crew, partly consisting of family members. For instance, the Abeln family business employed local (café) managers who sometimes took care of the projection themselves, while in other cases Abeln sent in projectionists.42 Apart from the more or less fixed circuits of weekly or bi-weekly screenings, incidental shows were also part of the business. In the late 1940s, a lucrative venture seems to have been the commission to screen films in the reconstruction camps, which housed workers who were involved in repairing war damage.43 ‘Coming up This Weekend’:  Ambulant Film Exhibition in the Netherlands

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Advertisement for the screening of Es war eine rauschende Ballnacht (1939) in the cinema hall of Hotel Jansen, Dinxperlo (Graafschapbode, 8 March 1940)

Advertisement for the screening of the British war drama Johnny Frenchman (1945) at Hotel-Restaurant ‘De Sluis’ in Dieren, circa 1946. Newspaper clipping, n.d. (Collection G. Hummelman)

Hotel Jansen, Dinxperlo. The entrance to the cinema hall is indicated by the sign ‘bioscoop’ (upper left). In front of the building a window display with publicity for the film Ein Herz bleibt allein (1955) (Courtesy of Edwin Jansen, www. postvanvroeger.nl)

Finally, what films did Miedema and other ambulant operators show? In what way did their programmes differ from those in permanent movie theatres? Were films tuned to the taste of small-town and rural populations? Unfortunately,

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these questions are hard to answer because of a lack of data. Most ambulant film exhibitors did not advertise in the daily press. Announcing the programme with flyers and posters was cheaper and as effective in small communities as expensive newspaper ads. Local or regional weekly papers with community information and publicity for local events, stores and businesses may have been another platform that they used, but this type of periodical has rarely been preserved. Moreover, the wide geographical area in which the ambulant operators were active makes it a challenging task to collect the fragmented information that would provide insight into their exhibition and programming practices. An additional complicating factor is our limited knowledge of post-war film distribution, which impedes a solid frame of reference. No systematic information on the programming of Miedema’s ambulant cinema operation has yet been recovered. However, some notion of the films he screened can be deduced from a series of advertisements from the regional newspaper De Graafschapsbode announcing the combined film screenings of two type B cinemas operations by Jac Miedema in Dinxperlo (circa 4,300 inhabitants in 1947) and Varsseveld (circa 1,400 inhabitants) in the remote eastern part of Gelderland.44 This material suggests that Miedema screened films that had premiered between five and ten months earlier in large metropolitan theatres. However, they were not yet at the end of their distribution cycle. On the contrary, all the titles in this sample were at the time of Miedema’s screening also on the bill in cinemas in smaller Dutch cities as well as in metropolitan neighbourhood theatres and even after that.45 Let me take the example of the Shirley Temple vehicle I’ll Be Seeing You (1944). It premiered with the Dutch title De bittere waarheid in Rotterdam, Amsterdam and The Hague on 20 December 1946 and stayed on the bill for two weeks. After that the film circulated for months in various urban cinemas in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague (December 1946–January 1947), Leiden (January 1947), Utrecht (February 1947), and returned for second runs in Rotterdam and The Hague (March, July 1947) and Amsterdam (May, December 1947).46 In July 1947, when Miedema screened the film in Varsseveld and Dinxperlo, it was also running at the Corso in The Hague and in the Cinema Oliveo in the small town of Born. During that summer, it was also shown in the large Schouwburg Bioscoop in Heerenveen and in various small cinemas in the province of Limburg. In March 1948, the film was screened in the Luxor cinema in the mining town Hoensbroek and again in Heerenveen.47 A similar pattern appears with other titles such as Casablanca (1942), which was still showing in permanent cinemas in large and small cities many months after Miedema had screened it. Miedema thus seems to have been able to offer his rural audiences fairly recent films, although this hypothesis would need further substantiation, and its validity for other ambulant operators has not been established. That programmes were relatively up-to-date may well explain the success of the travelling shows. Still, the question remains to what degree (youthful) audiences, increasingly mobile since the introduction of the moped in the 1950s, preferred to go to the movies in nearby cities, where there was more choice and social control could more easily be evaded. We know that, in contrast to their pre-war suspicion of cinema, during the 1950s, local governments increasingly started to encourage local cinema operations, not ‘Coming up This Weekend’:  Ambulant Film Exhibition in the Netherlands

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only to facilitate ­tourism, but also to entice the local youth to stay in the village instead of seeking pleasure in the nearest city.48

Conclusion Ambulant cinema has functioned as part of the capillary system in the Dutch film circulation for much longer than was assumed in the scholarly literature and it formed an integral part of the moviegoing experience in small towns and villages. For a significant part of the rural population in the Netherlands, films were regularly available. What contemporaries in the post-war years called travelling cinema evidently deviates from its classic appearance of the early twentieth century. The post-war ambulant cinema was a hybrid form of the permanent and the mobile. The nomadic fairground operation with tent shows had given way to a semi-sedentary and regularly recurring cinema operation. Partly, the ambulant cinema paved the way, as Dibbets has argued, to the so-called weekend-cinema of the 1950s and 1960s, thereby integrating cinematic entertainment into the fabric of social life in small-town and rural communities.49 At the same time, ambulant cinema remained more ephemeral than the mainstream permanent cinema, which was marked in particular by a recognisable building, radiating a sense of urbanity and modernity. This chapter is exploratory. A further scrutiny of available sources is needed, and their analysis in relation to statistical data (geographical, socioeconomic and ideological). Furthermore, the perspective of audiences should be taken into account by systematic historical interviewing. The notion of ambulatory service in rural areas could be a helpful framework to explore the role of cinema in the countryside, placing travelling cinema into a context of other forms of ambulatory service such as for instance the ‘SRV-man’, an iconic Dutch ambulant grocery store servicing those communities without stores. Another question for future research is the relation between (semi-)ambulant cinema and the regional art-house circuits that developed in the last decades of the century. Garncarz considers the (classical) travelling cinema a typically European institution, particularly in contrast to the US, where travelling cinema did not develop into the widespread phenomenon that it became in the old continent.50 In this context, the post-war ambulatory cinema in Europe (or at least the Netherlands) offers an interesting analogy to that famous other form of cinema exhibition that had mobility at the heart of its business design and seems to be a typically American institution: the drive-in cinema. Both forms of cinema exhibition responded to changing patterns of leisure, consumption, social geography and the changing nature of the audience, although suburbanisation and the increase of car ownership developed significantly earlier in the US than in war-wrecked Europe. A striking difference here remains the relationship to the city: where the drive-in often seems to have been situated in or near suburbanised settings, the ambulatory cinema primarily defined the rural cinematic experience in Europe.

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NOTES   1. See Yvonne Zimmermann, ‘Training and Entertaining Consumers. Travelling Corporate Film Shows in West Germany after the Second World War’, in Martin Loiperdinger (ed.), Travelling Cinema in Europe: Sources and Perspectives (Frankfurt am Main and Basle: Stroemfeld Verlag, 2008), pp. 169–80; Christian Kuchler, ‘Catholic Travelling Film Shows in West Germany after the Second World War’, in ibid., pp. 181–7.   2. John Sedgwick, Clara Pafort-Overduin and Jaap Boter, ‘Explanations for the Restrained Development of the Dutch Cinema Market in the 1930s’, Enterprise & Society vol. 13 no. 3 (2012), pp. 634–71. Also see Thunnis van Oort, ‘Industrial Organization of Film Exhibitors in the Low Countries: Comparing the Netherlands and Belgium, 1945–1960’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television (online 2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01439685.2016.11572 94, accessed 17 September 2016.   3. Luc Willink, Film (2nd edn) (The Hague: R. J. Goddard, n.d. [1928]), p. 1. Translation by Thunnis van Oort with thanks to Rebecca Wilson.   4. Geoffrey Donaldson was one of the first authors in the Netherlands to demythologise early Dutch film history. A number of his texts rectifying popularising publications on early Dutch film history are collected in Egbert Barten (ed.), Geoffrey Donaldson. Een leven voor de film (Noord-Scharwoude: Geoffrey Donaldson instituut, 2013). See also Geoffrey Donaldson, Of Joy and Sorrow. A Filmography of Dutch Silent Fiction (Amsterdam: Stichting Nederlands filmmuseum, 1997).   5. Frank van der Maden, ‘De komst van de film’, in Karel Dibbets and Frank van der Maden (eds), Geschiedenis van de Nederlandse film en bioscoop tot 1940 (Weesp: Het wereldvenster, 1986), p. 49.   6. Joseph Garncarz, ‘The Fairground Cinema: A European Institution’, in Loiperdinger, Travelling Cinema in Europe, p. 83.   7. Both equivalent Dutch expressions ‘reizende bioscoop’ and ‘ambulante filmvertoning’ were used indiscriminately by contemporaries, although ‘reizende bioscoop’ (travelling cinema) was the most common term, even in the more recent period. Consequently, the linguistic distinction is purely artificial and is only made here for analytical convenience.   8. Han Baudet et al., ‘Consumenten en innovaties (II): Een nieuwe benadering van historisch consumentengedrag’, offprint from Maandschrift economie, August/September 1974, Overdrukken van het instituut voor economisch onderzoek van de Rijksuniversiteit te Groningen [n.d.], pp. 612–26.   9. Ibid. 10. See also Corinna Müller, Frühe deutsche Kinematographie: Formale, wirtschaftliche und kulturelle Entwicklungen, 1907–1912 (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1994). 11. Van der Maden, ‘De komst van de film’, pp. 34–49. See also Thunnis van Oort, Film en het moderne leven in Limburg. Het bioscoopwezen tussen commercie en katholieke cultuurpolitiek (1909–1929) (Hilversum: Verloren, 2007). 12. Ivo Blom, Jean Desmet and the Early Dutch Film Trade (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2003); Bert Hogenkamp, De Nederlandse documentaire film 1920–1940 (Amsterdam: Van Gennep, 1988), pp. 9–24. 13. Van der Maden, ‘De komst van de film’, pp. 9–14, 38. 14. Ibid., p. 10.

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15. Jan Mooibroek, Bewegende beelden, witte doeken. Van kermistent tot bioscooptheater (Stadskanaal: Streekhistorisch centrum, 1998), p. 15. 16. Frank van der Maden, ‘Welte komt’. De geschiedenis van C. Welte’s cinematograph, theater van de levende fotografieën (Arnhem: Vereniging vrienden van het Nederlands openluchtmuseum, 1989), p. 34. 17. Ibid., pp. 46–7. According to documents in the NBB archives, Welte did visit a number of places with an ambulant cinema in 1950: Huizen, Putten, Nijkerk, Valkenburg, Woensdrecht. Those locations are not part of a defined circuit as they are quite diffusely spread throughout the country and very distant from Welte’s home base – they were probably incidental screenings. Archief van de Nederlandse bioscoopbond, EYE film instituut Nederland (hereafter: NBB). Inv. 2686 ‘Circulaires’. 18. Karel Dibbets, ‘Bioscoopketens in Nederland: Economische concentratie en geografische spreiding van een bedrijfstak, 1928–1977’. Master’s thesis, University of Amsterdam (1980), pp. 20, 43. 19. Van der Maden, ‘Welte komt’, p. 20. 20. John Sedgwick et al., ‘Explanations for the Restrained Development of the Dutch Cinema Market in the 1930s’, p. 19. 21. Marie-Antoinette Willemsen, ‘De fictieve kracht. De missiefilms van de missionarissen van Steyl (SVD)’, in Joos van Vugt and Marie-Antoinette Willemsen (eds), Bewogen missie. Het gebruik van het medium film door Nederlandse kloostergemeenschappen (Hilversum: Verloren, 2012), pp. 59–82. 22. Nederlandsche bioscoopbond, Verslag over het jaar 1926. See also Verslag over het jaar 1928, where the issue was put on the agenda again by the ‘northern’ exhibitors, but was again dismissed. 23. André van der Velden, Fransje de Jong and Thunnis van Oort, ‘De bewogen beginjaren van de Nederlandsche bioscoopbond, 1918–1925’, Tijdschrift voor mediageschiedenis vol. 16 no. 2 (2013), pp. 23–42, www.tmgonline.nl, accessed 30 August 2014. 24. ‘Eerste vergadering van den ledenraad’, Officieel orgaan van den Nederlandschen bioscoopbond vol. 6 no. 98 (16 October 1939), p. 8. 25. Dibbets, ‘Bioscoopketens in Nederland’, pp. 80–1. 26. Karel Dibbets, ‘Het bioscoopbedrijf tussen twee wereldoorlogen’, in Dibbets and van der Maden, Geschiedenis van de Nederlandse film en bioscoop tot 1940, p. 257. 27. Maandelijksche mededeelingen van den Nederlandschen bioscoop-bond (February 1935), p. 1. Unfortunately those lists are lost, as are most of the pre-war NBB documents. 28. Maandelijksche mededeelingen van den Nederlandschen bioscoop-bond (July 1935), p. 4. 29. Van der Maden, ‘Welte komt’, p. 33. 30. NBB, Annual report 1945, p. 117, http://film-bioscoopbranche.nl/issue/JRV/1945-05-01/ edition/null/page/117, accessed 14 May 2016. The small black dots represent the locations of ambulant film shows. 31. NBB Inv. 306 ‘Gewijzigd algemeen bedrijfsreglement 25 April 1950’, pp. 27–8. 32. Ibid., pp. 4–5. 33. Ambulant cinema was not otherwise systematically and centrally documented in detail. The central government did collect statistics on permanent cinemas and cinema attendance in general. More detailed records of ambulant cinema have not been recovered in the NBB archives.

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34. When the list is compared to the 1948 NBB directory, several members registered as ‘travelling cinema operator’ did not partake in the partitioning: ARFI Amsterdam (formally ‘Instituut voor arbeidersontwikkeling’, an organisation aimed at propagating socialism), De Jongs Nederlandsch Biograaf Theater (one of the ‘old style’ travelling cinemas), P. F. Standaert (Terneuzen) and August de Laat (Tilburg). 35. Many towns and villages on the NBB list are not listed in the CBS statistics because the CBS only registered municipalities. But for 200 out of the 312 localities in the NBB list we have information about the urbanisation grade: 176 (88 per cent) fall into the ‘A’ category of rural municipalities. This category is subdivided into A1–A4, based on the share of the male labour force active in the agricultural sector (ranging from over 50 per cent in category A1 to 20–30 per cent in category A4). Respectively 46 per cent of the localities with an ambulant cinema fell in A1, 22 per cent in A2, 17 per cent in A3 and 3 per cent in A4. Only eighteen localities (9 per cent) belonged to category B (urbanised countryside), whereas six (3 per cent) are categorised as C1 (rural towns). Obviously, there is a bias because we have seen that ambulant operators could operate in (larger) cities and towns where permanent cinemas (A and B) were active, but there were so many restrictions that this seems to have been rather an exception. Centraal bureau voor de statistiek, Typologie van de Nederlandse gemeenten naar urbanisatiegraad 31 mei 1960 (Zeist: W. de Haan, 1964). 36. This finding seems to confirm the hypothesis of Jaap Boter and Clara Pafort-Overduin that the development of film culture was hampered in homogeneously orthodox Protestant regions. Jaap Boter and Clara Pafort-Overduin, ‘Compartmentalisation and Its Influence on Film Distribution and Exhibition in the Netherlands, 1934–1936’, in Michael Ross, Manfred Grauer and Bernd Freisleben (eds), Digital Tools in Media Studies. Analysis and Research: An Overview (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2009), p. 13. 37. NBB statistics show that attendance of ambulant cinemas was remarkably stable and even increased over time. During the 1940s and 1950s, around 1 per cent of total attendance related to film screenings by ambulant operators. During the late 1950s, their market share doubles to 2 per cent, while cinema attendance in general shows a steady decline. But in the early 1970s, the statistics show a sharp increase of the market share of ambulant film exhibitors to a staggering 11 per cent in 1979. This is an unexplained anomaly in the collection or presentation of the statistical data that does not seem to correspond to the decline of rural cinemagoing in this period. Because we don’t know how NBB officials collected and presented these data, their use becomes limited. 38. Dibbets, ‘Het bioscoopbedrijf tussen twee wereldoorlogen’, pp. 248–9. 39. NBB Inv. 1231 ‘Correspondentie 1945–1949’. 40. NBB Inv. 2686 ‘Circulaires’. 41. NBB Inv. 1231 ‘Correspondentie 1945–1949’, 26 April 1946. 42. Merel Wijnen, ‘Het bioscoopleven in de Veenkoloniën. Een bedrijfshistorische analyse van bioscoopondernemer Abeln over een periode van 85 jaar’. Bachelor thesis, University of ­Utrecht (2014), p. 9. 43. NBB Inv. 1361. ‘Correspondentie 1945–1948’. 44. The sample is limited to July–September 1947 for two practical reasons: the newspaper editions are digitised up until this date, and (at the time of writing) the cinemacontext.nl database covers film programming in Dutch larger cities up until the year 1947. 45. According to a sample of newspaper advertisements in the period collected at Delpher (www.delpher.nl), a large databank of digitised newspapers, hosted by the National Library of the Netherlands (Koninklijke bibliotheek).

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46. The cinemacontext.nl database contained, at the time of writing this chapter, only information on programming in the larger cities in 1947. When searching in the Delpher databank, we can get a broader view, although still biased by the fact that the databank is far from complete and local newspapers in certain regions are under-represented. 47. See www.cinemacontext.nl; Limburgsch dagblad, 18 July 1947, 5 September 1947; Heerenveensche koerier, 30 March 1948; Nieuwsblad van Friesland, 5 September 1947 and 10 March 1949. 48. See Judith Thissen’s chapter in this volume. See also Ysbrand Bosma, ‘De bioscoop als stimulans voor de leefbaarheid. Het conflict van bioscoopondernemer Johan Miedema met de gemeente Sneek over de vermakelijkheidsbelasting in 1963’. Bachelor thesis, University of Utrecht (2014). 49. Dibbets,‘Bioscoopketens in Nederland’, p. 43. 50. Garncarz, ‘The Fairground Cinema’.

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10 Ch no Catholic Cinephilia in the Countryside:  The Jeunesse Agricole Title Chrétienne and the Formation of Rural Audiences in 1950s France Author Mélisande Leventopoulos

Despite the importance attached to the representation of farm life in French films, the rural experience of moviegoing remains a marginal topic in French historiography. 1 In the 1980s, the film sector began to rediscover the countryside, but this renewed interest in rural cinema did not have much impact upon the academic field.2 In addition to the tendency to focus almost exclusively on the greater Paris region, our limited knowledge of non-metropolitan exhibition and reception can also be explained by the fact that until now historians have largely overlooked the role of the Catholic Church in shaping French film culture. In the case of France, however, rural cinema as a social phenomenon can only be fully understood by taking into account the Church’s persistent efforts to frame the experience of cinemagoing.3 This chapter focuses on the cultural politics of the Catholic agricultural youth movement (Jeunesse agricole chrétienne) in the immediate post-war era. After the Liberation, cinema attendance in France showed a very sharp increase, especially outside Paris and its suburbs.4 Although the average attendance in the countryside never reached metropolitan levels, the explosive interest of rural youths in the movies became a source of major concern for the agricultural youth movement as the cinema was associated with urban life and the wrong kind of modernisation. While villages entered the era of mass entertainment, the rapid modernisation of agricultural techniques increased productivity and gave farm workers more free time.5 These changes were seen as symptomatic for the transformation of rural society. However, the growing interest in the cinema also offered unprecedented opportunities for Catholic outreach, both in the cities and in the countryside. In response to the post-war boom in cinemagoing, the Church began to incorporate film education in its youth programmes to elevate popular film taste and develop a Catholic version of cinephilia. I will examine how this ambition was realised within the rural youth movement. To provide a historical grounding for my analysis, I will first briefly discuss the Church’s attitude towards the film medium before World War II. This is followed by a short section about the emergence of Catholic youth movements during the 1920s and their early engagement with the cinema. Catholic film exhibition as a social force In its struggle against state secularism, the French Catholic Church was well aware of the propagandistic potential of new visual media. From the 1890s onwards, extensive use was made of the illustrated press and of magic lantern shows, to explain and enhance the Catholic faith. Much of this material was produced and distributed by La Maison de la Catholic Cinephilia in the Countryside

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Bonne Presse, which was established in 1873 to mobilise and strengthen the Catholic presence in French society by the means of mass media.6 As early as 1897–8, the Bonne Presse developed a film camera projector and somewhat later also projectors for the mixed use of films and magic lantern slides.7 However, in sharp contrast to the fixed views of the magic lantern, moving pictures were seen primarily as an entertainment medium and hence by and large disregarded as a pedagogical or missionary instrument. The Church’s interest in the cinema was primarily nurtured by a concern about the medium’s social impact and moral influence. Already in the early 1900s, priests began to invest in projection equipment so that they could entertain their constituency, children and teenagers in particular, and offer them an alternative to commercial screenings by itinerant exhibitors and permanent movie theatres. Within a decade, many parishes and Catholic youth associations organised regular film screenings with their own projector or working in collaboration with a commercial exhibitor. They could choose their programmes from a range of specialised catalogues that provided parishes and other religious institutions with a selection of ‘good films’ from the mainstream offering notably comedies, travelogues, documentaries and morally correct drama. Frequently, these films were programmed in combination with magic lantern slides, which often had an overtly religious or moral message. Thus film entertainment was deployed to serve Catholic instruction and to fight the ‘religious recession’ by luring the popular audience away from the commercial cinemas into the parish halls and Catholic youth clubs.8 In the late silent era, Catholic film screenings rapidly developed as a specific section of the film exhibition sector. After a slowdown during and after World War I, the Church’s involvement with the medium intensified in the 1920s, encouraged by the commercial success of a number of religious films which reached a popular audience well beyond the Catholic milieu, but also alarmed by the enormous popularity of cinemagoing with the ‘masses’. A third incentive to increase the Catholic propaganda in favour of ‘good films’ was the growing use of cinema by the secular Ligue de l’enseignement (Educational League), an association of lay teachers. In the realm of popular education, the League – which was a sworn enemy of the Church from its creation in the mid-nineteenth century – wanted to implement educational cinema in state schools.9 In 1927, the Comité catholique du cinématographe (CCC) was founded to promote the consumption and production of ‘clean’ films in accordance with Catholic values and to contribute to the development of a Catholic educational cinema. The CCC developed a rating system based upon the Church’s moral norms, but without favouring religious subject matter as it aimed to transform mainstream French film production rather than developing a ­Catholic alternative. That same year a veritable cinema fever broke out among French Catholics when the Bonne Presse launched a media campaign to raise funds to equip parishes with film projectors so that the cinema could be used as a weapon against further secularisation. More than 500 parishes benefited from the half a million francs that were collected and obtained either a 9.5mm Pathé-bébé or a 17.5mm Pathé-rural projector, the latest technological novelty which had been developed for small-scale film exhibition which dominated rural France (hence its name). Initially, most Catholic film screenings took place in multipurpose parish halls and children and adolescents formed the main audience. Admission was either free or only a nominal entrance fee was charged. During the early 1920s, we see the beginnings of a tendency towards specialisation with the opening of the Catholic cinema halls. This phenomenon occurred at the same time as the first building boom of permanent movie theatres outside 166

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the main metropolitan areas. Although these cinema halls could still be used for other activities, showing films was their principal function. For instance, the parish cinema of Tinchebray (Normandy) had a small stage for theatrical performances and concerts. Three screenings a week were the norm in most Catholic cinemas: one on Saturday night and two shows on Sunday, before and after Vespers. The programme would change every week and consisted of films that had received a good rating from the CCC. An embargo was imposed on the screening of films that the Church considered immoral. Unlike the semi-private screenings in parish halls, the new Catholic cinema halls charged admission. Although it seems safe to assume that the screenings attracted mainly the Catholic population, they were open to the general public. Hence, despite their non-commercial and associational nature, these venues entered in direct competition with commercial film exhibitors.10 In small towns, this might be the local permanent cinema, whereas in more rural settings the competition came from the League of Education projection network (Offices du cinéma éducateur) and from itinerant showmen who would come around every week or two weeks on a fixed day to show their programme in a local café-restaurant or the municipal salle des fêtes. Like their commercial counterparts, the Catholic cinemas no longer aimed only at the youth. As the most popular name for these venues – the Familia – indicates, they targeted a family audience with films suited for all ages. At first a modest development in small-town parishes, the new formula was greeted with ever greater enthusiasm. The early sound era witnessed a veritable building boom of Catholic cinemas all over France in cities as well as in non-urban areas, although with considerable regional differences. According to the CCC, there were at least 1,500 ‘family cinemas’ in France in 1938. In sum, on the eve of World War II Catholic film exhibition had become a significant social force and even a commercial factor, especially in Bretagne and the Loire Valley.11

Cinéma Paroissial, Tinchebray (Orne), around 1953. Today the building is a municipal movie theatre with an Art & Essai label

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The Jeunesse agricole chrétienne and the cinema in the ­Interwar years The same spirit of militancy and apostolic inventiveness that fostered the Catholic film actions of the interwar period also gave rise to the emergence of youth movements in the French Catholic milieu. Like the other Catholic youth movements, the agricultural youth movement was set up along gender lines. The Jeunesse agricole chrétienne (hereafter JAC) reached out to the male rural youth, whereas the activities of the Jeunesse agricole chrétienne féminine (JACF) targeted teenage girls and young women. Youngsters could become members at the age of fifteen and left the youth organisation when they married or on their twenty-fifth birthday to enter the adult movement, a system that ensured a continuous stream of new members to the latter. The JAC and JACF were set up in 1929 and 1933 respectively. Both organisations were based on the principle of evangelisation by peers. This had already been the guiding principle of the Catholic young workers’ organisation (Jeunesse ouvrière chrétienne or JOC), which had been founded in 1926 and whose missionary motto ‘watch, judge, act’ was also adopted by the agricultural youth movement to advocate militant engagement.12 In addition to the JOC and JAC, the Catholic youth movement included a division for young fishermen, one for Catholic students and the Jeunesse indépendante chrétienne for the middle-class youth. In this way, the Church hoped to reach young Catholics from all social backgrounds in its efforts to re-Christianise French society. During the 1930s, the two Catholic agricultural youth movements fought against the injustices suffered by the rural population and defended the inherent values of rural society. The JAC primarily devoted itself to the religious and agricultural education of its male members, whereas the JACF tried to stem the migration from rural to urban areas by advocating that young women stay on the land and treasure their role as housewives. Initially, there was little interest in engaging with the existing Catholic film activities organised within the parishes. In most rural small towns and villages, the local clergy had sufficient control over the moviegoing experiences of their congregation. Hence, the militants of the rural youth movements did not particularly worry about the cinema’s effect on their members, unlike the JOC whose members lived and worked primarily in urban areas and hence were often exposed to a much wider range of films and potentially ‘corrupting’ influences. However, the JAC sometimes organised propagandistic screenings. For instance, in 1934, its branch in Vay, a village near Nantes, showed La Terre qui meurt (The Dying Land, 1927), a film based upon the bestseller by the French Catholic writer and journalist Réné Bazin.13 Like the novel, the film dramatised the abandonment of the countryside for the city. An old peasant who is the tenant of a rural estate in the Vendee sees how his sons no longer want to work in the impoverished conditions on the family farm. One leaves to become a railwayman, while the other son seeks his fortune in America. In the end, the farm is saved by the son-in-law, a valet turned farmer. Although several French films of the late 1920s and 1930s glorified rural life and hence resonated with the aims of the JAC and JACF, propagandistic screenings like the one in Vay remained an exception. It was only after World War II that the militants of this youth movement began to steadily harness the cinema for youth outreach in rural areas. What provoked this radical change in attitude was the massive resurgence in the popularity of cinemagoing as a leisure activity in the immediate post-war period, which went hand in hand with a collective reinvention of a specifically French cinematographic cultural tradition. 168

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Cinema as a vehicle for Catholic emancipation After the Liberation, the French showed an even greater appetite for movies than before the war. Like other sectors of the Catholic milieu, the youth movement was captivated by the post-war cinema euphoria, in which the French Catholics participated with great enthusiasm. An avant-garde of Catholic cinephiles, some of whom were well-known figures in Parisian film circles, quickly understood that this opened unprecedented possibilities for Catholicism. During the Occupation, the JOC had introduced a new training programme in film reading for its members. After the war, militant Catholic students within the Jeunesse étudiante chrétienne (JEC) fostered a spiritual cinephilia, intellectual in content although it aimed at the larger public. This enthusiastic involvement with the cinema led in 1946 to the foundation of the Fédération loisirs et culture cinématographique (FLECC) (Federation for leisure and film culture). Most of its leaders had been active in the Resistance and had the ambition to reform Catholic mentalities. They posited the cinema as the people’s university of the future and attributed the medium a central role in the education of the masses. Initially set up as a technical service to support film education within the JOC, the FLECC soon served all branches of the Catholic youth movement and became involved in a wide range of activities, including the development of film learning programmes for denominational schools and the coordination of the Catholic ciné-clubs.14 From its headquarters in Paris, the FLECC repeatedly urged the militants of the youth movements to get involved in ‘film action’ so that the cinema would ultimately become ‘the voice and the instrument of a new mass culture, which responded technically and spiritually to the opportunities and needs of our time.’15 By seeking to reach out to the ‘great crowd of spectators’, the FLECC created a space of militant investment in cinephilia within the Catholic milieu, convinced as its leadership was that the cinema had a great emancipative potential for French Catholicism. Initially, the two rural youth movements did not share the cinephilic fever of the Paris-based FLECC, which had ramifications in the more urbanised small towns but had not yet reached the decentralised rural countryside. More conservative in orientation from an axiological point of view, the JAC was primarily concerned with the modernisation of agricultural production and the elimination of social inequalities between metropolitan and rural regions in realms such as schooling and housing.16 The call for a ‘cinéma rural’ came from the JACF, the women’s agricultural youth movement. Already by the summer of 1945, female militants began to advocate for a French film production adapted to the needs of the rural world with peasant heroes and narratives that counterbalanced the influence of the mainstream films. The ‘urban film production’ (le cinéma citadin) was repeatedly accused of misrepresenting rural life, encouraging the desertion of the countryside and promoting a version of modernity that was incompatible with the conditions of the rural population in France.17 The JACF’s growing engagement with the cinema can be followed by studying its magazines Jeune rurale (The young country woman) and Semeuses de France (France’s female sowers). The first and most important monthly was launched in April 1945 and designed to appeal to young country women in their late teens and twenties. Retitled Promesses (Promises) in 1950, this JACF publication appeared until the early 1960s. While it was the JACF’s main vehicle to reach its female constituency, the magazine had a much broader appeal. With about 80,000 subscriptions by the mid-1950s, Promesses Catholic Cinephilia in the Countryside

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reached an estimated one out of six working young people in twenty-five French départements according to historian Gérard Cholvy.18 Its content covered a wide range of subjects that were supposed to interest the young female reader, ranging from film and fashion, sewing and cooking, to boys and marriage. Semeuses de France discussed similar topics but adapted them to the tastes and interests of adolescent girls in the thirteen to seventeen age group, its targeted readership. However, this juvenile magazine did not have the same determining impact on rural film culture as its more adult counterpart. Jeune rurale and its successor Promesses promoted the cinema to such an extent that, by the 1950s, the JACF’s ideal model of the young female peasant implied a basic knowledge of the cinema. A closer examination of its writings on the cinema provides not only insight into the movement’s ideas about a rural film culture rooted in the Catholic faith, but also in the movement’s gendered construction of rural cinephilia. The country girl and the cinema One of the first film reviews in Jeune rurale appeared in 1946 on the occasion of the rerelease of Jacques Becker’s Goupi–Mains rouges (It Happened at the Inn, 1943). The film was favourably reviewed despite its classical and rather stereotypical representation of French peasantry. A year later, the documentary Farrebique by George Rouquier, which also dealt with the peasant world but with more realism, also received a positive reception: ‘It is a sincere film which praises the work and honesty of the peasants.’19 One might see these early reviews primarily as an effort on the part of the JACF to align itself with a certain representation of rural France, but this would not do justice to the magazine’s efforts to deal with the growing popularity of cinemagoing among its readership. The editors clearly sought to guide rural young women in their choice of films and monitor their participation in the culture of cinemagoing, the world of the movies and its stars. The first indications of an educational perspective on the cinema are already apparent in a full-page article that appeared in the June 1946 issue of Jeune rurale, in the form of an interview with a young shopkeeper named Paulette. It is likely that this article is fictional, but it is nevertheless worth quoting some excerpts at length because the interview gives us an impression of the conditions of rural film reception, and, more importantly, sets out the main premises of the magazine’s discourse on rural cinemagoing and film education: – Is it true, Paulette, that people around here go to the cinema quite often? – That’s right, in the village [bourg] it’s becoming a habit, in the winter of course, because during the summer one can go for a walk. Well it’s more or less like in town: a way of spending the evening […] even young people from the hamlets come almost as frequently as we do. […] – Do people know exactly which film will be shown? – It is advertised at the grocery, the baker and there are posters that we consult … . – Do people make inquiries on the quality of the films? – No, not as far as I know. I don’t know any film magazines, regional newspapers do not reproduce reviews either and for those few who are subscribers of national newspapers the reviews are useless because new films are not projected here, only films that are three or four years old. Posters are enough to excite curiosity: One’s dying to discover the face behind a name. 170

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[…]

– Do the films have a great influence on young girls? – Certainly, you know we live isolated lives, without seeing a lot of new things. I imagine that in Paris, the metro and the streets are already like a moving picture that is constantly renewed. Here, there are girls who hardly see more than ten people a day. [The cinema] is a window that opens to an unknown world … . Just the dresses, the lifestyle, attitudes. And then the story of the film, which we do not always understand, because for us, country girls, it unfolds too quickly hinting at things we do not know. […] – Does the effect caused by the cinema last, or to be clearer, do you go back over what you see? – I believe so. Especially when one has a solitary job. For instance, for me with costumers every day, time passes quickly, but Germaine who works in her garden all-day long, says to me that [images] come back from one Sunday to the other. – And what are the scenes that come back? – Love scenes. They affect one’s imagination and sensitivity.

At the end of the article, we see a quite remarkable shift in perspective. The interview turns from Paulette telling a human interest story about the everyday practices of cinemagoing in a rural community, to the more political level of Catholic film action. Although she is not introduced as a JACF militant, Paulette’s discourse leads to social considerations about film education: – Can we react to this [great influence of the cinema on young girls]? – Yes, above all when we can talk about it again. For us going to see a film is a family outing,

– – – –

so it is the subject of conversation the day after. We judge, we criticise, we discuss our impressions. But in a lot of families they only speak of work during the meal, and so, people keep all their feelings for themselves. Do people like documentaries? Those about war: yes; but not the others. They are always shown at the beginning when we are eager to seeing the main film, it needs a plot. Don’t you think it’s a pity? Yes, I do, but we need to educate, we should awake interest very early and stimulate a desire for instruction.20

Tellingly, at the end of the interview, Paulette makes a passionate plea for a genuine rural cinema: You see, what we need are peasant films, [fiction] films specifically made for us, with real heroes, real country girls as well as documentaries with a more direct interest to our lives. This year, it would have been fascinating if we could have had a film about the Rural Youth Center Movement [Maison rurale].21

The models of rural spectatorship inscribed in this article should obviously not be taken at face value, but as ideological constructs. The writer’s first aim is to draw the readers’ attention to the growing popularity of the cinema in the countryside, the emergence of urban leisure patterns and the conditions of film reception. At the same time, the interview offers a militant’s assessment of cinema’s influence upon country girls, suggesting Catholic Cinephilia in the Countryside

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that both the film offering and the conditions of reception need to be improved. In fact, the interview calls quite explicitly for a response by the movement and action to change rural film culture: what is needed are not only (documentary) films with rural themes and heroes, but also an education in film appreciation so that the girls would be able to discriminate between the ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ films. The magazine took up the task of instructing the readers by regularly publishing personal reviews of particular movies. Sometimes these were just short comments of a few lines discussing recent releases, but more often, the reviews took the form of a page-long article dedicated to a single film. Individual members (but most likely the editorial staff too) wrote about the films that they had seen. Time and again, these reviewers insisted on the reviewer’s personal experience and interpretation, thus giving the impression of a film criticism that emerged from the bottom up. Despite this personal touch, the reviewers followed the official assessments issued by the Centrale catholique du cinéma (the national Catholic Cinema Steering Committee that had replaced the ancient CCC) and supported the line set out by the magazine’s editorial board. Unmistakably, the overall strategy of Jeune rurale was to promote films that were judged valuable from a Catholic point of view. Films that were not considered worth seeing were simply ignored, rather than being reviewed negatively. At first, Jeune rurale often favoured films with a religious theme, rural setting or overtly moral ending. In 1949, for instance, the films reviewed included Les Paysans noirs (Black Peasants, 1949), a French documentary shot in the Ivory Coast by Georges Régnier, and L’École buissonnière (Passion for Life, 1949), a picture about an innovative lay teacher in a rural village, as well as the Hollywood movies The Yearling (1948) and The Fugitive (1948). Under its new name Promesses, the magazine devoted ever more space to the cinema especially after it became bi-monthly in 1953. In this period in which the ­Catholic movement became a mass organisation, the ambition of the JACF was to develop a truly popular cinephilia based upon the Catholic faith. For that, young country women needed to broaden their knowledge of film culture and change their general attitude towards the movies. First, active participation in cinephilic practices was stimulated by the way of quizzes. In 1953, Promesses integrated questions about film in its big annual contest, which dealt with topics like fashion, general knowledge, politics, economics and family life.22 A few months later, the quiz ‘Are you up-to-date?’ asked readers to give the names of three film directors in ten seconds. Those with the best scores were encouraged to improve their knowledge of the cinema by reading the Catholic weekly Radio, cinéma, television.23 Second, the editors of the magazine made clever use of their readers’ interest in mainstream fiction films to shed a different light on commercial film production and thus propose new ways of interpreting films. For instance, the example of the Cary Grant vehicle Every Girl Should Be Married (1950) was used to explain that such comedies helped viewers to understand ‘why girls do not propose to boys’.24 In their effort to uplift their readers, Promesses was careful to take the sociocultural background of its rural readership into account as well as the alleged specificities of the female sex. Thus, the editors and reviewers frequently addressed the readers’ unrestrained taste for sentimental melodramas and their adoration of film stars. When La Cage aux filles (Cage of Girls, 1950) starring Danielle Delorme came out, an entire page was dedicated to the film, while its female star figured prominently on the cover. The film was a conventional tearjerker with a strong moral ending. Delorme plays Micheline, a young woman 172

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who, after failing her school exams, leaves with her lover for Paris, where he abandons her and she starts on the wrong path. Arrested, Micheline escapes from reform institutions several times, but is eventually saved by a kind-hearted teacher. Promesses combined a review of the film by the JACF activist Simone Verdier with a summary of the plot (film raconté) in the form of a photo novel. Echoing Paulette’s remark about the difficulty of understanding ‘the story of the film … because for us, country girls, it unfolds too quickly hinting at things we do not know’, the easily accessible format of the photo-roman aimed to help readers to make sense of the film’s narrative.25 We see a similar approach to the romantic comedy Julietta (1953) starring the highly popular French actor Jean Marais. Promesses devoted three pages to the film’s love story and Marais’s photo figured on the cover – a first and an exception because film covers were typically reserved for female stars. The staff’s obvious enthusiasm for Julietta was only slightly tempered by a moral warning for ‘romantic 18-year old girls’ against too much romantic imagination (as was the case of the film’s female protagonist).26 There was more to this JACF propaganda for certain films than the mere ambition to guide the rural young woman in her choice of films and help her to better understand the stories. The ultimate goal was to develop a form of cinephilia that reconciled Catholic moral values with the commercial cinema and its star system. Tellingly, Danielle Delorme’s image on the cover was accompanied by a religious caption that left little room for a non-religious interpretation of the film: ‘Micheline in La Cage aux filles. Picture of our soul’s plea for resurrection’ (see illustration on page 174). The magazine format of Promesses facilitated the inclusion of publicity materials provided by the film industry. Photographs of famous actresses renewed the gallery of female portraits featured on the cover. Thus, the magazine strongly associated itself with the cinema, although it dealt with a much wider range of topics. Initially, these commercial images were often combined with religious footers, as in the case of the portrait of Danielle Delorme, as if the editors felt the need to justify the use of overtly commercial material, but also in an effort to infuse the star system with a spiritual dimension. However, little by little, Promesses began to deal in a more secular way with the cinema, as illustrated by the case of the magazine’s review of Julietta and its use of the Jean Marais publicity material. In retrospect, the magazine’s discourse of female cinephilia paved the way for the integration of young rural women into the political public sphere, a development that the JACF encouraged from 1953 onwards as the Catholic youth movement became a veritable mass movement.27 Promesses refused specialisation and never became a film magazine. Still, it managed to develop an editorial line which permitted the infiltration of Catholic judgment in the conventional forms of French feminine cinephilia.28 What Eugène has seen for you While the militants of the JACF took the lead in modernising Catholic spectatorship in rural France, their male counterparts did not neglect the cinema either, although they addressed the boom of post-war cinemagoing with less eagerness than the women. The JAC’s main platform was Jeunes forces rurales (Young rural forces), a bi-monthly publication in newspaper format which had a circulation of 100,000 copies by the 1950s.29 As in the case of Jeune rurale/Promesses, its editorial staff developed a film criticism adjusted to the supposed tastes and sensibilities of its targeted Catholic Cinephilia in the Countryside

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Cover Promesses with ­Danielle Delorme, April 1950

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readers. Moreover, only films that had a moral potential were promoted in the journal. In the review column ‘Seen for you’, films were typically discussed from a Catholic point of view on love, marriage and family life. For instance, the screen adaptation of Georges Simenon’s crime novel La Vérité sur Bébé Donge (The Truth of Our Marriage; 1952), which deals with the consequences of adultery, was presented as ‘a poignant drama on the unity of the family’.30 Although the director’s intention was denounced as false repentance, Luis Buñuel’s Los olvidados (1951) was positively reviewed because the film encouraged viewers to reflect upon the causes of social misery.31 Rural politics were directly addressed in the review of Le Petit monde de Don Camillo (The Little World of Don Camillo, 1952), a French-Italian comedy about the relations between a priest and a communist mayor in an Italian village. This Fernandel film was extremely popular with Catholic audiences and a box-office hit in many parish cinemas. Jeunes forces rurales covered the movie twice, the second time in the form of a discussion between members of its editorial staff.32 At stake was the question of whether Le Petit monde de Don Camillo was pure fiction and had nothing to do with reality (as Julien Duvivier claimed), or, whether it should be seen as an accurate representation of social life in rural Italy. The experiment of publishing opposing reviews was renewed one month later with the French war drama Jeux interdits (Forbidden Games, 1952), revealing an appetite for film debate not unlike that in specialised film journals and in the ciné-club movement.33 In 1953, the title of the film column was changed to ‘Eugène has seen for you’, which underscored the peer-to-peer quality of its recommendations. The column included a list of several films with short summaries and each time the image of Eugène’s face expressing like or dislike.34 Notwithstanding its regular film column, Jeunes forces rurales did not give cinema the same status as Promesses. This can be explained by the fact that the central concerns of the JAC were in the realm of socioeconomic modernisation, rather than sociocultural emancipation. But the lack of a deeper investment in film culture may also have reflected gendered differences in leisure patterns. Young male farm workers may well have been less attracted to the movies. As one JAC militant explained, boys preferred to go dancing.35 FROM CRITICISM TO SCREENINGS: FILM EDUCATION IN THE VILLAGE36 The youth movement’s efforts to elevate the film taste of its members and bring rural cinephilia into line with Catholic values were not limited to the pages of its periodicals but extended to practical film education for its militants. It will come as no surprise that on this front too, the initiative came from the JACF. Françoise de Charnacé, member of the JACF’s national board and responsible for its leisure section, played a pioneering role in modernising the movement’s cultural offering. Until the early 1950s, the JAC promoted primarily recreational activities that preserved rural traditions, like local dances and singing. Without radically breaking away from this policy, she nevertheless pointed out that reform was necessary: Our movement wants to stimulate the over-all education of young rural women. Hence it is concerned with all kinds of leisure activities, with everything that can entertain and enrich them. […] But we must always try to adapt our action to our times; therefore we must give priority to the cinema in ¾ of the French regions.37 Catholic Cinephilia in the Countryside

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Starting in the 1951/2 season, the JACF began to tackle the issue of rural leisure from ‘the inside’, trying to better satisfy the needs and desires of young people in order to give them a ‘real education’. Priority was given to film education following a trickledown approach. Knowledge of the medium was disseminated from the leisure section of the national secretariat, and via the national and regional teams to the militants on the local level. The training, which was developed independently and without support from the Fédération loisirs et culture cinématographique, included a theoretical initiation, viewings and discussions, and incentives to read specialised magazines and Catholic film books.38 Articles on the basics of film-making were also published in Militante jaciste, the information bulletin for the movement’s activists.39 Group leaders responsible for the film education training could rely on the detailed instructions for film analysis which had been prepared by de Charnacé.40 For instance, female militants from all corners of a region or département would come together to attend a regular screening of a particular film at a commercial cinema. After the show, the group would be divided into smaller groups which each had to analyse particular aspects of the film. The next day, the subgroups presented their findings to each other and finally the overall results of the analysis were collectively debated. Militants were expected to participate regularly in such film education sessions and to divulge their knowledge to activists further down the ladder. However, the JACF’s film training programmes did not only aim at the movement’s militant elites. Thanks to projectors provided by the dioceses, sessions in film analysis were also organised for the rank-and-file members and other young rural women in the context of agricultural training programmes and other collective events. Finally, the JACF encouraged the formation of village film clubs which reunited ‘les amies du cinéma’ (female friends of the cinema) to discuss the films that they had seen at the commercial cinema. It was not until 1954 that the JAC began to invest in the film education of its militants and rank-and-file members, but when it did, this had an enormous impact on the cultural politics of the entire agricultural youth movement. With the support of the FLECC, travelling ciné-clubs were set up which aimed at the entire rural population, male and female, young and old. In sharp contrast to previous efforts to educate the rural masses, these ciné-clubs did not build upon the taste of the rural population, but rather sought to introduce the more elevated taste in film which had been developed in Parisian Catholic film circles. Also, they functioned exclusively within the infrastructure of the non-commercial sector, using multipurpose parish halls or family movie theatres for their screenings and discussions. The 16mm films were provided by the FLECC and had previously been used for educational screenings in Catholic schools. People had to become members of the ciné-club to gain entry, a measure imposed by the legal frame of the non-commercial sector in France. It also meant that no recent films could be shown because in order to prevent competition between commercial cinemas and the growing number of ciné-clubs, the latter were only allowed to schedule films that were at least four years old (the average period of a film’s commercial distribution in the early 1950s).41 In many respects, the new system turned out to be a crucial mistake and many clubs failed within a year or two. Militants discovered that their film programmes rarely met with the expectation of rural audiences whose tastes were inclined to the more popular. Moreover, people were not accustomed to subtitles and in some villages they were still used to silent film. Sometimes the screenings were 176

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quite successful, but all in all rural audiences resisted the very idea of ciné-clubs, which entailed a post-screening discussion and a critical assessment of the films rather than the mere entertainment of them. Typically, only members of the JAC and JACF timidly remained for the debate. Local organisers often did not know how to stimulate the ­discussion. Some of them presented films without having received any training. It was not unusual for the local chaplain to be more qualified to both operate the projector and to lead the discussion. Even the girls of the JACF, who were better prepared than the JAC militants, found it difficult to orchestrate the screenings. Learning from these failures, the JAC and JACF began to collaborate more closely to regain the confidence of rural youth, coordinating their activist efforts. Film programmes were harmonised with rural preferences, thus adapting the urban model to its rural context. The JAC even involved itself in film production, supporting the making of Routes barrées (Blocked Roads, 1957), a documentary about the difficult conditions of rural youth. A better understanding of the pedagogical merits of collective film analysis during the post-screening discussions supported the appropriation of the urban ciné-club culture by rural militants and audiences alike. The clubs were also better coordinated at the local level. For instance, in the Orne, the regional ciné-club network appointed a general manager, a secretary, a treasurer, a presenter and a person in charge of animating the club in each location. Women were part of the local teams, but the available evidence suggests that they were typically excluded from running the debates and from other leadership positions. The legitimacy of the male leadership was rooted in the fact that they were trained by the FLECC and hence had the much-needed film analytical and didactic competences as well as technical knowledge to make sure that the screenings and discussions were a success. A JAC militant proud of his own performance gives us some impression of the dynamics during the post-screening debates on The Quiet Man (1952): Is there anyone who didn’t like the film? Nobody? So what do you think about it? Nothing? I understand you. Me too, the first time that I saw it, I had the impression of having passed two pleasant hours without being able to say why. Since then, I have had time to think about it. This film fascinated me to the point that I was automatically thinking of it each time I was free to do so. […] The thing that struck me most was that emotions were embedded in the landscape. Let’s get clearer: a horse gallop reveals John’s anger. Do you see other examples illustrating this idea? Answers fused from all the sides even before I had finished my question.

These and other testimonies confirm that by the late 1950s, the rural ciné-club members seem to have appropriated the urban format. They knew how to look at the films with a critical view and were less intimidated from taking the floor to express their thoughts. In other words, the ciné-club system was successfully transferred from the city to the countryside and integrated into the militant action to improve the quality of rural life. Post-war Catholic cinephilia developed in the context of a surge in cinema attendance after the Liberation. It originated in Paris, but, thanks to female militants of the JACF and to a lesser degree of the male militants of the JAC, it was successfully embraced by rural youth, first in the press and then in the ciné-clubs. Even if the phenomenon remained limited in terms of the actual number of screenings and members, these cinephilic practices had a profound impact upon the culture of cinemagoing in rural Catholic Cinephilia in the Countryside

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France. Certainly, in the early 1960s, the JAC and JACF lost their interest in cinema as television became the dominant mass medium and many small-town and rural cinemas started closing their doors. However, despite the rapid decline of Catholic ciné-clubs and parish cinemas, the tradition of cinephilic engagement in rural France did not come to an end. While the Catholic cinemas that survived during the 1960s and 1970s went through a process of secularisation, they often adopted a cultural politics in favour of quality films.42 By the early 1980s, many of the surviving venues (approximately 300) had been classified Art & Essai. This legal status implies a support of independent cinema and involves a state subvention to help to maintain a culturally diverse offering of quality films. The continued presence of Art & Essai cinemas in rural areas (see Feigelson in this volume) may well be explained in part by the Catholic milieu’s long-lasting engagement with cinephilia. This seems particularly the case in Bretagne, the former bastion of family cinemas, where today 74 per cent of the cinemas are classified Art & Essai.43 Notes

This chapter draws on a paper presented in January 2014 at the seminar ‘Cinéphilies populaires’ of the research programme Cinepop 50 (National Institute of Art History, Paris). I thank its organisers: Laurent Jullier, Jean-Marc Leveratto and Geneviève Sellier. I am also grateful to Judith Thissen for her help and advice during the writing of this article.

  1. See, among others, Margaret Butler, ‘Paysan, paysage, patrie: French Films and Rural Life 1940–1950’, Rural History vol. 14 (2003), pp. 219–37; Ronald Hubscher, ‘Goupi–Mains Rouges’, Histoire & sociétés rurales vol. 27 (2007), pp. 71–89. A notable exception is Alison J. Murray Levine, ‘Cinéma, propagande agricole et population rurale en France (1919–1939)’, Vingtième siècle. Revue d’histoire vol. 83 (2004), pp. 21–38. See also Valérie Vignaux, ‘Diffusion et réception du cinéma éducateur en zone rurale dans l’entre-deux-guerres en France: réponse à l’enquête de 1930’, in François Amy de la Bretèque (ed.), Le ‘local’ dans l’histoire du cinéma, (Montpellier: Presses universitaires de la Méditerranée, 2007), pp. 143-4. Some regional monographs deal with the topic of rural screenings; see, among others, Daniel Taillé, Un siècle de spectacle cinématographique en Deux-Sèvres (1896–1995) (Niort: Cinéma-Niort, 1999).   2. See ‘Cinémas paysans’, CinémAction no. 16 (1981), Chapter 5; Daniel Sauvaget, ‘La diffusion du film en milieu rural’, CinémAction no. 36 (1986), pp. 74–83.   3. For a historiographical presentation of the Catholics and cinema issue in France, see Mélisande Leventopoulos, Les catholiques et le cinéma. La construction d’un regard critique (France, 1895–1958) (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2015).   4. Claude Forest, Les dernières séances. Cent ans d’exploitation des salles de cinéma (Paris: CNRS éditions, 2012), p. 71.   5. Georges Duby and Armand Wallon (eds), Histoire de la France rurale vol. 4 Depuis 1914. La fin de la France paysanne (Paris: Seuil, 1977); Annie Moulin, Peasantry and Society in France since 1789 (Cambridge/Paris: Cambridge University Press/Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme, 1991).   6. Isabelle Saint-Martin, Voir, savoir, croire. Catéchismes et pédagogie par l’image au XIXe siècle (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2003), p. 280.   7. Jacques and Marie André, ‘Le rôle des projections lumineuses dans la pastorale catholique française’, in Roland Cosandey, André Gaudreault and Tom Gunning (eds), Une invention du

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diable? Cinéma des premiers temps et religion (Lausanne/Sainte-Foy: Payot/Laval University Press, 1993), pp. 44–60.   8. For a detailed analysis, see Mélisande Leventopoulos, La construction collective d’un regard critique. Les catholiques et le cinéma dans la France du XXe siècle (1895–1995) (PhD thesis, University Paris 8, 2013).   9. On French educational cinema, see Kenneth H. Garner, Seeing Is Knowing: The Educational Cinema Movement in France, 1910–1945 (PhD thesis, University of Michigan, 2012) and Pascal Laborderie, ‘Les offices du cinéma scolaire et éducateur à l’épreuve des publics’, ­Conserveries mémorielles vol. 12 (2012): http://cm.revues.org/1230 (accessed 19 July 2014). 10. In most cases, the cinema was run on the modus of an association. In some urban contexts, the management would be given to a commercial exhibitor who worked under the control of the local clergy. See Leventopoulos, La construction collective d’un regard critique, p. 56. 11. Jacques Deniel and Michel Lagrée, ‘Le cinéma en Bretagne rurale: esquisse pour une histoire’, Annales de Bretagne et des pays de l’Ouest vol. 92 (1985), pp. 257–88; Michel Lagrée, ‘Les trois âges du cinéma de patronage’, in Gérard Cholvy (ed.), Le patronage ghetto ou vivier? (Paris: Nouvelle cité, 1988), pp. 215–27; Michel Lagrée, Religion et cultures en Bretagne 1850–1950 (Paris: Fayard, 1992), Chapter 11; Claude Forest, Les dernières séances, p. 50. 12. For a general presentation of the JAC/JACF, see, among others, Gérard Cholvy, Histoire des organisations et mouvements chrétiens de jeunesse en France (XIXe–XXe siècle) (Paris: Cerf, 1999); Édouard Lynch, ‘La jeunesse agricole dans le Rhône: Entre archaïsme et modernité’, in Marie-Emmanuelle Chessel and Bruno Dumons (eds), ‘Catholicisme et modernisation de la société française (1890–1960)’, Cahiers du centre Pierre Léon d’histoire économique et sociale no. 2 (2003), pp. 57–86. 13. Le tout petit de Vay, December 1934. 14. On the French ciné-club network, see Léo Souillès, La culture cinématographique du mouvement ciné-club: Histoire d’une cinéphilie (PhD thesis, University of Lorraine, 2013). 15. Télé-ciné no. 21 (1950), p. 1. 16. Jean-François Chosson, Les générations rurales (Paris: LGDJ, 2003); Paul Houée, Les politiques de développement rural (Paris: INRA/Economica, 1996). 17. Colette L’Hermette, ‘Peut-il y avoir un cinéma rural?’, Jeune rurale, July 1945, p. 3. 18. Jean Conq, ‘De la JAC au MRJC’, in JAC/MRJC origines et mutations (Lyon: Chronique sociale, 1996), p. 190; Cholvy, Histoire des organisations et mouvements chrétiens de jeunesse en France, pp. 296–7. 19. J-M. François, ‘Goupi Mains Rouges’, Jeune rurale, 15 March 1946, p. 9 and ‘Farrebique ou les quatre saisons’, Jeune rurale, May 1947, p. 6. For a deeper analysis of Goupi–Mains rouges in relation to French rural history, see Hubscher, ‘Goupi–Mains Rouges’. 20. A.L., ‘Les jeunes et l’écran’, Jeune rurale, June 1946, p. 3. 21. So-called ‘Maisons rurales’ were set up all over France by Catholic family organisations and the Church to provide rural youth with an alternative education. 22. Promesses, 15 February 1953. 23. ‘Êtes-vous à la page?’, Promesses, 1 March 1953, pp. 1–3. Radio, cinéma, television, the forerunner of Télérama, was funded by the Dominican order with the aim of educating the masses. 24. Promesses, May 1950, p. 20. 25. Ibid., April 1950, p. 16. On the film raconté, see Laurent Jullier and Jean-Marc Leveratto, Cinéphiles et cinéphilies. Histoire et devenir de la culture cinématographique (Paris: Armand Colin, 2010).

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26. ‘Un film raconté: Julietta’, Promesses, 15 January 1954, pp. 10–11, 24. 27. Martyne Perrot, ‘La jaciste: Une figure emblématique’, in Rose-Marie Lagrave (ed.), Celles de la terre. Agricultrice: L’Invention politique d’un métier (Paris: École des hautes études en sciences sociales, 1987), pp. 33–61. 28. Geneviève Sellier, ‘Le courrier des lecteurs de Cinémonde dans les années 1950: La naissance d’une cinéphilie au féminin’, in Noël Burch and Geneviève Sellier, Le cinéma au prisme des rapports de sexe (Paris: Vrin, 2009), pp. 67–90. 29. Cholvy, Histoire des organisations et mouvements chrétiens de jeunesse en France, pp. 296–7. 30. Maurice Rivière, ‘Un film poignant …’, Jeunes forces rurales, 15 March 1952, p. 4. 31. Ibid., ‘Los Olvidados’, Jeunes forces rurales, 15 February 1952, p. 4. 32. ‘Ce qu’ils pensent de Don Camillo’, Jeunes forces rurales, 1 October 1952, p. 2. 33. ‘Pierre, Marcel et Michel vous disent ce qu’ils pensent de Jeux interdits’, Jeunes forces rurales, 1 November 1952, p. 2. 34. ‘Eugène a vu pour vous’, Jeunes forces rurales, 1 February 1953, p. 2. 35. See the chapter by Corinne Marache in this volume. Her interviewers confirm that farm workers preferred more active recreations. 36. The third part of this chapter is based on the Christian agricultural youth movement’s archive conserved by the French National Archives (site of Fontainebleau: ANF MRJC 20030070 168). It contains very precious reports established by JAC/JACF militants and local managers of the FLECC. 37. En équipe, January 1952, p. 3. 38. The archives mention in particular Jean-Pierre Chartier and François Desplanques’s, Derrière l’écran (Paris: Spes, 1950) and the two main Catholic specialist magazines: Radio, cinéma, télévision and Télé-ciné (which was the organ of the FLECC). 39. Françoise, ‘Comment se fait un film?’, Militante jaciste, March 1953, p. 8. 40. En équipe, January 1952, pp. 6–8. 41. Roxane Hamery, ‘Les ciné-clubs dans la tourmente. La querelle du non-commercial ­(1948–1955)’, Vingtième siècle vol. 115 (2012), pp. 75–88. 42. On the crisis of Catholic exhibition, see Centre national des archives de l’Église de France, 40 CO 77. 43. Jacques Deniel and Michel Lagrée, ‘Le cinéma en Bretagne rurale’, pp. 277–86; Mireille Le Ruyet, ‘Petites exploitations en Bretagne: Focus sur les salles de cinéma associatives et leurs bénévoles’, in Claude Forest and Hélène Valmary (eds), Théorème no. 22: La vie des salles de cinema (Paris: Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2014), p. 59.

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11 Ch no Alternative Cinema in the Youth Centre Movement in Title ­Germany in the 1970s and 1980s Author Gunter Mahlerwein

From the late 1960s to the early 1980s, alternative non-commercial cinema flourished in villages and small towns across West Germany. In autonomous youth centres, youngsters arranged movie shows that broke away from the existing rural and smalltown film culture in several ways. First, they created alternative public spaces where film screenings were part of a broader cultural and political programme. Second, the screenings themselves were organised in an alternative way, including experiments with films selected by the audience and public discussions after the show. Third, these youth clubs programmed films that could not be seen in commercial cinemas (as far as these still existed in their own villages or nearby towns). Finally, some groups even produced their own movies. The whole process can be understood as a part of the growing mediatisation of rural society. On the one hand, the activists were highly influenced by media, especially by rock music culture and by the media coverage of the political movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Not only did the media play an important role in their socialisation process, but they also frequently used media as instruments to distinguish themselves from village society. By adapting urban film culture, especially elements of the art-house cinema and its discourse on film, these youngsters participated in the modernisation of rural culture. Although urban developments were instrumental in this modernisation process, this chapter shows that it had its own social and cultural dynamics. The youth centre movement The ‘revolution’ of 1968 did not only take place in the cities. Certainly, the student protests of the late 1960s were most spectacular in university towns and especially in the larger cities where oppositional structures could develop rather rapidly.1 However, the protest movements of high-school students (Schülerbewegung) and apprentices (Lehrlingsbewegung), which developed almost simultaneously with the student movement, spread far beyond the urban context. Moreover, adolescents from small towns and villages were intensely involved in the youth centre movement, which can be seen as a direct consequence of the political turmoil generated by ‘1968’. The fight of the adolescents for autonomous places to spend their leisure time started in the late 1960s and reached its peak in the middle of the 1970s. The aim of the youth centre movement was to obtain communal spaces for ‘open’ youth activities. These spaces had to be Alternative Cinema in the Youth Centre Movement in Germany

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independent from existing associations and the parish, and beyond the control of local governments and other authorities, so that the youngsters could develop and realise their ideas in a self-administered way.2 The first initiatives appeared in large towns and cities, but we know that already in the late 1960s some young people who lived in rural areas requested an autonomous youth room in their village. Within a few years, adolescents in many small towns and villages followed their example. By the mid-1970s, around 1,000 initiative groups existed in the Federal Republic.3 The contexts of the movement differed considerably between the city and the countryside. In the cities, teenagers could go to so-called youth leisure houses (Jugendfreizeithäuser/Jugendhäuser), where they organised their own activities under the supervision of social workers. By contrast, the non-commercial leisure pastimes of rural youths were dominated by local associations and the Church. Traditionally, the informal meeting points of rural adolescents – on the street, at bus stops, milk collection points, in the central market place and other public spaces – only permitted somewhat restricted activities, as the youngsters were keenly observed by the adults in the village, who rarely valued these informal gatherings. Especially in rural communities, the lifestyle of adolescents was typically very adult-oriented because of the intensive interactions between generations in farm work and the early integration of the youth in local associations.4 Far more often than in urban contexts, teenagers’ battles for an ‘open’, fully self-controlled space in their village implied a conflict with the older generations. The demand for a youth centre was often understood as a challenge to the existing rural order and to the traditional distribution of power in the village. The conflict between adolescents who claimed autonomy and the older generation could be particularly intense because of the many face-to-facesituations in small communities and the close relationships between its inhabitants (family, work, membership in local associations etc.). The first-generation activists of the youth centre movement were born in the early 1950s and were politicised in the atmosphere of 1968. In ideological terms, the youth centre movement can be positioned on the left of the political spectrum. Leaders in the movement often belonged to the youth organisations of the Social Democratic Party, the liberal FDP (which had a rather left-wing youth organisation), the Communist Party (DKP) and other communist splinter parties. It is generally believed that high-school students and younger university students often took the initiative to demand a local youth centre, but for the rural milieu their function as pioneers has yet to be proved empirically. In fact, the available evidence suggests that in many villages apprentices, young workers and even some young farmers took an active part in the development of the youth centre movement. Although the first generation of activists had a strong influence on the second generation, who took over in the middle of the 1970s, on the whole the influence of politics should not be overestimated. It seems that most activists and visitors of the youth centres were not politically organised, but merely influenced by the leftist Zeitgeist. Moreover, the cultural conditioning by late-1960s rock music seems to have been at least as important as contemporary politics. One of the initiators of a youth centre remembered hearing a Beatles song at the age of twelve as an eye-opening experience, which was soon followed by listening to bands and musicians like The Who or Frank Zappa.5 It is likely that many first-generation activists underwent a similar experience. In particular, the influence of Woodstock was enormous because of the resultant film 182

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and associated records. Other rock concerts played a decisive role too. First-generation activists defined the second generation as the ‘Non-Germersheim Generation’, meaning that they did not take part in the legendary rock festival of Germersheim in 1972, a huge event which attracted around 70,000 visitors.6 It seems quite significant that the difference between first- and second-generation activists was defined in terms of whether or not they attended a particular music festival. With their alternative lifestyle, partly influenced by rock music and hippy culture, partly by left-wing politics, many of the youth movement activists not only distinguished themselves from the generation of their parents, but also from those of their own generation who remained more connected with the mainstream of village life. It is difficult to assess the importance of the youth centre movement, but it seems to have been a considerable force. In many small towns and villages the conflicts between the adolescents and the local politicians about spaces and practices of self-administration were heated. The centres that opened with the consent of the local authorities were typically located in schools or in the basements of public buildings. However, the request for a room was not always successful. In some rare instances, the rural youth responded to the refusal to grant them a location by squatting in an empty building, but more frequently they would renovate an abandoned building to create a space for themselves. Squatting was more common in bigger cities. Still, we find examples of squats in small towns and villages in southern Germany. Other 1968proven forms of action, like demonstrations, sit-ins and so on, also found their way to the

Protest against the closure of the youth centre in Stetten, 13 November 1976 (Source: Ruhestörung: 25 Jahre Jugendzentrum Stetten in Selbstverwaltung 1968–1993 [1993], p. 33)

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countryside.7 Many of the youth centres that were set up in the early 1970s closed within a few years because of problems with local authorities or after complaints by neighbours. But there were also internal factors at work such as conflicts within the organisation (often due to the challenges of self-administration), the lack of continuity in the day-to-day management of the centre because there were no young people of the next cohort willing to take over or difficulties with motivating the local youth to visit the centre. Nevertheless, many youth centres still existed in the 1980s and some continue to this day, their work often assisted by social workers and minus the concept of self-administration. In retrospect, the youth centre movement can be seen as the most important form of activism among youngsters living in the countryside in the 1970s.8 The social and cultural development in the villages, I would argue, explains why this movement flourished in the rural milieu. The rise of the service economy at the expense of agriculture gave adolescents more leisure time, since they did not have to work in their parents’ farms as much as the generations before them. Educational expansion was rather successful in the countryside, where many new secondary schools were opened from the 1960s onwards. Young people had more opportunities and freedom than previously. They often had their own room, a higher level of mobility and were less financially dependent on their parents thanks to student grants for secondary education and the introduction of apprentice wages. Moreover, suburbanisation and the way workers, students and pupils commuted between the countryside and the city also brought urban influences into rural life.9 Media played a major role in these cultural transformations by providing rural adolescents with role models and musical styles, which they could use to distinguish themselves from the village mainstream and which stimulated the process of individualisation. At the same time, information about the youth centre movement circulated across a broad range of media, from public radio programmes, to the commercial teen magazine Bravo and, not to forget, the grey literature produced by the movement itself.10 Commercial and non-commercial cinema in the countryside From the very beginning, the cinema played an important role in the youth centres, where showing films was integral to the leisure programme. The organisation of the screenings, the selection of films and their reception will be discussed through a case study of several youth centres in rural south Germany. However, to provide a context for our analysis, I will first briefly describe the traditions of commercial and noncommercial film exhibition in the countryside. Initially, in Germany as elsewhere in Europe, rural audiences were primarily served by travelling showmen who presented their programmes in pubs, local halls and other public buildings, in a tent or even in the open air. Permanent cinemas became a feature of the cultural infrastructure in many small towns and villages from the 1920s on, including villages with not more than 2,000 to 3,000 inhabitants. Small-town cinemagoing peaked at the end of the 1950s with some 7,000 cinemas in operation outside the nation’s largest cities.11 In addition to commercial screenings, a wide range of educational and other forms of non-commercial film exhibition existed. In the 1950s and 1960s, parishes and adult education institutions regularly organised film screenings. The use of film in schools had a much longer history. Even in the 1920s, the screening of educational films during 184

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lessons was widely promoted in Germany. This modern form of teaching was centralised and optimised in the Third Reich and after the war. Like their urban counterparts, many newly built schools in villages had a special viewing room equipped with a 16mm projector, which could be operated easily by the teaching staff as little technical training was required.12 Media centres (Kreisbildstellen), which dated back to the early twentieth century but became especially important during the Nazi era, possessed large collections of educational slides and films. They also trained the film projectionists and were responsible for the distribution of films and other visual materials. Also in the 1950s, youth film clubs sprang up all over Germany. To support these clubs, a national umbrella organisation was formed in 1970 (Bundesarbeitsgemeinschaft der Jugendfilmclubs/BAG).13 Thus, when the youth centres opened their doors in the 1970s, they could often fall back to some extent on the technical and distributional infrastructure of noncommercial film exhibition that already existed in many villages and small towns. Film screenings in Youth CentrEs The example of Stetten, a small village near Stuttgart, illustrates how the film projects of the youth centres often started out. Even in 1968, a young vicar showed films for adolescents in an old school and afterwards in a former pub, which functioned as a youth club for several months. A group of local youngsters, who fought for a proper youth centre in their village, continued this tradition and screened films in the basement of the old school at more or less regular intervals during the 1970s. In a similar way, other youth centre initiatives developed out of film screenings in public spaces. To borrow a film projector one needed to pass an exam at the regional media centre, which typically also provided the films in the start-up phase. By setting up a series of film evenings, choosing the films, advertising the event, managing the technical aspects and the contacts with the distributors, the adolescents demonstrated that they were capable of organising these special events and could also take care of the day-to-day routines of their club. In many cases at first some of the initiators constituted the special film team, which would be made responsible for the planning and organisation of the screenings.14 Over the years, the members of these teams could turn into veritable film experts. They acquired their knowledge by discussing films as well as the offering of certain distributors and by visiting workshops where they would meet young cineastes and learn about film history and cinema management. In most cases, the film teams would be responsible for the selection of the films, but the politics and practices of selection could differ considerably, ranging from more or less autonomous decisions of the film team to forms of grassroots democracy. For instance, in 1973, at the youth centre in Stetten, every visitor could propose a number of titles from the catalogues of the distributors. They had to explain their choice by giving a short résumé of the film as well as a written statement. Their proposals would then be discussed and the final selection decided by a majority vote.15 Several film distributors supplied the youth centres with films. At first, the film teams often used the programmes of the Landes-/Kreisbildstellen (regional media centres). This was a cheap solution, but the films were often considered rather boring. More attractive but also more expensive were the titles that could be rented from commercial and non-commercial distributors of 16mm films. In the mid-1970s, for instance, the Alternative Cinema in the Youth Centre Movement in Germany

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Film screening at the youth centre in Guntersblum, 1980 (Source: Archiv Aktion Jugendtreff Guntersblum)

1982 film programme of the youth centre in Guntersblum with publicity for ­Rosemary’s Baby (1968) (Source: Archiv Aktion Jugendtreff Guntersblum)

Katholisches Filmwerk Frankfurt, an agency run by the Catholic Church, had 16mm copies of the controversial Rosemary’s Baby (1968) by Roman Polanski, the screen adaptation of Arlo Guthrie’s classic song story ‘Alice’s Restaurant’ (1969) and the box-office hit French Connection (1971). Other important providers were the Frede der Deutschen Kinemathek (Friends of the German Kinemathek), the BAG Filmclub and the private firm Atlas Schmalfilm.16 The Filmverlag der Autoren, a film distribution agency run by the activists of the New German Cinema, also provided the youth centres with 16mm copies. In general, screenings took place once a month. Apart from the organisational efforts that weekly screenings would demand, more regular screenings were often considered too much of a financial risk because typically the only source of income from the film rental was the entrance fees. There were exceptions however. The ambitious film team of the Aktion Jugendtreff Guntersblum, a youth centre in a wine-growing village of around 3,000 inhabitants situated in Rheinland-Pfalz, showed three or four films per month in the late 1970s and early 1980s. However, this was only possible because they generated their own budget with a very profitable wine bar at the yearly local wine festival in August.17 Programming practices and film production The analysis of the film programme of six youth centres in south Germany between 1970 and 1982 reveals that its scope was very broad, ranging from early American slapsticks to political documentaries about Latin America. In all six youth centres that I studied, older American movies were quite common on programmes. Classic Westerns, Marx Brothers comedies and Charlie Chaplin movies figured frequently, as did films by Alfred Hitchcock. 186

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An important reason these titles were chosen was that they could be borrowed cheaply from the regional media centres. The more recent American movies selected by the film teams usually dealt with the life of adolescents, reflected youth cultures or were considered ‘cult films’, including, for example, Alice’s Restaurant, Harold and Maude (1971), Easy Rider (1969) and Little Big Man (1970). Not surprisingly considering the interest in rock music among the activists of the youth centre movement, many centres programmed music films like Woodstock (1970), Tommy (1975) and The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) as well as concert films like Cream Farewell Concert (1968), The Stones in the Park (1969) and Pink Floyd Live at Pompeii (1972). European art cinema was also much appreciated, first and foremost the New German Cinema of the 1960s and 1970s, in particular the work of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Wim Wenders and Alexander Kluge, but also Italian neo-realism, French nouvelle vague and the oeuvre of the Swedish director Ingmar Bergman. The political interests of the youth centre movement crystallised around the programming of films about the military regimes in Greece and Latin America, squatters in Berlin or Zurich, the women’s liberation movement, other youth centres, nuclear power stations, ecology and ethnic minorities (films about Native Americans were very popular). As in Stetten at the end of the 1970s, these political films were often part of a larger series of discussions and conferences about political issues.18 Clearly, the intention of the film teams was not merely to show films for entertainment. Although action and suspense films were not missing from the programmes, ambitious artistic and political films dominated. ‘We wanted to be enlightening, we had an educational ambition although we were adolescents ourselves’, said a member of the film team of the Guntersblum youth centre.19 Similarly, a flyer from the Jugendhaus Altrhein in Eich explained that the films and other events at the centre ‘should entertain, inform, [and] motivate [people] to think about specific problems’ and thus encourage discussion. A newspaper advertisement for the screening of Il tetto (The Roof, 1956) in Eich pointed out that the problems represented in this neo-realist film by Vittorio De Sica demanded a post-screening debate.20 In the late 1970s, in particular, the film teams often drew their inspiration from the programmes of urban art-house cinemas and Kommunale Kinos (communal cinemas). As soon as one of them had a driving licence, the Guntersblum team attended the latenight screenings of the art-house cinemas in other towns in the region to find ideas for their own screenings. Although they could not screen the most recent movies, because they were too expensive, by visiting art houses and by reading specialised film magazines, they gained knowledge about the latest trends in art cinema, which they then integrated into their own programming practices. These ambitions went so far that the cinema programme in the youth centre in Guntersblum was split into two parts, one for audiences with more mainstream preferences and a ‘studio programme’ that was based on the urban model and aimed at the local cinephiles. In the case of the youth centre in Königshofen in Franken, the long distance to the art-house cinema in Würzburg prompted the formation of a film team so that art films could be seen without having to travel 50 kilometres.21 The art houses also inspired new forms of publicity. Initially, the youth centres advertised their programmes by way of short articles in the local newspapers, often little more than a short summary of the film. In later years, they began to produce flyers with elaborate descriptions, film stills, extracts from press reviews (often from the Berlin local magazine Tip) and even their own commentaries.22 Alternative Cinema in the Youth Centre Movement in Germany

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Fascinated by cinema, some of the activists even tried to become professionals. The film team of Guntersblum planned to open a cinema in a large city, but abandoned the plan after one of their members worked as a trainee in an art-house cinema and realised the financial risks of such an enterprise. In 1979, the film team of the youth centre of Kressbronn, a small town (8,000 inhabitants) situated on the shores of Lake Constance, started a joint venture with a local cinema owner in the nearby larger town Ravensburg to show a highly-ambitious art-house programme. Later they established a professional art-house cinema, which still exists today. Similarly, in 1983, former youth centre activists founded the art-house cinema Traumstern in the small town of Lich near the university town of Gießen.23 These initiatives suggest a close relationship between the youth centre movement and the emergence of art-house cinema in the countryside, but this needs further research. Finally, it should be mentioned that in the late 1970s, many youth centres also ventured into film production. Often the rationale behind these film projects was that the activists wanted to document their own work. The youth centre in Eich, for instance, engaged a professional photographer to make a film about their annual open-air festival. This film was later shown in other youth centres. In Stetten in 1975–6, several activists made a documentary film on 8mm about the history of their youth centre. A year later, they produced another small film about the squatting of a house which they used as a meeting place. Clearly, this was an attempt to document their activities in a systematic way. The group even set up its own film production company, called David Pfeffer Filmproduktion Stetten after a rebellious eighteenthcentury minstrel who lived in their village, but the name obviously also called to mind the record label David Volksmund Produktion of the anarchistic rock band Ton Steine Scherben. The Guntersblum group too made several short films and then ventured into a much bigger film project: a film adaptation of a novel by the Russian brothers Strugazki. They wrote the screenplay themselves and several sequences were shot with members of the equally ambitious theatre group of the Guntersblum youth centre. Audiences and Reception Unfortunately, we found only very limited evidence relating to the popularity of the film screenings in youth centres. Still, the scarce figures indicate that the screenings were quite successful. Film and dance evenings in Stetten in 1971 were ‘full to bursting’ and the screenings often attracted more than 100 visitors. The film nights at the youth centre in Königshofen in the 1970s attracted similar numbers. The reason behind these successes was not only the quality of the programme, but also the opportunity that these events provided to meet with peers, especially when the youngsters did not yet have a space for themselves and needed to discuss the plans for a proper youth centre. Viewing conditions in the centres were usually far from ideal, but this apparently did not spoil the pleasure nor keep people away. Technical defects were frequent: films would break or there would be problems with the sound or the projector. In Königshofen, the screening often began later than planned because the visitors kept 188

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on chatting with each other. The overall atmosphere was very relaxed according to contemporary sources. Special conditions helped to turn these film evenings into attractive outings for local youths. For example, the advertisements of the youth centre in Bodenheim emphasised that during the screening the bar would be open and smoking was allowed.24 In Guntersblum, some thirty and forty adolescents attended the weekly screenings on average. Most films on the studio programme attracted fewer visitors, while movies like The Rocky Horror Picture Show were highly popular. Similarly, an examination of the financial reports of the Jugendhaus in Eich reveals that the youth centre audience preferred music films and cult films. In 1977, the rock opera Tommy was the most popular screening, followed by Harold and Maude and the Beatles’ film Let It Be (1970). By contrast, Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes (Aguirre, The Wrath of God, 1972) and Cul-de-Sac (1966) by Roman Polanski attracted less than forty people.25 Eberhard Kögel, who was actively involved in the youth centre in Stetten, explains that audience expectations differed considerably. To reduce costs, the youth centres in the region rented films together but this caused heated debates about the selection of films, because the centres catered to quite different audiences. Whereas the screenings in Stetten attracted many apprentices, in the nearby Beutelsbach, there were many more high-school students. Another source of tension came from the fact that members of the film teams were often cinephiles with special interests that did not necessarily correspond with that of their core audience. In Guntersblum, the films on the ‘studio programme’ were sometimes misunderstood or even rejected outright. For instance, many people walked out of the screenings of Alexander Kluge’s ‘theoretical’ films. Nevertheless, the Guntersblum film team persisted in their effort to create the atmosphere of an art-house cinema. By giving a short introduction to the film, they tried to make art-house films more accessible. Also they continued to programme more mainstream films to keep youngsters who were not interested in art cinema within the youth centre movement. In Guntersblum this was possible because they had the money to organise a screening once a week and thus could alternate between different types of films. Elsewhere, discontent over the programme would often lead to the critique that the selection was made in a dictatorial way and result in experiments with more democratic programming practices.26 Not only visitors had an opinion about the films that were screened. The older people in the village closely followed what was going on in the youth centres and often condemned them for their ideological orientation. Thus in 1981, the youth centre in Guntersblum came into conflict with the village council after a conservative council member had sharply criticised the programming of a documentary about the squatters in Berlin with the provocative title Schade dass Beton nicht brennt (What a Pity That Concrete Does Not Burn). Something similar happened in Stetten, where in 1978, the YMCA claimed that the local youth centre had been infiltrated by communists because it had programmed a series of films about working-class life. The series had been set up by a group of communist students at the University of Stuttgart. The youth centre had merely copied the apparently successful concept. There were also counteractions. For instance, in 1979, the ‘Catholic Youth Association’ of Bodenheim started a programme called ‘open youth work’ and invited local youngsters to the film Eine Liebe followed by Alternative Cinema in the Youth Centre Movement in Germany

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a discussion. This initiative can be seen as a response to the growing popularity of the youth centre screenings.27 Continuity and discontinuity The film screenings in the youth centres were set up in a period when commercial film exhibition in rural areas had been in decline for more than a decade. Although the owners of the remaining small-town cinemas complained about unfair competition from the non-commercial screenings in the youth centres, by the 1960s these commercial cinemas had already lost their function as central meeting points for adolescents.28 In most villages, commercial film exhibition in the form of permanent cinemas or regular screenings in multipurpose buildings had disappeared by the time the youth centres emerged. Only the first generation of youth centre activists had experienced local film screenings during their childhood years. Typically, they had gone to the movies every Sunday afternoon with friends. The generation of the late 1970s and the early 1980s knew the cinema only from going to the next small town or city.29 One might consider the youth centre screenings as taking up the baton from the bygone village cinema. However, this was not necessarily the viewpoint of those involved. The film team of the Guntersblum youth centre, for instance, did not see itself as the successor of the village cinema that had closed some years before the youth centre opened its doors. On the contrary, they wanted to present a form of ‘city cinema’ with the ambition to bring urban culture, especially arthouse movies and nightlife to their village.30 While this explanation makes sense from the perspective of a historical narrative that foregrounds the growing integration of the countryside into the networks of urban culture, we should not overlook the specifically rural dynamics at work in the history of the independent youth cinema culture in the villages during the 1970s. Due to improved education, greater mobility, growing participation in mass consumer and media culture as well as the decline of agriculture as a ‘mode of life’, the biographies of adolescents in the countryside indeed began to show more and more similarity with those of their urban peers. When their lives were not dominated by the church or by traditional rural associations and, if in their village there were some pioneers of the latest lifestyles, then cultural innovations like that of the youth centre movement were rapidly adopted. However, while the appropriation of a progressive lifestyle distinguished the youth centre activists from their parents as well as from the more conservative members of their own generation, they also continued the rural tradition of cultural self-organisation. This tradition went back to the nineteenth century, when the lack of commercial and communal cultural options led to many grass-roots initiatives. Village associations were very successful in establishing a cultural infrastructure, providing a wide range of activities and choices. The youth centre movement in the villages, then, should also be situated in this long-term tradition. Moreover, while it is undeniable that the activists were very much inspired by the urban art houses and communal cinemas, it is also evident that by setting up a youth centre and organising cultural events they weakened the lure of the city for rural adolescents and in that sense paradoxically contributed to the preservation of village life. 190

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Notes   1. Detlef Siegfried, Sound der Revolte: Studien zur Kulturrevolution um 1968 (Weinheim: Juventa, 2008), pp. 251–60.   2. Axel Schildt, ‘Nachwuchs für die Rebellion – die Schülerbewegung der späten 60er Jahre’, in Jürgen Reulecke (ed.), Generationalität und Lebensgeschichte im 20. Jahrhundert (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2003); Axel Schildt, ‘Überbewertet? Zur Macht objektiver Entwicklungen und zur Wirkungslosigkeit der “68er”’, in Udo Wengst (ed.), Reform und Revolte: Politischer und gesellschaftlicher Wandel in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland vor und nach 1968 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2011), pp. 89–102; Torsten Gass-Bolm, ‘Revolution im Klassenzimmer? Die Schülerbewegung 1967–1970 und der Wandel der deutschen Schule’, in Christina von Hodenberg and Detlef Siegfried (eds), Wo ‘1968’ liegt: Reform und Revolte in der Geschichte der Bundesrepublik (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2006), pp. 113–38; Albert ­Herrenknecht, ‘“Kleinstadt 1968” – Die politischen Jugendbewegungen in der Provinz von den 1950er bis 1970er Jahren’, Pro-Regio-Online vol. 5 (2008), pp. 16–46, 71–83, www.proregio-online.de/downloads/klein1968.pdf, accessed 15 April 2014.   3. Friederike Kamann and Eberhard Kögel, Ruhestörung: 25 Jahre Jugendzentrum Stetten in Selbstverwaltung. Erster Teil 1968–1993 (Grafenau: Trotzdem-Verlag, 1993), pp. 44–6; Detlef Siegfried, Time Is on My Side: Konsum und Politik in der westdeutschen Jugendkultur der 60er Jahre (Göttingen: Wallstein-Verlag, 2006), pp. 655–62; David Templin, ‘Jugendzentrumsinitiativen und Konflikte um selbstverwaltete Freizeiträume im Kreis Pinneberg während der 1970er Jahre’, in Zeitgeschichte in Hamburg 2010 (Hamburg: Forschungsstelle für ­Zeitgeschichte, 2011), pp. 71–87.   4. Birgit Marx, ‘Landjugend im Modernisierungsprozess – ein Überblick über 40 Jahre ­Landjugendforschung’, pro regio nos 22/23 (1999), pp. 44–57.   5. Interview with Geo Dehn, 26 March 2013.   6. Albert Herrenknecht, Wolfgang Hätscher and Stefan Koospal, Träume, Hoffnungen, Kämpfe. Ein Lesebuch zur Jugendzentrumsbewegung (Munich: AG-Spak-Publikationen, 1982), p. 117.   7. Siegfried, Time Is on My Side, p. 656; Friederike Kamann and Eberhard Kögel, Ruhestörung: 25 Jahre Jugendzentrum Stetten in Selbstverwaltung. Zweiter Teil: 1976–93 (Grafenau: Trotzdem-Verlag, 1994), pp. 343–413; Albert Herrenknecht, Provinzleben: Aufsätze über ein politisches Neuland (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag Jugend und Politik, 1977), p. 55.   8. Richard Münchmeier, ‘Offenheit – Selbstorganisation – Selbstbestimmung. Die Politisierung reformpädagogischer Traditionen durch die Jugendzentrumsbewegung’, in Meike Sophia Baader and Ulrich Herrmann (eds), 68 - engagierte Jugend und kritische Pädagogik: Impulse und Folgen eines kulturellen Umbruchs in der Geschichte der Bundesrepublik (Weinheim: Juventa 2011), pp. 52–64, here p. 52.   9. Siegfried, Time Is on My Side, pp. 33–50; Gunter Mahlerwein, Aufbruch im Dorf: Strukturwandel im ländlichen Raum Baden-Württembergs nach 1950 (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2007), pp. 119–31. 10. Siegfried, Time Is on My Side, p. 658; ‘Hier sind wir die Herren im Haus’, Bravo, 10 May 1973, pp. 24–7. 11. Klaus Kreimeier, Kino und Filmindustrie in der BRD: Ideologieproduktion und Klassenwirklichkeit nach 1945 (Kronberg: Scriptor Verlag, 1973), p. 205; Werner Troßbach and Clemens Zimmermann, Die Geschichte des Dorfes von den Anfängen im Frankenreich zur bundesdeutschen Gegenwart (Stuttgart: Ulmer, 2006), pp. 228–30; Mahlerwein, Aufbruch im Dorf, p. 204. Alternative Cinema in the Youth Centre Movement in Germany

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12. Ursula von Keitz, ‘Wie “Deutsche Kamerun-Bananen” ins Klassenzimmer kommen’, in Harro Segeberg (ed.), Mediale Mobilmachung 1. Das Dritte Reich und der Film (Munich: Fink, 2004), pp. 71–102; Kate Bowles, ‘The Last Bemboka Picture Show: 16mm Cinema as Rural Community Fundraiser in the 1950s’, in Richard Maltby, Daniel Biltereyst and Philippe Meers (eds), Explorations in New Cinema History. Approaches and Case Studies (Chichester: Blackwell, 2011), pp. 310–19. 13. Keitz, ‘Wie’, p. 80; Markus Köster, ‘Film und Bild als Jugenderzieher. Die Geschichte der Bildstellen in Westfalen (und dem Rheinland) bis 1945’, Geschichte im Westen vol. 25 (2010), pp. 59–87; Holger Twele, Jugend und Film. Entwicklungen – Aufgaben – Praxisbeispiele (Frankfurt am Main: Bundesverband Jugend und Film, 1993), pp. 7–9; Dieter Baacke, Horst Schäfer and Ralf Vollbrecht, Treffpunkt Kino. Daten und Materialien zum Verhältnis von Jugend und Kino (Weinheim: Juventa, 1994), pp. 55–7. 14. Kamann and Kögel, Ruhestörung 1, pp. 54, 71, 77–8; Interview with Frank Schwarz, 23 May 2013; Arbeitsgemeinschaft Provinz-Film-Festival (ed.), Provinz-Film-Katalog (Heidelberg: SPAK AG, 1981), p. 58; Amtsblatt der Verbandsgemeinde Eich, 25 November, 1976. 15. Interview with Frank Schwarz, 23 May 2013; Kamann and Kögel, Ruhestörung 1, pp. 133, 245. 16. Kamann and Kögel, Ruhestörung 1, p. 77; Archiv Verein Jugendhaus Altrhein, Eich; Interview with Frank Schwarz, 23 May 2013; Lexikon der Filmbegriffe, http://filmlexikon.uni-kiel.de/index.php? action=lexikon&tag=det&id=227, accessed 16 April 2014; Erziehung und K ­ lassenkampf, Zeitschrift für Marxistische Pädagogik nos 10–11 (1973), pp. 161–3, www.rockarchiv.infopartisan.net/ zentren/z045.htm, accessed 16 April 2014. 17. Interview with Frank Schwarz, 23 May 2013. 18. Archiv AG Film der Aktion Jugendtreff Guntersblum; Archiv Verein Jugendhaus Altrhein; Archive Jugendhausinitiative Nierstein; Archiv Jugendhausinitiative Alsheim; Allgemeine ­Zeitung Mainz, 18 March 1977, 6 October 1977, 3 November 1977, 5 January 1978, 10 February 1978, 3 May 1978, 10 October 1978, 1 December 1978, 4 January 1979, 17 January 1979, 26 January 1979, 22 March 1979, 4 April 1979, 3 May 1979, 31 May 1979, 10 October 1979; Kamann and Kögel, Ruhestörung 1, pp. 71, 77, 78, 132, 133, 245; Kamann and Kögel, Ruhestörung 2, pp. 419–25, 463. 19. Interview with Frank Schwarz, 23 May 2013. 20. Jugendhaus-Info Nr.1, Archiv Verein Jugendhaus Altrhein; Amtsblatt der Verbandsgemeinde Eich, 2 February 1976. 21. Interview with Frank Schwarz, 23 May 2013; Provinz-Film-Katalog, p. 50. 22. Kamann and Kögel, Ruhestörung 2, p. 419. 23. Kassenbericht 1977, Archiv Verein Jugendhaus Altrhein; Kamann and Kögel, Ruhestörung 2, pp. 319, 320; Provinz-Film-Katalog, p. 60; Interview Frank Schwarz, 23 May 2013; ProvinzFilm-Katalog, pp. 39–41; www.kulturzentrum-linse.de/kulturzentrum-linse-e-v, accessed 18 April 2014; Dietrich-Bonhoeffer-Schule in Lich and Kino-Traumstern-Kollektiv (eds), 70 Jahre Kinogeschichten 1920–1990 (Lich: Selbstverlag, 1990), p. 74. 24. Kamann and Kögel, Ruhestörung 2, pp. 78, 87; Provinz-Film-Katalog, pp. 56–8; Allgemeine Zeitung Mainz, 2 March 1977. 25. Interview with Frank Schwarz, 23 May 2013; Kassenbericht 1977, Archiv Verein Jugendhaus Altrhein. 26. Kamann and Kögel, Ruhestörung 1, pp. 104, 133, 245; Provinz-Film-Katalog, p. 58; Protokoll Eröffnungswoche, Archiv Verein Jugendhaus Altrhein.

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27. Interview with Frank Schwarz, 23 May 2013; Provinz-Film-Katalog, p. 58; Kamann and Kögel, Ruhestörung 1, p. 185; Allgemeine Zeitung Mainz, 22 March 1979. 28. Provinz-Film-Katalog, p. 28. 29. Baacke et al., Treffpunkt Kino, p. 60; Interview with Geo Dehn, 26 March 2013; Interview with Hilde Clauter, 2 May 2013; Interview with Volker Kemmeter, 21 May 2013; Interview with Frank Schwarz, 23 May 2013. 30. Ibid.

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PART IV CONTEMPORARY TRENDS IN H ­ ISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE

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12 Ch no Film Title Education, Technology and Popular Culture: Community Cinema in Rural Areas of the United Kingdom Author Karina Aveyard

This chapter examines the cycles of expansion and contraction of volunteer-led, noncommercial exhibition (community cinema) in regional and rural areas of the UK in the period since World War II. Community cinemas often function to fill gaps in commercial film provision, but are typically about more than simply addressing imbalances in market supply and demand. The discussion here explores the influence and importance of the broader social, cultural and political conditions that have helped encourage, but also constrained, community cinema initiatives across the decades in question. More specifically, the analysis suggests that there have been two distinct phases of community cinema expansion in the UK that have broadly shaped both urban and rural enterprises. While recognising the importance of local factors in determining the characteristics of grass-roots cinemas, it is argued that these periods of growth also need to be understood within the wider context of shifts in national film policy, advances in screening technology and changing sociopolitical attitudes to education, cultural access and rural sustainability. These wider factors have been equally crucial in framing the perceived cultural and social value of film in everyday rural life and, in turn, shaping the different types of cinemas communities have worked to set up in their local area. The history of volunteer-led film exhibition in the UK can be traced back to 1925, when the first film society was established in London. Known simply as the London Film Society, this venture emerged from an alternative film culture scene that was gaining momentum in the city at the time. Scott MacDonald notes that from the outset, the London Film Society offered access to a wide range of innovative, non-mainstream content, such as avant-garde films, scientific and other types of documentaries, and classic silent features, and that these were enthusiastically received by its members.1 Over the next few years, formally constituted film groups were established in a number of other UK cities, including Cambridge, Edinburgh, Manchester and Oxford. The movement was given a further boost in 1937 when the British Federation of Film Societies (BFFS) was formed as an umbrella organisation for this growing area of screen activity.2 While film societies began as a largely urban phenomenon they also became a successful model for community-initiated cinema in small towns, where they often had a role not only in enriching film culture but also bringing screenings to places where there was limited or no access to commercial cinema. Consolidating the work of the 1920s and 1930s film culture pioneers, the film society movement in the UK expanded significantly in the years following World War II. What I have termed ‘first-wave’ community cinemas flourished from the 1950s to

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around the late 1970s. Volunteer-led cinemas at this time were distinguished by their interest in film as an artistic and educational medium, and placed a strong emphasis on screening art cinema, foreign-language, experimental and documentary films. T ­ ypically these kinds of cinemas were constituted as film societies and affiliated with the BFFS, which saw its memberships double from around 250 in the 1950s to reach 500 by the 1960s.3 Unfortunately the majority of the BFFS records from this time have not been archived and there are no comprehensive figures available on the names and locations of these societies or their urban–rural distribution.4 Interviews with BFFS staff and a long-standing board member5 confirm that there was significant film society activity in small towns during this period, particularly in the more isolated areas of Yorkshire, the south-west and Scotland, which, at the time, had its own film society organisation independent of the BFFS. In all three regions communities were scattered and commercial cinemas were largely absent. The need for both a suitable venue (usually a village hall) and a 16mm projector meant that it was often difficult for very small and/or remote rural settlements to set up a local screening initiative. Hence, non-metropolitan film societies at this time tended to be found predominantly in substantive small towns. There was also community film screening activity occurring during this period outside the BFFS umbrella, although again the lack of records makes this difficult to trace precisely. A report on support for the arts in England and Wales compiled in 1976 by Lord Redcliffe-Maud provides some indication – in the mid-1970s it found there were over fifty-nine regionally located councils providing community film shows without external assistance.6 However, by the early 1980s, the number of film societies across the UK had begun to fall, and this has been attributed at least in part to the decline in the manufacture and availability of 16mm prints and the greater availability of non-mainstream film following the arrival of home video and the launch of specialised movie channel Film4.7 In the late 1990s, the appearance of inexpensive and easy-to-use DVD (and later Bluray) exhibition technologies helped underpin a sustained ‘second-wave’ resurgence in community cinema that has been particularly prominent in regional and rural areas. However, rather than pursuing the ideals of high culture and aspirations of selfimprovement, these more contemporary volunteer-led enterprises have been notable for their embrace of popular film and emphasis on widening social engagement and fostering inclusion, rather than on education. Community cinemas are differentiated from other forms of film exhibition by their cooperative management structures, dependence on a volunteer workforce and notfor-profit financial status.8 Consequently, these initiatives tend to be small-scale and aesthetically diverse, heavily influenced by the resources available within the particular places in which they operate and the personalities of the unpaid workers who devote their time to organising the group’s events. Volunteer-led cinemas are organised under a variety of operating structures that can range from formally constituted film societies through to village hall committees, charities and unincorporated associations.9 While they share many similarities, the distinction between film societies and other types of volunteer-led cinema is historically significant in terms of the aims and purposes of these differently constituted groups. As this chapter highlights, film societies provided the preferred model for much of the first-wave volunteer cinemas, while a more open and less prescribed approach has tended to characterise more recent activity. 198

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Film societies generally operate as closed, member-only groups, although members are usually permitted to bring paying guests. Members pay an annual subscription that covers entry to all films on the society’s programme. This approach enables the group to be reasonably certain of its yearly income at the outset of the season, which in turn allows the management committee to budget and plan events with greater confidence. Outside the film society model, most community cinemas tend to make themselves open to the general public, although some offer optional memberships usually based around the incentive of discounted tickets as a way of improving financial stability. Community cinemas of all types are generally very keen to attract new members, so that while formal film societies may seem restrictive or closed in the way in which they are administered, these groups should not necessarily be perceived as thereby unwelcoming.10 THEORISING COMMUNITY CINEMA One of the most significant shifts to have taken place in cinema scholarship over the past decade or so has been the interest that has developed in aspects of the moviegoing experience that lie beyond the screen and outside the theatre.11 Looking beyond textual content and its reception, researchers are becoming increasingly engaged with the institutional and geographic frameworks that control the film-viewing experience and the wider sociocultural situation of the audience.12 However, this turn in critical studies is yet to give sustained attention to the role of community cinemas in facilitating a distinctive form of public film consumption. This neglect gives rise to a rather interesting paradox in relation to the study of art cinema and other types of niche titles favoured by both film societies and specialist/ independent commercial exhibitors. While textual and reception studies have tended to prioritise the analysis of art cinema over popular or blockbuster movies, researchers have remained largely disengaged from the contexts in which these films are viewed, particularly with regard to rural locations. Those who have taken an interest in art cinema exhibition, including Janna Jones, Melanie Selfe, Ailsa Hollinshead, Liz Evans and Barbara Wilinsky, highlight the importance of cultural distinction in the public consumption of alternative films in metropolitan locations.13 They demonstrate how engagement with a perceived ‘high’ cultural product influences the type of audiences that seek out this experience – or not, in the case of Hollingshead’s work. However, most of what has been written about specialised film viewing focuses on interactions in metropolitan-based commercial movie theatres rather than those taking place within the expansive network of volunteer-led societies and community groups. Also, little attention has been given to variation in small towns and rural areas. This is despite the fact that grass-roots cinema has been acknowledged as playing a crucial role in the development of twentieth-century film culture in the UK and Europe.14 It is significant that the two most significant periods for the expansion of volunteer-led film initiatives since World War II have occurred largely out of step with mainstream cinemagoing developments. Between the 1950s and 1970s film societies flourished while commercial attendances plummeted and cinemas closed across the UK.15 Since the early 2000s volunteer groups have again been growing, despite Film Education, Technology and Popular Culture

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fluctuating cinema admissions and the fact that it has never been easier to access and watch films outside movie theatres. The recent increases are evident from the annual community cinema activity surveys conducted by the BFFS. When the surveys began in 2005/6 the BFFS was mailing to a list of 246 members, 42 per cent of which were in rural areas. For its most recent report (2012/13) the BFFS surveyed over double this number – 638 organisations (members and affiliates) of which 38 per cent were located in rural areas.16 These counter-trends in grass-roots activity raise fundamental questions about what initiates and sustains community cinemas, particularly about whether their primary purpose is simply to fill market gaps. The two key periods of growth identified in this chapter can be understood at least in part as responses to the liberating development of small-scale, inexpensive projection equipment (16mm and later DVD/Blu-ray). However, enthusiasm for community cinema cannot be accounted for solely in terms of the opportunities created by advancements in technology. The organisation of regular film screenings is demanding work, requiring significant investments of time without the enticement of personal financial reward. The people who commit themselves to such enterprises create sites of consumption where commercial imperatives are set aside in favour of ideals focused variously around education, cultural enrichment, social cohesion and community advancement. The rationale for the shifting prioritisation and articulation of these ideals over the past sixty years or so becomes clearer when placed in the context of concurrent national, social, cultural and political events. FIRST-WAVE COMMUNITY CINEMAS The decades immediately following World War II have been characterised as a ‘golden age’ for film societies and film culture more broadly.17 Technical advancements in 16mm film made during the war had led to the development of a quality format that now provided a practical alternative to 35mm. As a shooting gauge, 16mm was increasingly favoured by specialised and experimental film-makers. As a projection format, it was more economical than 35mm and became popular with non-commercial screening groups with limited financial resources, such as film societies, public libraries, colleges and universities.18 Of particular significance for film societies was that 16mm removed the need to run screenings in commercial cinemas, which most had been restricted to doing up until that point. The shift out of the movie theatre enabled many groups to lower their operating costs and helped make the film society model viable for groups with smaller memberships. This was especially beneficial for communities in small towns where scale and cost had been significant barriers to organising their own screenings. Community cinema at this time was also encouraged and supported by two key public organisations established just before the start of the war – the British Film Institute (BFI), formed in 1933, and the BFFS, four years later. From the outset, the BFI saw itself as having an important role in promoting film as an art form and raising awareness of its educational potential.19 The BFFS shared similar ideals, but pursued these with the more specific purpose of promoting and representing the film society movement. The BFFS provided a formalised structure for volunteer-led exhibition in 200

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the UK and helped to further legitimise this area of non-commercial exhibition. In ­partnership the BFI and BFFS sought to encourage the establishment of new ­societies by publishing material with practical information about establishing and operating a film group. This included three editions of the booklet Forming and Running a Film ­Society. Additionally, in 1945 the BFFS established a non-theatrical distribution arm, the Central Booking Agency. This initiative was designed to assist film societies in accessing non-mainstream films, something that had become highly problematic in the years immediately following the end of the war due to shortages of prints. H ­ owever, while well intentioned, the Central Booking Agency was soon beset by problems of its own with film societies critical of the high prices it charged for film hire, which made the service impractical for many small groups to use.20 All film societies affiliated with the BFFS, whether rural or urban, or large or small, were mandated to pursue the same core objectives. These centred principally on the aims of teaching audiences to appreciate and understand (and eventually develop a preference for) non-mainstream films. The Forming and Running a Film Society guide explicitly articulated the rationale for volunteer-led film groups in this period: 1. To encourage interest in the film as an art and as a medium of information and education by means of the exhibition of films of a scientific, educational, cultural and artistic character. 2. To promote the study and appreciation of films by means of lectures, discussions and exhibitions.21

The BFFS-BFI guide goes on to make it very clear that the purpose of film societies at this time was not just about screening films and providing opportunities for people to watch and enjoy them: A society should never feel that when it has achieved the screening of good films under good conditions it has completed its job. There is a great deal more that it could and should do. One of the main objects of a society, according to its constitution, is the encouragement of an intelligent, informed and discriminatory attitude towards film as an art.22

These aspirations of education and appreciation had their origins in the alternative film culture movement that had gained momentum over the first half of the twentieth century both in the UK and elsewhere.23 This movement defined itself as very much against the mainstream and tended to be highly dismissive of popular movies and the undiscriminating masses that paid to view them. Prior to World War II such debates about the artistic and educational qualities of film tended to circulate within relatively privileged cultural and social circles. However, in the post-war years, interest in the cultural elevation of film was to attract a wider network of supporters. A left-wing Labour government was elected in the UK in 1945 with a mandate for enacting significant social and economic change. The Labour Party pledged to foster greater social equality and was interested in increasing political awareness and participation.24 As part of a general commitment to ‘raising up’ the working and poorer classes, education and access to knowledge and culture were seen as important means of self-improvement.25 Film offered an attractive conduit for engaging and teaching the Film Education, Technology and Popular Culture

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perceived lower classes. Cinema was already a mass entertainment that attracted large audiences on a regular basis. However, the problem was that the movies to which they were attracted were deemed to be of little value by cultural elites. The goal then was to redirect this enthusiasm for cinemagoing towards more worthy films and in doing so raise the status of both the medium and its patrons.26 Within this context Richard MacDonald cites the publication of Robert Manvell’s book Film (1944) as an important moment in the development of UK post-war film culture and film societies more specifically.27 The book was released as an affordable sixpenny Pelican, the educational imprint of the then relatively new budget paperback publisher Penguin Books. It sold over 500,000 copies, which helped to ‘disseminate film appreciation ideas widely’.28 Film comprised sections on film history and offered advice on understanding various narrative and aesthetic techniques. The final part of the book was devoted to advice for the reader on how to start a film society, something the BFI and BFFS would later build upon with their own Forming and Running a Film Society publications. MacDonald argues that one of the key factors that set Manvell apart from earlier writers on film (such as Rudolf Arnheim with Film in 1933) was his more optimistic and egalitarian views about how film appreciation could be encouraged.29 Unlike Arnheim, who believed it took years of training to learn to understand film properly, Manvell suggested that audiences could be taught to appreciate films without necessarily needing to become experts in order to do so.30 However, while Manvell may have been less rigid than some of his theoretical predecessors, he nevertheless demonstrated a similarly paternalistic attitude towards the audiences he was interested in reforming. His book was undoubtedly influential in encouraging the film society movement, but its tone and address suggest it was a publication aimed more at readers attracted to the idea of being educators than those identified as being in need of education. For example, at the outset of the book Manvell likens the challenges of film education to that of reading, and in doing so clearly distances the readers of his book from those ‘others’ judged as requiring improvement: ‘To teach a man to read is to give him a skill to use for his good, but this is not the same thing as to teach him to distinguish through his reading what is good for him.’31 Such distinctions are reinforced in the conclusion of the book where Manvell articulates his ‘positive’ vision of the future: The younger public, gradually joining the adult world with better instruction from their schools, need not be regarded any longer as a potential cross-section of low life. Political and social thought, however primitive and unguided, is developing.32

While Manvell and other film culture enthusiasts of this period professed to be interested in reaching and persuading mainstream audiences to see the error of their ways, it is not clear whether they were terribly effective on a wide scale. While commercial cinema admissions were falling during this period, even at their lowest point this sector continued to eclipse activity within the non-commercial sphere. Film societies were at least partially successful in attracting people from a range of backgrounds; however, it was also the case that their memberships tended to be drawn from those already receptive to their broad ideologies.33 MacDonald contends that people tended to join film societies because they identified with the aspirations of cultural improvement and 202

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the purposeful recreation that it provided.34 Certainly, publications like Manvell’s Film and the work of the BFFS and BFI spoke to the aspirations of these sections of society. While not specifically aimed at rural populations, these guides were clearly keen to engage a broad readership, not just urban elites. Manvell’s guide, for example, makes references to ‘towns’ rather than cities, and asserts ‘A well-organised Film Society is … a definite addition to the social life of any community.’35 Further, it goes on to advise small groups to work with the ‘local town library’ in order to expand their film ­collections.36 Further complicating the historical narrative of the film society movement is evidence that suggests these groups did not always operate as committed networks of people deeply devoted to art, education and self-improvement. In the Forming and Running a Film Society guides, societies are directed to provide written notes for every film screening they ran and arrange lectures and/or discussion groups. Provision of these resources is explicitly identified in the booklets as being crucial to realising the film society’s learning-orientated goals. However, they also warn new community groups to expect only a small proportion of members to actually attend the supplementary educational events.37 Similar tensions between educational aspirations and attracting audiences are highlighted in an essay penned in 1950 by Gerald Cockshott, credited as founder of the Norwich and Sussex Film Societies, and included in the first edition of Forming and Running a Film Society. The essay includes some first-hand advice for new groups about getting started: It would be better not to suggest on your circular that you are founding an educational organisation: if you do, everyone will immediately think of the dullest documentary he has ever seen … . If you say you intend to show good films, everyone will think he is going to see the sort of picture he already likes. He may be surprised by what you show him, but that does not mean he will be disappointed.38

And for the opening-night programme Cockshott went on to advise: You should show a feature – a programme made up entirely of documentaries will strike most people as something of an ordeal – and choose a comedy if possible … . Of course I do not mean that you should begin by showing anything that is beneath the artistic standard that you propose to maintain.39

These indicate a real resistance to the educating zeal of film societies, even among those interested enough to join and attend screenings. This uneasy balance between education and entertainment is further illustrated in a promotional film from the period (1956) made by the Ipswich Film Society, which mocks the lofty instructive aspirations associated with these kinds of film groups in its bid to attract members.40 Collectively, these historical artefacts suggest that many members may have liked the idea of being educated more than they embraced the reality of it. The popularity of film societies in the decades following World War II indicates that these organisations encapsulated ideals that resonated with many people and were integrally connected with the rhetoric of the age. However, at the same time, the partial or selective active engagement among its broad membership base suggests Film Education, Technology and Popular Culture

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that these ideals may have been more important, at least for some, at an intellectual level than as a lived practice. What is perhaps most notable about the more recent ­second-wave community cinemas, which we turn to in the next section, is their departure from the pursuit of education and appreciation. There is little evidence to suggest that this has occurred as a direct response to the perceived shortcomings of the film society model or driven by a conscious desire to do differently. However, this shift can be conceptualised as part of changing attitudes to leisure, individual and community responsibility and, in the case of volunteer-led cinema in non-urban locations, new approaches to rural sustainability. SECOND-WAVE COMMUNITY CINEMA The current period of community cinema expansion has its origins in the late 1990s/ early 2000s. As outlined above, the BFFS began formally tracking screening activity in the non-commercial sector in the mid-2000s and over that time has seen the size of its survey increase by over 150 per cent. BFFS figures indicate that small-town and rural community cinemas have grown from just over a 100 in 2005/6 to almost 250 in 2012/13.41 This second wave of activity has also been assisted by technology – this time the launch of DVD and the development of good-quality audiovisual screening systems based on this format that were cheap and relatively easy to use. BFFS data indicates that the DVD/Blu-ray is now favoured by the vast majority of community cinemas, with most recent survey (2012/13) revealing that 83 per cent of respondents ‘usually’ use one of these as their screening format.42 A second key factor in the resurgence of community cinema has been the growth and simplification of the non-theatrical distribution market in the UK. The BFFS continues to rent films to volunteer groups through its rebranded Booking Scheme,43 although the organisation’s surveys suggest this service is not used particularly widely by its members.44 Far more popular are non-theatrical distributors like Filmbank and Dorset Moviola that specialise in renting screening copies of films on DVD and Blu-ray at very competitive prices.45 These companies collate titles from a range of commercial distributors and organise them into user-friendly catalogues designed specifically to help simplify the work of film programming for volunteer groups. In addition, Dorset Moviola offers reduced fees to groups that use their own discs. Under this arrangement the cinema group buys its own DVD/Blu-ray copy of the film from a retail outlet and simply makes a licence payment to Moviola in order to exhibit it. The latter is a popular option as it means the group can run their screening from a disc they know is in mint condition and saves on postage and handling costs. The most recent survey of community cinema in the UK identified 638 active volunteer-led enterprises operating across the country – a significantly higher figure than the 500 or so recorded at the peak of 1960s activity.46 The majority of these current groups are also relatively new, with the same BFFS survey revealing that 61 per cent of responding organisations had been formed since 2000.47 In terms of regional distribution, there are some very similar patterns to those noted in the 1950s–1970s. The south-west, Scotland and Yorkshire are still among the highest areas for BFFS membership, together accounting for 46 per cent of the total number of UK groups.48 204

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While community cinema is enjoying a revival, the way in which many contemporary communities structure and run their screening initiatives is quite different to the approach of many first-wave film groups. Traditional film societies, with the goal of promoting film appreciation and education, still operate in significant numbers, but this is no longer the dominant model for volunteer cinema. More common are groups that seek to organise screening events in order to facilitate social interaction and foster community cohesion by providing opportunities for people to get together in welcoming and informal public spaces. In order to realise these goals, community groups typically aim for broad appeal with their film programming with an emphasis on mainstream movies that have already proved successful at commercial cinemas, such as The King’s Speech (2010), Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2011), Saving Mr Banks (2013) and The Great Gatsby (2013). Films with excessive sex or violence that might risk discouraging or offending local patrons are generally avoided. Activities centred explicitly on film education and appreciation are notably absent. The fundamental nature of this shift in the characteristics of community cinema in the UK is underlined by the changing face of the BFFS, which has survived by ­reinventing itself as an organisation representing all volunteer cinemas, not just ­formally constituted film societies. It articulates a much more open approach to community cinema with the emphasis on self-determination and local devolution as ­indicated in its current mission statement: The British Federation of Film Societies (BFFS) is the national support and development organisation for the film society and community cinema movement. Established in its current form in 1946, we enable communities across the country to develop the type of film screenings they want and can sustain. [emphasis mine]49

The BFFS maintains a distinction between ‘Members’ who follow its Charitable Objectives (largely traditional film societies) and ‘Associates’ (other types of not-for-profit volunteer cinema not bound to pursuing the Objectives), although both types of groups are offered very similar levels of support and advice.50 The reconfiguration of the BFFS can be understood perhaps more as a response to shifts taking place at a grass-roots level than as a key driver of change in itself, and its wider social and political context is important to consider. While first-wave community cinemas were heavily influenced by left-wing ideals of democracy, social equality and strong state support, political rhetoric since the election of Conservative leader Margaret Thatcher (beginning in the late 1970s) has leant more towards the promotion of individual responsibility and a minimalist role for government. In rural areas particularly this has given rise to a transformation in the way socially and economically disadvantaged towns and villages are supported by the state. During the 1950s and 1960s rural policy tended to be framed centrally. It was bestowed on communities rather than developed with them, which was not always successful. Since that time there has been more interest in consultation and community partnerships and an emphasis on selfhelp and empowerment of towns and villages from within. However, this has come at a cost with these new approaches typically relying heavily on local investment of money and resources on the part of already disadvantaged communities while seeking to minimise the provision of direct government support.51 Film Education, Technology and Popular Culture

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Second-wave community cinemas embody many of the ideals of the current policy framework of local responsibility and proactive intervention. Volunteer film groups and their supporters often frame their activities as direct and positive responses to the everyday adversity of their rural situation. One such example is Village Screen, a publicly funded programme that promotes community screenings in rural Norfolk. The scheme was launched in 2005 and is administered by arts-based charity Creative Arts East. It has a network of forty community groups spread across the county, which it supports through the rental of portable DVD-projection kits to facilitate screenings and the provision of advice. Village Screen was explicitly established to assist rather than run volunteer cinemas. It encourages individual communities to tailor events to the needs and interests of local residents, and requires them to take responsibility for the administration and management of their enterprise. This approach is explained on the Village Screen website: [About Village Screen] Volunteer promoting groups get together to screen the latest blockbuster or a timeless classic in the comfort of their local village hall or community centre. Since 2005, Village Screen has become a vibrant and growing network of voluntary groups organising screenings for and with rural communities across Norfolk. Film events create opportunities for neighbours to meet, socialise and renew bonds. Less travel and lower cost make this the obvious choice for many rural residents.52

As this quote illustrates, the emphasis is very much on leaving communities to do their own thing, but providing support where necessary. Village Screen does not pressure community groups to screen particular types of films and there is very little of what might be described as art cinema on any of the programmes of the member cinemas. Further, it is significant that the value of these enterprises is constructed very much in terms of what they contribute to their local town or village rather than grander visions of learning or self-improvement. The success of Village Screen can be attributed to the fact it addresses three key issues: the absence of local cinema facilities, the problem of meeting start-up capital requirements and leadership. First, with only a handful of commercial cinemas operating in rural Norfolk, many people lived in places that did not have access to film screenings before the start of Village Screen and this provides a clear mandate for the programme. Second, Village Screen is able to supply community groups with projection and sound equipment, as well as training and advice in its use. This significantly reduces the amount of start-up capital required for individual groups, and makes participation in the scheme feasible for a greater number of communities. Village Screen began with two mobile DVD screening units and has recently acquired a third. Communities are trained in how to assemble and operate the equipment, and pay a modest hire fee of £15 plus VAT each time they use it. The relatively compact geography of England makes it feasible to service a relatively large number of enterprises with only three screening kits. The group hiring the equipment is responsible for its return to Creative Arts East or for passing it on to the next venue. With distances of perhaps only 10–20 miles involved, it is not uncommon for the kits to be used in two or three locations over a single weekend. By accessing public funding, a number of cinemas in the Village Screen network have been able to become more independent by securing grants to purchase their own equipment, including the two groups I visited at North Creake and Wells-next-the-Sea.53 Third, in terms of 206

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Preparations for a Village Screen Promoters Evening, Castle Acre (Norfolk) (Photo by the author, May 2011)

leadership Village Screen’s full-time manager Alice Morelli advertises and promotes the programme across Norfolk, and closely supports communities through the development process to their first screenings. It is notable that in many of the Village Screen cinemas I have visited Ms Morelli has teamed up with local residents who are relative newcomers to the town or village, typically retirees from London who have often held senior civil service and industry jobs and bring a great deal of confidence and skill to the task of setting up their community enterprise. However, this can sometimes alienate long-term residents and contribute to the perception that the cinema is overly cultured or pretentious. As part of the establishment process, Ms Morelli has found that targeting communities with pre-existing volunteer networks can be a particularly successful strategy. There are numerous village halls throughout rural Norfolk and Suffolk managed by volunteer committees and used for a range of purposes from high-school drama performances through to yoga and adult education classes. For example, the hall at North Creake (one of the Village Screen network cinemas) hosts presentations by the local gardening club, historical society and drama group. Each of these groups has its own board, while the hall itself is managed by a separate committee. It was this hall committee that formed a subgroup to establish the cinema in partnership with Ms Morelli. With these kinds of structures and people in place, film groups can often be established relatively quickly. In towns where the enterprise is starting out without these pre-existing community organisations, the process can take considerably longer. The Gorleston community cinema, which operates from the local library, took more than a year to bring to fruition – largely due to the work involved in forming a committee and enlisting the required quorum of volunteers.54 Village Screen cinemas tend to attract mature audiences, predominantly an over-fifties age group, and the typical screening frequency is once a month. Some cinemas elect to close over December and January when it is often bitterly cold and aged village halls can be hard to heat effectively. Members of committees at Village Screen cinemas in North Creake, Tittleshall and Wells-next-the-Sea find their patrons are drawn both from within and from areas beyond their immediate village. Wendy Seale, a committee member from Tittleshall says ‘incomers’ (those outside the village) are very important to their enterprise, and as a result they advertise events over a relatively wide geographic area.55 All three groups also report attracting people from larger towns, including some that have local commercial cinemas. In these cases, they find patrons are coming to them seeking a more socially intimate setting, as the following comment by a patron at the Wells cinema indicates: Oh what joy when last year I discovered Screen-next-the-Sea – the people in Wells not only have a theatre they now have a wonderful community cinema that I have frequented on many occasions. I just adore the intimacy of Screen-next-the-Sea, the introduction just before the film, the trailers; everything about it makes it a very professional and slick operation. It’s a small cinema with a big heart, and it can only get better – it’s a delightful, intimate, friendly, enchanting cinema.56

While the Village Screen cinemas do well in catering to the older rural audience, they have generally not been successful in engaging younger patrons and families. Wendy Seale from the Tittleshall community cinema believes this is partly the result of geography. The relatively short distances between towns make it feasible for families and young adults to travel 208

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Community hall The Maltings, Wells-next-the-Sea (Norfolk) (Photo by the author, April 2011)

to commercial cinemas to see films when they are first released. For these age groups, seeing a film in a local setting is often not as important as seeing it when it first hits the market.57 Collectively, the Village Screen network represents a vital and vibrant area of exhibition activity. This scheme encourages and supports spaces for film consumption where commercial imperatives are set aside in favour of ideals centred on cultural and social enrichment and community advancement. Importantly it is left to local communities to decide what form these take. While this is not always a process that engages the entire community, it is the self-determination that marks out these kinds of cinemas from the more rigid first-wave film society model. CONCLUSION This relatively brief survey of community cinema activity in the UK since the 1950s has emphasised the importance of wider sociocultural, political and economic forces in influencing the characteristics of screening enterprises at an individualised level. In particular it has focused on the role of organisations and infrastructure, technology and shifting sociopolitical ideologies as key focus points for contextualising UK volunteer-led cinema development. This approach to analysis has aimed to provide some broader context for rural exhibition and builds on the significant body of research that helped establish this field of inquiry through case studies and more localised studies.58 It is noteworthy that the research in this chapter emerged from research that did not initially have a national Film Education, Technology and Popular Culture

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focus, but from a series of micro-investigations including a close study of Village Screen. It was from this small-scale work that various patterns of activity were revealed, which in turn led on to broader analysis of the distinct cycles of post-World War II community cinema activity that have taken place in the UK. From a methodological perspective, this underscores the importance of considering the macro and the micro as complimentary rather than exclusionary ways of doing rural cinema research. Notes   1. Scott MacDonald, ‘Cinema 16: Documents toward a History of the Film Society’, Wide Angle vol. 19 no. 1 (1997), p. 7.   2. British Federation of Film Societies, History of the BFFS, 2014, www.bffs.org.uk/aboutus /aboutus/history.html, accessed 5 June 2014; Stuart Hanson, From Silent Screen to Multiscreen: A History of Cinema Exhibition in Britain since 1896 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), pp. 49–50.   3. British Federation of Film Societies, History of the BFFS.   4. Archived records of the British Federation of Film Societies are held in the UK National Archives in a special collection at the British Film Institute. However, these collections are relatively small and contain little information about the day-to-day activities of the BFFS during the 1950s–1970s.   5. Peter Cargin, Vice President of the British Federation of Film Societies, interviewed 18 July 2014; Jacqueline Chell, Operations and Development Manager, Cinema for All (British Federation of Film Societies), interviewed 11 July 2014.   6. Lord Redcliffe-Maud, Support for the Arts in England and Wales: A Report to the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation (London: Gulbenkian Foundation, 1976).   7. British Federation of Film Societies, History of the BFFS.   8. British Federation of Film Societies, ‘About Us’, www.bffs.org.uk/aboutus/, accessed 5 June 2014.   9. Karina Aveyard, Lure of the Big Screen: Cinema in Rural Australia and the United Kingdom ­(Bristol and Chicago, IL: Intellect, 2015). 10. Ibid. 11. Gregory A. Waller, ‘Robert Southard and the History of Travelling Film Exhibition’, Film Quarterly vol. 5 no. 2 (2003–4), p. 13. 12. Richard Maltby, Daniel Biltereyst and Philippe Meers (eds), Explorations in New Cinema History: Approaches and Case Studies (Oxford: Blackwell, 2011); Kathryn Fuller-Seeley (ed.), Hollywood in the Neighborhood: Historical Case Studies of Local Moviegoing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008). 13. Barbara Wilinsky, Sure Seaters: The Emergence of Art House Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001); Janna Jones, ‘Finding a Place at the Downtown Picture Palace: The Tampa Theater, Florida’, in Marc Shiel and Tony Fitzmaurice (eds), Cinema and the City: Film and Urban Societies in a Global Context (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), pp. 122–33; Melanie Selfe, ‘“Doing the Work of the NFT in Nottingham” – or How to Use the BFI to Beat the Communist Threat in Your Local Film Society’, Journal of British Cinema and Television vol. 4 no. 1 (2007), pp. 80–101; Elizabeth Evans, ‘Superman vs Shrödinger’s Cat: Taste, Etiquette and Independent Cinema Audiences as Indirect Communities’, Participations: Journal of Audience and Reception Studies vol. 8 no 2 (2011), pp. 327–49; Ailsa Hollinshead, ‘“And I Felt Quite Posh!” Art-house Cinema and the Absent Audience – the Exclusions of Choice’, Participations: Journal of Audience and Reception Studies vol. 8 no. 2 (2011), pp. 392–415. 210

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14. Jamie Sexton, Alternative Film Culture in Inter-war Britain (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2009); Stuart Cunningham and William D. Routt (1989), ‘Fillums Became Films ­(1940–1956)’, in Ina Bertrand (ed.), Cinema in Australia: A Documentary History (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2008), pp. 179–87; Mahlerwein, this volume; Jernudd and Lundmark, this volume. 15. Hanson, From Silent Screen to Multi-screen, pp. 92–4. 16. British Federation of Film Societies (2006), British Federation of Film Societies: 2005/06 ­Membership Survey, http://bffs.org.uk/export/sites/bffs_site/pdffolder/Survey_Report_2005 -06.pdf, accessed 8 July 2014; British Federation of Film Societies (2013), British Federation of Film Societies: Community Exhibitor Survey 2012/13, http://bffs.org.uk/export/sites/bffs_site /pdffolder/BFFS_Community_Exhibitor_Survey_Report_2013.pdf, accessed 8 July 2014. 17. Richard MacDonald, ‘The Vanguard of Film Appreciation: The Film Society Movement and Film Culture, 1945–1965’, in Geoffrey Nowell-Smith and Christopher Dupin (eds), The British Film Institute, the Government and Film Culture, 1933–2000 (Manchester: Manchester University Press), p. 87. 18. British Federation of Film Societies, History of the BFFS. 19. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, ‘Foundation and Early Years’, in Nowell-Smith and Dupin, The British Film Institute, pp. 15–19. 20. MacDonald, ‘The Vanguard of Film Appreciation’, p. 92. 21. Federation of Film Societies and the British Film Institute, Forming and Running a Film Society (3rd edn) (London, 1961), p. 5. 22. Ibid., p. 16. 23. Cunningham and Rout, ‘Fillums Became Films’; James Donald, Anne Friedberg and Laura Marcus, Close Up 1927–1933: Cinema and Modernism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998); Garth Jowett, Film: The Democratic Art (Boston, MA: Little Brown, 1976); Sexton, Alternative Film Culture in Inter-war Britain. 24. David Child, Britain since 1945: A Political History (Oxford and New York: R ­ outledge, 2006), pp. 10–27. 25. MacDonald, ‘The Vanguard of Film Appreciation’, p. 87. 26. Ibid., p. 88. 27. Roger Manvell, Film (London: Pelican Books, 1944). 28. Ibid., p. 87. 29. Rudolf Arnheim, Film (London: Faber & Faber, 1933). 30. Richard MacDonald, ‘Film Appreciation and the Postwar Film Society Movement’, ­unpublished PhD thesis, Goldsmiths, University of London (2010), pp. 271–2. 31. Manvell, Film, p. 11. 32. Ibid., p. 166. 33. Hanson, From Silent Screen to Multi-screen, pp. 92–4. 34. MacDonald, ‘The Vanguard of Film Appreciation’, p. 88. 35. Manvell, Film, p. 170. 36. Ibid., p. 171. 37. Federation of Film Societies and the British Film Institute, Forming and Running a Film S­ ociety, p. 16. 38. Gerald Cockshott (1950), ‘An Informal Essay’, in Federation of Film Societies and the British Film Institute, Forming and Running a Film Society (1st edn) (London, 1961), p. 19. 39. Ibid., p. 20. 40. This four-minute promotional film is freely available from the East Anglian Film Archive, www.eafa.org.uk/catalogue/826, accessed 14 July 2014. Film Education, Technology and Popular Culture

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41. British Federation of Film Societies (2006), British Federation of Film Societies: 2005/06 Membership Survey, pp. 7 and 14; British Federation of Film Societies (2013), British Federation of Film Societies: Community Exhibitor Survey 2012/13, http://bffs.org.uk/export/sites/bffs_site/pdffolder/BFFS _Community_Exhibitor_Survey_Report_2013.pdf, accessed 8 July 2014, pp. 5 and 15. 42. British Federation of Film Societies (2013), Community Exhibitor Survey 2012/13, http://bffs.org .uk/export/sites/bffs_site/pdffolder/BFFS_Community_Exhibitor_Survey_Report_2013.pdf, accessed 5 June 2014, p. 14. 43. British Federation of Film Societies (2014), ‘BFFS Booking Scheme’, www.bffs.org.uk/services/blockbooking/, accessed 6 June 2014. 44. British Federation of Film Societies (2013), Community Exhibitor Survey 2012/13, http://bffs.org .uk/export/sites/bffs_site/pdffolder/BFFS_Community_Exhibitor_Survey_Report_2013.pdf, accessed 5 June 2014, pp. 15–16. 45. Filmbank, www.filmbank.co.uk/, accessed 19 September 2016; Dorset Moviola, www.moviola .org/, accessed 19 September 2016. 46. British Federation of Film Societies (2013), Community Exhibitor Survey 2012/13, http://bffs .org.uk/export/sites/bffs_site/pdffolder/BFFS_Community_Exhibitor_Survey_Report _2013.pdf, accessed 5 June 2014, p. 5. 47. Ibid. 48. British Federation of Film Societies, Community Exhibitor Survey 2012/13. 49. British Federation of Film Societies, ‘About Us’, www.bffs.org.uk/aboutus/, accessed 6 June 2014. 50. British Federation of Film Societies, ‘Charitable Objectives’, http://bffs.org.uk/membership /charitableobjectives.html, accessed 6 June 2014. 51. Peter Kenyon and Alan Black, Small Town Renewal Overview and Case Studies (Canberra: Rural Industries Research and Development Corporation, 2001); UK Government (2014), ‘Rural Development Programme for England’, www.gov.uk/rural-development-programme-for-england, accessed 5 June 2014; Department of Agriculture and Rural Development (2014), ‘Rural Development’, www.dardni.gov.uk/index/rural-development.htm, accessed 5 June 2014. 52. Creative Arts East (2014), ‘About Village Screen’, www.creativeartseast.co.uk/village screen/, accessed 9 June 2014. 53. North Creake received funding from the Norfolk Community Foundation to purchase equipment including a 4x3-metre screen and digital projector. Wells-next-the-Sea received grants from local organisations Wells Lions and Wells Carnival and from national schemes the UK Lotteries and the O2 Its Your Community to purchase its screening kit (Paul Heron and Peter Phillips interview, 25 March 2011; David Saunders interview, 11 April 2011). 54. Morelli interview, 18 May 2011. 55. Wendy Seale, President of Tittleshall Village Hall Cinema, Norfolk, interviewed 24 May 2011. 56. M. Dumont quoted in David Saunders (2010), ‘Chairman’s Blog’, www.wells-cinema.com /SntS2/Blog.html, accessed 10 September 2011. 57. Seale interview, 24 May 2011. 58. For example, Robert Allen, ‘Relocating American Film History: The “Problem” of the Empirical’, Cultural Studies vol. 20 no. 1 (2006), pp. 48–88; Kate Bowles, ‘The Last Bemboka Picture Show: 16mm Cinema as Community Fundraiser in the 1950s’, in Maltby et al., Explorations in New Cinema History, pp. 310–21; Kate Bowles, ‘“All the Evidence Is That Cobargo Is S­ lipping”: An Ecological Approach to Rural Cinema-going’, Film Studies vol. 10 (2007), pp. 87–96; Fuller-Seeley, Hollywood in the Neighborhood.

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13 Ch no Le Pestel in Die (Drôme): Quality Cinema in a Semi-Rural Title ­Setting Author Kristian Feigelson

Over the past decades, cinemagoing in France has become once again a predominantly urban leisure activity, concentrated in agglomerations of more than 100,000 inhabitants.1 While about half of the French population still lives today in municipalities with less than 10,000 inhabitants only a minimal fraction of these small towns and villages has a cinema (2.8 per cent in 2013). In terms of attendance, the smaller communes represent only 15 per cent of the total tickets sold, that is, slightly fewer than 29 million admissions in 2013. If we single out the strictly rural zones, this number is as low as 1.3 per cent or around 2.6 million admissions. Given these figures, it comes as no surprise that rural film culture is often associated with a kind of ‘desertification’ – a lack of audience as much as cinemas, especially when compared with the immediate post-war era in which cinemagoing in the countryside boomed. As a matter of fact, the number of municipalities with at least one movie theatre has decreased by 60 per cent since 1960. In 2013, France counted 2,025 cinemas and 5,587 screens for a total of 36,568 municipalities. The majority of these venues (57.6 per cent in 2013) have only one screen, including 650 art-house cinemas.2 There is little doubt that the current economic and cultural geography of ­cinemagoing in France reflects the profound sociodemographic changes that have occurred in rural regions over the past decades. As Henri Mendras observes: In the aftermath of the war, France was the most agricultural of all the industrialised countries: 45 per cent of the population lived in ‘rural’ communes and a quarter of the work force worked in agriculture. Forty years later, France had become urbanised, agriculture accounting for no more than six per cent of the working population and representing no more than four per cent of the national product. During the 1960s, at the height of the rural exodus, each year close to 100,000 workers left the countryside.3

However, the desertification narrative is only one part of the story. P ­ aradoxically, the statistics also show that small conglomerations (< 10,000 inhabitants) boast around half of the total number of establishments classified Art & Essai (1,141 in 2013), which means that the venue is partly devoted to quality programming, including original versions of films (not dubbed). Movie theatres with this ‘art house’ label – a uniquely French certification system with no equivalent elsewhere in Europe – represent around 17 per cent of cinemas in terms of attendance in urban agglomerations (> 50,000). By contrast, in many semi-rural and rural départements, art-house Quality Cinema in a Semi-Rural Setting

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­attendance accounts for up to 85 per cent of admissions or even more (e.g. in the Gers and the Meuse all cinemas are classified Art & Essai).4 The remarkable concentration of Art & Essai cinemas in small-town and rural France challenges common-sense notions of cultural geography and taste. It also highlights the efforts made by the cinema owners in less densely settled areas to adapt their programming practices in order to provide an inspiring cultural offering for the local population. At the same time, the low number of admissions suggests that this sector of the French film exhibition market suffers from an unfavourable position within the national hierarchy of distribution, which governs the circulation of copies and typically relegates rural venues to the margins (although for some films extra copies are provided by the Agence pour le développement régional du cinéma (ADRC), the agency which stimulates regional cinema). In addition, the low admission can be explained by the flight of potential patrons to better-equipped multiplex cinemas in nearby towns, which provide a larger choice. Although since the 1980s, much effort has been put into the modernisation of rural cinema venues, combining better technology with more comfort, it is hard to survive in such a competitive context. In this chapter, I will take the case of Le Pestel cinema in Die, a semi-rural small town with 4,392 inhabitants (2012) in the region Rhône-Alpes, to shed light on the challenges of running a cinema in a semi-rural setting. Le Pestel is a representative example of the many community cinemas in rural and small-town France that operate under the legal regime of a not-for-profit association (municipal or private) and are typically managed by locals who are passionate about cinema. The Pestel benefits from a public-service provision, which ensures the management a certain level of independence.5 Dozens of similar cases could be cited across France: La Turballe (Loire-Atlantique), Égletons (Corrèze), Caussade (­Tarn-et-Garonne), Mauriac (Cantal), Semur-en-Auxois (Côte d’Or), the Ciné 32 network in the Gers, the Cinémaginaire cinemas around Argelès (­Pyrénées-Orientales), Perros-Guirec (Côte d’Armor), Morteau (Doubs), Marcigny (Saône-et-Loire), and so on.6 These cinemas all share the same cultural and economic profile. They combine the day-to-day programming and screening of a broad spectrum of films with an emphasis on quality productions, including sometimes rare foreign imports, with the organisation of larger public events such as themed film festivals and lecture series on film classics. The model for these cinemas goes back to the ciné-club movement of the 1920s, which was by and large a metropolitan phenomenon until the 1950s. Ciné-clubs gained a foothold in the countryside after World War II, often in the form of film clubs set up by major sociocultural associations of the era, like the Catholic youth movements (see Leventopoulos in this volume). Historically, in rural areas, communal organisations often played the role of cultural incubator, offering the Arts a material and organisational infrastructure, which was founded upon the benevolent associative system. When the drastic fall in attendance destabilised commercial film exhibition in rural areas, leading to the closure of numerous movie theatres, rural associations frequently began to advocate a local cinema policy. Starting in the 1970s, small-town cinemas were increasingly promoted as a key and innovative element in the process of economic revitalisation.7 Local councils began to imbue the cinema with a new cultural legitimacy, a policy that was facilitated by the Art & Essai label, which thus became a vital instrument for cinema’s survival in rural areas. Against this background, it comes as no surprise that the silhouette of Jacques Tati figures prominently in the logo of Le Pestel and that we find several posters of his films in 214

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Exterior view of Le Pestel, postcard (1948)

the lobby, with Jour de fête (1949) in particular functioning as a powerful reminder of the prominent role that cinema played in rural France during the immediate post-war era. A short history of Le Pestel Le Pestel cinema was built in 1943 in a modern style by an architect from Valence. The theatre, which looks at first sight more like a villa, was named after a mountain in the nearby Diois by its first owner, who was passionate about mountains. Because of the Festival Est–Ouest (East–West Festival) that takes place in Die every year, nowadays the name also happens to echo that of the Russian Decembrist Pavel Ivanovich Pestel, who was an instigator of the aristocratic plot against the Czar in 1825 and subsequently hanged, while his accomplices were deported to Siberia, where they established utopian communities. Considering that on the local level, Le Pestel has contributed to the utopian ideal of an associative model based on sociability and friendship, its name’s connotation with the Russian Decembrist movement is not inappropriate. The idealism of the people who run Le Pestel today is part of a broader regional tradition of social and political involvement. In Dieulefit, a Protestant bastion not far from Die, Emmanuel Mounier and other intellectuals of the Resistance found refuge during World War II. The villagers also protected the lives of circa 1,500 Jews. The postwar ‘People and Culture’ movement of Joffre Dumazedier and Benigno Carcerés, which developed many innovative ideas about leisure and free time, also originated in the region (École des cadres d’Uriage). Cinema was one of the central activities of this education movement, which set up 16mm film clubs in villages. These clubs had a predilection for political cinema, notably screening the militant documentaries of Joris Ivens, Quality Cinema in a Semi-Rural Setting

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Chris Marker and Alain Resnais. Beyond the core circle of teachers, the movement counted social workers, trade unionists and farmers among its supporters, who set up a wide range of cultural activities for rural communities, including itinerant exhibitions, travelling theatres, visual art workshops and school debates.8 Until 1985, Le Pestel was a privately owned commercial cinema devoted to ­mainstream programming. Facing declining attendance, just like many of his c­ ompetitors, the owner decided to sell the building to the town. After the take-over by the municipality, it was classified as an Art & Essai cinema. The council put the management of Le Pestel in the hands of Germaine Thévenot and Jean-Robert Croquet, who were employed by the Utopia cinema in Valence (later Le Navire). In these years when cinema was facing its worse crisis in attendance figures, it only managed to survive with great difficulty. In 1988, Gérard Henry and his partner Catherine Savalle took over the business following an advertisement placed in Le Dauphiné libéré. This united the couple’s professional and personal future. They both came from rural Normandy, from families of farmers, and were imbued with the spirit of 1968. Cinema was a passion that they shared. Gérard, who earned his living as a woodcutter, had worked in a cinema before. For Kate, the movies were above all an opening to the world. Both had a strong desire to take action in Die and to continue the adventure of Le Pestel. It was not just a personal challenge, but also a matter of public engagement. Despite difficult economic circumstances, especially in the early years, the couple managed to reinvigorate Le Pestel with a new élan without falling into debt. They became small, independent entrepreneurs, remunerated by the cinema’s annual profits. In the 2000s, turnover was around €135,000, including €18,000 of municipal subsidies (since 2001) and the Art & Essai subsidy which varies annually. Largely self-financed, the cinema found its economic balance over the years and now employs five part-time employees. The venture still needs structural investments (the renewal of the seats every fifteen years, for instance), but these are paid for by an additional tax on the cinema tickets (TSA) and the remainder by the local council. In addition to the driving force of its managers, the support of the ADRC and the Art & Essai label helped to turn Le Pestel into a success. Also, the cinema benefits from the continued support of the town council, regardless of its political orientation, as both right- and left-wing politicians are well aware of its importance as a cultural institution and of the energy, enthusiasm and time that has been invested to make and keep Le Pestel successful. A neighbourhood cinema Over the years, Le Pestel has become a genuine neighbourhood cinema. Its rich and diverse programme attracts a broad and loyal local audience for whom the cinema feels like a second home. For Catherine Savalle-Henry, it is her actual home as she lives in the apartment on the first floor. She and her team not only warmly receive the many regulars when they come to a screening at Le Pestel, but patrons are also welcomed at the bar and in the garden, where Roudo the rooster, much like the Pathé mascot, announces the beginning of every new day. Following the premature death of Gérard Henry in 2004, ‘Kate’, as everyone calls her, has become the emblematic face of Le Pestel, advancing their common goals, which goes far beyond operating an art-house cinema. For example, she regularly organises 216

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theme-evenings, buffet-tastings of regional food (usually organic) and café-croissant breakfasts with film-makers, etc. Her basic principle is ‘to offer specific and atypical films to a mixed audience’. Public space and collective spirit go hand-in-hand with encouraging a form of cinephilia that merges intimacy and individuality. Relationships within the team are marked by a high degree of conviviality. Le Pestel employs two qualified projectionists, who each work between 35 and 120 hours per month. Although they have other activities outside the cinema, they consider themselves first and foremost cinephiles. Employees are given freedom to act on their own initiative, which further contributes to the friendly atmosphere. Depending on their shift, the projectionists will take on the role of barman or film critic. There is a strong sense of family, with everybody performing whatever role is required of them (reception, ticket desk, etc.). The welcoming team that Kate has created over time has given the place its singularity and strengthened its reputation in the region. Moreover, the scarcity of jobs and the local culture of supporting the cinema contribute to a low rotation of employees and this helps to preserve the now well-established and much-appreciated communitarian spirit at Le Pestel. At a time when Hollywood cinema in its most commercial form dominates the European screens, movie theatres like Le Pestel demonstrate the emergence of a new form of cinephilic commitment both on the part of the audience and the team that runs the venue. Both parties are devoted to preserving a cinema of quality, including 35mm films. While it is uncertain how digitisation will change the order of things in the long run, it is clear that over the past decades, with ups and downs, Le Pestel has continued to resist cultural homogenisation by offering a platform for quality cinema in a semi-rural environment and by becoming a lieu de défense for films that are demanding and might not have been screened elsewhere.9 Moreover, Le Pestel stimulates social interaction and mobilisation around cinema, both on a local and global scale. During its annual East–West Festival (see below), Die becomes an international meeting-point. On a dayto-day basis, Le Pestel exists within a framework of active audience participation during film debates, theme nights with local associations, post-screening talks/debates with film-makers and film critics. Retrospectives are also organised every now and then. They typically take the form of film weekends or late-night screenings dedicated to the work of one prominent film-maker, like Luchino Visconti, Luc Moullet or Aki Kaurismäki. In close cooperation with Die’s many local associations (there are more than a hundred in Die), debates are organised around documentaries and other films that stimulate discussion. Le Pestel sees it as its mission to encourage the exchange of ideas among different players in different roles, if only for brief instances. For instance, to mark the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, on Saturday 25 November 2013, Le Pestel showed a documentary about domestic violence by François Chilowicz. The screening was organised in collaboration with Collectives, a group of local women who fight for women’s rights, and followed by a debate led by social workers from the CNIDFF (Centre national d’information sur les droits des femmes et des familles).10 Programming strategies and market constraints Cinema audiences in the Drôme-Ardèche region benefit from a relatively substantial network of art-house cinemas and several summer film festivals (such as the documentary film festival in Lussas). In 2013, the Ardèche was good for 439,000 admissions Quality Cinema in a Semi-Rural Setting

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(1.4 visits per capita). The large majority of these tickets (89.6 per cent) were sold by the Art & Essai cinemas (12 in total with 23 screens). In the Drôme, with a total of nearly 1.5 million admissions in 2013 (3.17 visits per capita), the 16 art-house cinemas (23 screens) sold 520,000 tickets (34.3 per cent of the total).11  Within the Drôme, Le Pestel (207 seats) sells around 29,000 to 30,000 tickets annually, which comes down to circa 600 admissions per week over a 49-week period. About half of the total number of tickets are sold in advance by way of a fidelity programme, which consists of a loyalty card that is good for ten entrances and valid for one year. The majority of Art & Essai cinemas in the Diois region belong to the local Le Navire chain, which operates 5 cinemas with a total of 12 screens, as well as a travelling cinema for outdoor screenings during the summer months. The regional distribution of art-house films is supported by Les écrans, an association created in 1992 to support independent cinemas in the Ardèche, Drôme and Vaucluse as well as by the ADRC, which from 1983 has helped to reduce the high cost of transportation in remote regions and to offer extra aid to counterbalance unfair competition from large chains that dominate the French market (notably by paying for additional copies in the early phase of a film’s release).12 For the management of Le Pestel, the attractive line-up of both Hollywood blockbusters and art-house films in Valence (60 km from Die, 5 cinemas, 21 screens) and competition from the Art & Essai Eden cinema in Crest (38 km away, 3 screens) is a serious problem. Even more so as box-office hits can often only be obtained five weeks after their national release. In fact, agreements between distributors and multiplex companies like Gaumont-Pathé become increasingly problematic for independent art cinemas and seriously limit their liberty in terms of programming. How then does a cinema like Le Pestel survive under these difficult conditions? We have already discussed the ways the team works in tandem with the local community and organises a wide range of filmic and other events. But the success of a mono-screen cinema is also very much dependent on its regular weekly programme. Le Pestel shows between two and four films per day except on Wednesdays. Programming for Kate and her team is very much about making an original mix of films from all over the world and with different horizons, while at the same time not conceding their artistic ambitions. In a context in which small and medium movie theatres have closed over the last decade, this policy of cultural diversity has become an essential asset. Films are viewed in advance at professional screenings or when they come out in Valence. Also guiding their choice are reviews in the quality press (Le Monde, Libération, Les Inrockuptibles, Le Canard enchaîné and Charlie Hebdo) and film periodicals like Positif and Cahiers du cinéma. The result is a carefully balanced programme, with an eclectic mix of genres. Whereas Art & Essai cinemas in rural areas do not have to programme more than 30 per cent art-house films, at Le Pestel the large majority of films fall into this category (75 per cent).13 Indeed, the staff finds it important to valorise cinema and cinephilia in all its forms. In the summer of 2011, for example, Kate invited a group of musicians to ­accompany a silent film programme. During the summer, the cinema also seeks to attract the holiday crowd. Thus, the films of the Iranian film-maker Asghar Faradi enjoyed a respectable success at Le Pestel. Statistics about the patrons of Le Pestel reveal divides that are more generational than social. The rural, but semi-urban Die basin has 6,000 inhabitants, but the 218

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Programme flyer for Le Pestel, October–November 2014

Quality Cinema in a Semi-Rural Setting

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cinema attracts people who live as far as 40 kilometres away. All in all, it is a mixed, but primarily older, cinephilic public. There is no solid base for a younger clientele (twelve to twenty years), for whom the cinema has become increasingly multiform and is no longer primarily associated with the practice of going to a movie theatre. Like elsewhere in the world, watching illegal downloads from the internet is common. Nonetheless, the multiplex cinemas in Valence continue to attract the youth of Die and the surrounding areas, thanks in part to the direct and regular SNCF train service (a one-hour trip). To encourage cinemagoing as an active cultural practice, Le Pestel regularly gives reductions to high-school students (tarif lycéen) and those under sixteen. It ­programmes films in primary schools as well as high schools. This extra-mural programme is set up in collaboration with the Ligue de l’enseignement (French League of Teaching), which from 1983 has been the driving force behind an itinerant cinema network aimed at promoting film culture in rural regions across France. Le Pestel and the Festival Est–Ouest France hosts over thirty regional film festivals and Die has gained itself a place in this cultural landscape with its annual East–West Festival, which takes place in mid-­ September. Since 1989, the town has organised this annual event with the aim of bringing together artists from across the globe. The idea for the festival came from Ton Vink, a Dutchman who had settled in the region. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, he was keen to break down cultural borders between Eastern and Western Europe. The festival involves diverse local partners, from the municipal theatre of Die and the branches of the departmental multimedia library to local cultural and sports associations. The participation of Le Pestel in the East–West Festival has given the cinema great exposure beyond the region. During the festival, the cinema operates in close collaboration with the festival’s organisation and caters to a different audience than its habitual clientele, although many locals also attend the events. In many respects, it is the story of a local cinema ‘going global’. For over two weeks, the town of Die is taken over by a diverse crowd (nearly 10,000 visitors per year), who attend the many events that tour the region: photography and art exhibits, film screenings, theatrical performances, concerts, poetry readings, meetings with writers, round-table debates, a book fair, tastings of local cuisine, etc. Borderless themes like nationalism and minorities, immigration, economic transition and climate change are at the heart of the programme, encouraging interaction and debate among the visitors, both from inside and outside the region. Many guests stay with locals from Die or the surrounding villages at farms and vineyards. During the festival, the entire Diois region is bustling with cultural activities as the festival uses all sorts of venues in and around Die and mobilises over a hundred volunteers. Initially, the festival was built each year around a different country or region in Eastern Europe. For example, four editions were dedicated to Russia. In 2001, the theme was Siberia, followed by Moscow in 2002, the Volga region in 2004 and the Trans-Siberian Express in 2010. Other editions were devoted to artists and art works from the Caucasus to the Ukraine and the Black Sea, but also to countries in Central Europe. During the Trans-Siberian edition, Le Pestel screened eight fiction films and six documentaries 220

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relevant to the festival’s central theme, including Aerograd (Aleksandr Dovzhenko, 1935), Letter Never Sent (Mikhaïl Kalatozov, 1959), Siberiada (Andrei Konchalovsky, 1979), Le Tombeau d’Alexandre (The Last Bolshevik; Chris Marker, 1992) and Goulag (Iossif Pasternak and Hélène Châtelain, 2000). Over the years, the East–West Festival has brought many Eastern European film-makers to Die. When in the context of European integration, the festival broadened its geographical scope to include other European countries, it was the turn of film-makers from Turkey and Greece. On average, the special festival screenings attracted some 1,200 spectators to Le Pestel each year. The collaboration with the festival ended after the East–West Festival organisers took on responsibility for the management and programming of the renovated municipal Théâtre de Die. Since 2012, the festival films have been shown in the theatre (DVD projection). Thanks to the East–West Festival, Die has become a place of artistic encounter, a town that welcomes cultural diversity and creative culture, as well encouraging a spirit of collective engagement – be it social, political or ecological. Among the numerous festivals in France, each with its own qualities, the Festival Est–Ouest at Die stands out because it has fostered such a strong diversity in the Arts in a relatively isolated rural region. Le Pestel has thrived on this alternative culture, which persists outside of the festival period. At the same time, since they took over Le Pestel, Catherine SavalleHenry and her late husband Gérard Henry have also figured prominently in the maintenance of the extraordinary cultural and social vitality in Die and its environs because of their passionate commitment to art cinema, their atypical programming strategy and their strong engagement with the local community. Future perspectives Die has not escaped from the pressures and challenges of the new Europe that it has helped to promote since 1989 notably with the East–West Festival, but also by ensuring an open cultural climate throughout the year. The recent history of its cinema reflects a period of intense cultural and economic transformation, as well as structural changes in the film exhibition sector. The widespread acceptance of digital cinema generated uncertainty because it required serious investments in new equipment. This has further undermined the position of independent cinema owners vis-à-vis the major distributors and the large, vertically integrated chains.14 Independent movie theatres like Le Pestel can only exist with financial support from local, regional and national governments and thanks to a balanced mix of art-house and mainstream films within the context of an Art & Essai programming and certification system. The transition to digital technology may well reduce the versatility that has characterised Le Pestel for more than two decades. Until now, the cinema in Die survived many difficulties thanks to the extra investment and the passion of the players involved, including its faithful public. In 2014, Kate decided that it was time to step down, rather than seeking a renewal of the three-year management contract that she had with the municipality until March 2015. Eight candidates, two of them coming from the local community, responded to the public tender (Délégation de service public) by the town of Die. Between the two local candidates, the municipal council eventually decided in favour of Jean-Pierre Surles, Quality Cinema in a Semi-Rural Setting

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a television cameraman with a passion for the cinema, who has been a regular visitor to Le Pestel for more than forty years. At this critical moment of transition, all parties involved show a strong commitment to maintaining the distinctive cultural ambitions of Le Pestel, while they also recognise the need to adapt to the spirit of the time with the launch of a website, Facebook page and with new partners, all to ensure a stable future for this unique cinema which has shown its worth far beyond the Diois region.15 Notes   1. This study is primarily based on a series of interviews conducted in Die in 2010–11 and my contribution to the programme of the East–West Festival in 2010. I would like to thank in particular Kate Henry, the manager of Le Pestel, for her support as well as her team and the festival organisers. An earlier version of this article appeared in Laurent Creton and Kira Kitsopanidou (eds), Les salles de cinéma: Enjeux, défis et perspectives (Paris: Armand Colin, 2013), pp. 84–97.   2. All statistical information is derived from ‘La géographie du cinéma: Les résultats régionaux des salles et des films, les pratiques, cinématographiques des Français, le public régional du cinéma …’, Les dossiers du CNC no. 331, September 2014.   3. Henri Mendras, La seconde révolution française (1965–1984) (Paris: Gallimard, 1988), p. 24.   4. ‘La géographie du cinéma’, pp. 49 and 52.   5. However, independence remains relative, even in this sector. See Le Monde (7 June 2012) on the setbacks of Le Méliès, an Art & Essai cinema in Montreuil in the aftermath of the conflicts within the MK2/UGC group.   6. See, for instance, Edwige Bordes, À propos d’Auch, ciné 32, Master’s thesis Paris 3, 1997.   7. See Daniel Sauvaget, ‘Service de proximité et insertion dans la ville’, in Gérard Cladel et al. (eds), Le cinéma dans la cité (Paris: Kiron/Éditions du félin, 2001), pp. 161–70.   8. See Pierre Bitoun, Les hommes d’Uriage (Paris: La découverte, 1988).   9. Much like the Utopia network, which is active in Avignon and in more than fifteen towns and urban conglomerations and advocates a notion of engaged Art & Essai cinema. See Olivier Alexandre, Utopia: À la recherche d’un cinéma alternative (Paris: Éditions l’Harmattan, 2007). 10. Médias Citoyens Diois, http://mediascitoyens-diois.blogspot.nl/2013/11/die-26150-journee -contre-les-violences.html. Accessed 17 February 2015. 11. ‘La géographie du cinéma’, p. 52. 12. For Les écrans, see www.les-ecrans.org. For a detailed analysis of regional film distribution in France, see Claude Forest, ‘Quarante ans de fréquentation cinématographique française: Évolutions régionales et départementales (1957–1996)’, 1895. Revue d’histoire du cinéma no. 23 (December 1997), pp. 63–80. See also Daniel Sauvaget, ‘La diffusion du film en milieu rural’, in René Prédal (ed.), Cinéma et monde rural, Cinémaction no. 36 (Paris: Éditions Corlet, 1986), pp. 74–83. 13. Le Flash. Bulletin d’informations municipales@die no. 75, January–February 2015. 14. By 2013, all twenty-one cinemas in Drôme had at least one digital projector, ‘La géographie du cinéma’, p. 27. 15. Le Flash. Bulletin d’informations municipales@die.

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14 Ch no Cinema Title in the ‘Fog City’: Film Exhibition and Sociogeography in Flanders Author Daniel Biltereyst and Lies Van de Vijver

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Belgium was considered to be the fifth most highly industrialised nation in the world, enjoying an open, export-driven and expansive economy. Next to its location in between some of the most vibrant economic powers of that time and to the role of Antwerp as a major world harbour, Belgium’s high-ranked position in international trade was also due to the exploitation of rubber and all kinds of minerals in its colony, Congo.1 It was in this effervescent economicindustrial context that cinema was introduced and that it developed into a popular pastime and into a new booming industry. With its population of about 7.5 million, the small kingdom was obviously not considered a huge film market, yet from the interwar years on it was seen as a highly open and lucrative one with a wide range of cinemas and high attendance rates.2 By the early 1900s, Brussels had already grown into an international transport pivot and an important film distribution centre, while in the capital and other major cities film theatres prospered.3 After the Great War, which had a devastating impact on Belgium’s societal, economic and cultural life, the cinema continued to flourish. As one of the few countries without an adult film censorship system and with no significant film production of its own, movies from all major international film production centres flew into the country, with American and French titles predominating.4 With the exception of a few case studies on particular towns or periods, the development of Belgium’s film exhibition market is still under researched, especially when it comes to linking cinema to wider social, economic and geographic concerns.5 This chapter will use data from some of these studies, including data from a collaborative research project on the history of the Flemish film exhibition scene, the Dutch-language northern part of Belgium.6 After looking at some key historical trends in the development of film exhibition in Flanders, one of the most urbanised and densely-settled regions in Europe, this contribution focuses on recent developments in cinema attendance and the geographical distribution of movie theatres in rural, urban and metropolitan areas. We will deal with the question of whether theories of spatial functional hierarchies can be applied to different networks of film exhibition in a region like Flanders, which is often considered in social geography and urban studies as a large urban sprawl or a diffuse ‘fog city’ (Nevelstad).7 Exploring questions related to the spatial location of film venues, this chapter raises the question of whether in this compact structure with large urban networks, where the periphery is by definition not urban, the traditional dichotomy of city and country loses its meaning.

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Belgian film exhibition market: Historical developments and structural changes International comparative historical data on film exhibition and cinema attendance are scarce and often rather unreliable, but the few existing insights mostly support statements that Flanders has a history of a vivid film exhibition market. This was the case even before the Great War. In 1910, a Dutch film trade journal, De kinematograaf, estimated that Belgium had some 625 cinemas, of which 115 were located in Brussels (for a population of 650,000 inhabitants).8 Two years later, there were 650 cinemas.9 By this time, film venues had prospered in major cities like Antwerp, Brussels, Ghent and Liège, in minor towns and slowly in less urban areas too. Guido Convents explains that the high number of film venues was not only due to Belgian film entrepreneurs, but was also the result of a thriving existing entertainment culture in which the new medium found a home (such as fairs and variety venues), the unique format of the cafécinés and the interest of pillarised society in the new film medium.10 During the 1920s and 1930s, the number of cinemas continued to grow and remained comparatively high in comparison to international standards. In a 1931 study on the introduction of sound cinema systems, Howard T. Lewis counted some 740 movie theatres in Belgium, which was a much higher figure than in the Netherlands (266) or Switzerland (330), which both had around the same number of inhabitants as Belgium.11 In an academic article on the international film exhibition sector, published in 1938 in an economics journal, Belgium stood out once again for its high rate of cinema attendance. With its 1,100 theatres, the country ranked high on the list with a figure of one seat for every 16 inhabitants, compared to a provision of one for 21 in France, one for 39 in Germany and one for 48 in the Netherlands. Only the United Kingdom did better with 1 seat for 12 inhabitants.12 During the interwar years, the practice of filmgoing developed into the most popular leisure form, not only in urbanised but also in rural towns and villages. The number of film venues reached a peak around 1925 with 1,129 cinemas, followed by a sharp decline to 772 venues at the end of the decade in the context of the economic recession and increased taxation.13 In the 1930s, taxes were still considered heavy, according to international standards, but a new fiscal regulation somewhat softened the pressure on the film exhibition market. Although sound technologies took quite long to enter Belgium cinemas, especially movie theatres in more rural areas, the introduction of talking pictures had a positive effect on the market with a growth in the number of cinemas, in suburbs and in small urban towns too, from 984 theatres in 1930 to 1,128 in 1934.14 A specific explanation for the high number of film venues in Belgium is the importance of the non-commercial sector. In ideological terms, Belgium was a highly segregated country and various societal groups tried to use the film medium to attract people belonging to their respective spheres of influence. From the 1920s on, religious and political organisations of a Catholic, socialist, liberal-conservative and Flemishnationalist bent started to screen films on a regular basis.15 In the period between the 1920s and the 1960s, pillarised venues accounted for approximately 25 to 30 per cent of the total number of film outlets. Many of these were located in more rural areas and emerged in reaction to the arrival of commercial cinema. From the late 1950s on, the proportion of pillarised film venues declined heavily and the phenomenon eventually disappeared, primarily as a result of secularisation.16 224

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In the post-war period and until the pivotal years of 1957–8, cinema remained the most popular form of entertainment and many new cinemas opened. Between 1946 and 1953, there was a staggering 37 per cent rise in film exhibition venues in Flanders and Brussels, and between 1954 and 1957, another 247 new venues were launched. With a total number of 1,585 cinemas for 8 million people, Belgium left bigger countries like Germany, Italy, France and Spain behind.17 While the number of cinemas continued to increase in the immediate post-war years, cinema attendance stabilised and then began to slowly decrease from the 1950s on. The penetration of television, introduced in October 1953, was only one reason for the drop in attendance. Other reasons included changing leisure patterns (the success of popular music and dance halls and the growing popularity of day trips), greater mobility due to increased car ownership and better transport systems (finalisation of major highways, better public transport) and sociodemographic trends (the baby boom leading to an all-time high in the number of births in 1961). In the 1960s and 1970s these trends were accompanied by wider sociogeographic changes (see below). Like elsewhere in Europe, cinema attendance decreased quite spectacularly from the late 1950s until the 1990s. In this period, ticket sales on the Belgian market declined from 113.5 to 17.1 million (see Table 14.1). The pivotal years 1957–8 also marked a continuous decrease in the number of film exhibition venues. In the ten years after 1957, Belgium lost 54 per cent of its film venues. The 1960s marked the end of the era of small, single-screen and family-owned cinemas as the film market was increasingly controlled by bigger networks that could only survive through a strategy of concentration, synergy and market control. In an attempt to reverse the decline in cinema attendance, the major cinema corporations tried to offer more choice. In the 1970s, the former movie palaces in city centres were transformed into multiscreen cinemas. Thus, while there was a steady decline in the number of cinemas, the amount of screens continued to increase. Table 14.1  Moviegoing in Belgium, Flanders and Brussels (number of tickets, in millions, per year)  

Belgium (tickets in millions)

Flanders (%)

Brussels (%)

Wallonia (%)

1950

113.52

43.6

22.97

33.43

1960

79.56

45.24

24.12

30.64

1970

30.39

41.95

27.48

30.57

1980

19.86

47.94

28.7

23.36

1990

17.1

44.56

30.94

24.5

2000

23.55

48.79

20.34

30.87

2010

21.31

47.97

17.77

34.26

2013

21.76

47.03

17.76

35.2

Source: Data based on admission figures from Belgian film industry yearbooks (1950–2000) and FOD Economy (2010–2013).

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At the end of the 1980s and in the 1990s, the downward spiral slowed. A major player in this process was Albert Bert, a relatively small exhibitor operating in the provinces of eastern and western Flanders, who was inspired by the American and British multiplex phenomenon. In 1981, Bert had already opened a 12-screen multiplex in the centre of Ghent (Decascoop). In 1989, he followed this with a much bigger gamble: building the 25-screen Kinepolis complex in Brussels. His concept, which was rather new for the continent, was based on offering a wide choice of mostly American movies aimed at teenagers and young adolescents in cinemas built on the outskirts of a major city. These shopping mall-inspired multiplexes had the advantage of good transport links and parking facilities. The gradual introduction of similar multiplexes in other Belgian cities, as well as in neighbouring countries and other foreign markets, made Bert’s Kinepolis Group into an important player on the European market and, in ­Belgium, it had an almost monopolistic hold. The investments in multiplex cinemas had an important effect, not only on admission figures, which from the 1990s started to increase again to more than 23 million tickets at the turn of the millennium, but also on the structure of the Belgian cinema market, which is now characterised by a high level of concentration with only a few major players. The key companies in this concentrated market are the Kinepolis Group and the French UGC Group. They control the majority of the Belgium film exhibition sector, which consists of 90 cinemas, 476 screens and 104,123 seats (2013 figures). In total around 20 million tickets are sold annually. Contemporary Flemish cinema culture In the second part of this contribution we will concentrate on some key structural dimensions of the current film market in Flanders and Brussels. As of 2013, there are 303 screens available in 52 cinemas, offering 66,327 seats.18 Although since this report there has been a downward trend due to the crisis in the market (and some exhibitors went bankrupt or stopped), we will take 2013 as a reference for analysing the dynamics within the Flemish film market, which consists of three major types of film exhibition: a handful of major players, exploiting a circuit of multiplexes, a network of independent commercial cinemas and a small art-house circuit (Table 14.2).

Table 14.2  Film venues by type in Brussels and Flanders (2011)   Multiplexes Independent ­commercial cinemas Art-house cinemas Total

Exhibitors

Cities

Screens

Seats

4

16

221 (73%)

51,704 (79%)

19

18

56 (19%)

11,182 (17%)

7

6

24 (8%)

2,368 (4%)

30

30

301

65,254

Sources: Based on data in Voorbij de vertoning: Analyse van het Vlaams audiovisueel vertoning- en distributieveld (2011).

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The market is dominated by four groups operating multiplex venues in sixteen cities, representing 79 per cent of the seats and 73 per cent of the venues (Table 14.3). The ­biggest operator here is the local branch of the Belgian Kinepolis Group, which has 23 cinema complexes in Europe, representing a total of 317 screens. Kinepolis is active in 11 ­Belgian cities (110 screens and 29,606 seats) with 27 screens in Brussels, 24 in Antwerp, 14 in Hasselt, 10 in Kortrijk, 12 in Ghent, 8 in Ostend and Bruges, and 7 screens in Leuven. The second player in terms of seats and screens is the French UGC Group (45 screens and 9,198 seats). The group has three multiplexes, two in Brussels and one in Antwerp. The two other major players, exploiting multiplexes, Ciné-Invest and Utopolis, not only have fewer seats and screens, but operate in smaller cities, most of them with a population of less than 100,000 inhabitants. A major player in the small-town market is the Belgian-owned Ciné-Invest (37 screens and 7,375 seats), which has four multiplexes, mainly in the province of Limburg. The last player is the Utopolis Group (29 screens and 5,525 seats), a Luxembourg chain that owns and operates cinemas in different European countries. They are active in the regional cities of Aarschot (28,969 inhabitants), Lommel (33,636 inhabitants), Turnhout (42,008 inhabitants) and Mechelen (82,602 inhabitants).19 Next to these four major groups, nineteen other commercial exhibitors operate for-profit cinemas with often less than seven screens, ranging from smaller community cinemas such as De Keizer in Lichtervelde to multiplex venues such as Cityscoop in Roeselare. These independent exhibitors, representing less than one-fifth of the market in screens and seats, mostly operate cinemas in smaller cities like Aalst (82,587 inhabitants), Geraardsbergen (32,852 inhabitants) or Lier (34,497 inhabitants).20 Many of these places have a long history of family-owned cinemas. Their continued existence frequently depends on personal, often nostalgia-driven initiatives by local exhibitors, like the Cinema Albert in Dendermonde. It is no surprise that this part of the film market is highly vulnerable. For instance, in 2013, the Vanhakendover family decided to close its six-screen Cinema Rialto in Ostend, thus turning Kinepolis into the local monopolist in this coastal city. The third branch in the market is a small circuit of art-house cinemas, representing only seven exhibitors and 4 per cent of the overall amount of seats. As well as private initiatives like art-house cinemas in student cities like Antwerp (Cartoon’s) and Ghent

Table 14.3  Multiplexes in Brussels and Flanders (2011)  

Cities

Screens

Seats

Kinepolis Group

8

110

29,606

UGC

2

45

9,198

Ciné-Invest

4

37

7,375

Utopolis

4

29

5,525

16

221

51,704

Total

Sources: Based on data in Voorbij de vertoning, p. 29.

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227

(Sphinx and Studio Skoop), this circuit includes three subsidised venues in Antwerp (Cinema Zuid), Kortrijk (Buda) and Louvain (ZED). We will come back to the different dynamics of the Flemish film market and to the question of how these operators co-exist, but in order to understand this, it is necessary to look at broader sociogeographic characteristics. Flanders as one metropolitan area In the following analysis, we seek to gain an insight into which parameters determine the location of cinemas as well as consider the variety and internal dynamics in a specific film exhibition market, in this case Flanders. In addition to parameters that include public support programmes (for instance, for art-house cinemas) and private initiatives (like family-owned commercial cinemas), we believe a mixture of economic and sociogeographical parameters should be taken into account. In attempting a more in-depth analysis of film exhibition, we examine factors such as the distribution of film venues in relation to broader geographic and demographic patterns and other markers of the degree of urbanisation versus rurality. Echoing the need for interdisciplinary work in New Cinema History, this chapter aims to confront structural data on film exhibition with concepts and research from social and economic geography, in particular, studies on Flanders.21 In order to understand the film exhibition data, we first need to focus upon the overall spatial structure of the northern part of Belgium, one of the most densely populated regions in Europe.22 Geographers and policy-makers tend to look at the Dutch-speaking region of Flanders as one metropolitan area, assuming the bi-lingual (French-Dutch) capital of Brussels, which is geographically located within Flemish borders, to be part of its socioeconomic hemisphere. Located in between other major metropolitan areas in Western Europe, Flanders has a population of 6.4 million (2013). This is slightly less than the Dutch Randstad (7.1 million) and a little more than the German Ruhr area (5.3 million). Concerning geography Although we realise that urbanisation can take many forms and consists of d ­ ifferent components (morphologically, demographically, functionally, etc.), we choose to make a geographic analysis purely based upon morphologic elements (i.e. size and population). There are two criteria for categorising the municipalities: the number of inhabitants and the population density. In terms of population density, historically the largest category was the category of localities with a population density of under 200 inhabitants per square kilometre, which we name villages. After World War II, more than half of all municipalities in Flanders fell in this category. The majority of them had a predominantly agrarian profile. The second category of municipalities that we distinguish are municipalities with a population density of 200 to 600 inhabitants per km², which we defined as small towns. Most municipalities in this category are semi-urbanised, often due to industrial activity (like mining). Throughout the twentieth century, this category 228

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becomes more prevalent as general urbanisation takes place in the Flanders region. The third category includes all municipalities between 600 and 1,000 inhabitants per km². Most provincial capitals and market towns with a regional function fall into this category. A fourth and last category is made up of municipalities with a population density higher than 1,000 inhabitants per km² or larger cities. This is the smallest group, but it consists of all the metropolitan municipalities. Ghent, Antwerp and Brussels Capital Region (Brussels and its suburbs) are the three metropolitan agglomerations within the Flemish provinces. To make a selection of the medium-sized cities, we took the forty-two most densely-populated municipalities that the Town and Country Planning of the Flemish District described as cities.23 We added to this sample seven towns in the Antwerp region and thirteen towns in the Ghent region. Though this selection is in a way tentative as it is based upon the current situation, it holds up well when compared with population figures per town throughout the past century. In order to make a systematic analysis of the connection between urbanity and movie exhibition throughout the past century, we divided the movie theatres in our database into three categories: cinemas located in one of the three metropolitan areas (over 100,000 inhabitants or a population density higher than 1,000 inhabitants per km²), cinemas situated in medium-sized cities (between 20,000 and 100,000 inhabitants or a population density of between 600 to 1,000 inhabitants per km²) and the remaining category consisting of movie theatres in localities with less than 20,000 inhabitants or a population density lower than 600 inhabitants per km2. Cinema, urbanity and rurality The material we collected on the emergence of movie theatres in Flanders suggests that at least for the first decade of permanent film exhibition, movie theatres were in fact an urban phenomenon. But the question is whether the majority of movie theatres have always been situated in urban areas as is so often assumed. Put differently: was there or was there not a different film culture in more rural areas? The emergence of permanent cinemas in Flanders took place in geographically determined waves. The Brussels region is by far the most important conglomeration in the area, followed by Antwerp and Ghent. Between 1905 and 1910, movie theatres boomed in urban contexts. This boom began in the three metropolitan cities and then spread to the main provincial cities. Ten years after the first theatres opened in the big cities, the first permanent cinemas appeared in small towns in rural areas. By that time, movie exhibition had already taken a firm grip on urban leisure culture. A remarkable finding was that between 1920 and 1960, the number of movie theatres in the three largest cities in Flanders did not fluctuate very much. In 1925, there were 177 cinemas active in Brussels, Antwerp and Ghent. This number peaked to around 200 cinemas in the 1950s, with Brussels as front-runner. Movie theatres continuously opened and closed, but in absolute numbers, the three largest cities in Flanders seem to have reached a saturation point fairly early on, after which the exhibition industry became more of a replacement market than a market targeted at expansion. As Table 14.4 shows, the rapid decrease in cinemas in the 1960s mainly took place in smaller towns and villages. From 66 per cent of the total number of screens in 1960, it Cinema in the ‘Fog City’

229

Table 14.4  Number of screens in three types of localities according to the number of inhabitants (1960–2013) 1600 1400 1200 1000 800 600 400 200 0

1960

1965

1970

town/city < 20,0000

1975

1980

1985

1990

1995

2000

2005

2013

city from 20,000 to 100,000 inhabitants city > 100,000

declined to only 10 per cent in 2005. The number of screens in the urban and metropolitan areas remained more or less stable, yet increased quite drastically statistically: in cities with 20,000 inhabitants or more from 23 per cent in 1960 to 50.5 per cent in 2005; in the three metropolitan areas from 10 per cent to 39 per cent. Whereas cinema and urbanity are often linked together in regard to the early days of movie exhibition, our analysis makes clear that cinema is now again primarily a phenomenon of large urban centres.24 Cinema, the ‘fog city’ and the Flemish ‘diamond’ This large-scale analysis of the geographic spread of film venues and screens poses several problems, however. One is that there are no official and workable standards in historical perspective to differentiate cities from (semi-)urbanised and rural localities. Furthermore, the region of Flanders was initially divided into more than 1,200 different municipalities of unequal size. In 1977, this administrative structure was completely overhauled as Flanders was reorganised into a region with 335 municipalities. So the stabilisation and increased concentration of cinemas in urban areas are partly the result of expanding boundaries. What complicates the matter further is that scientific typologies of Flanders focus primarily on the period from the 1970s onwards when most movie theatres in less urbanised municipalities had already closed. More important is the question of to what extent the traditional dichotomy of city and country can still be applied to regions like Flanders. The city is no longer a clearly defined entity. In the context of Flanders, its morphological and spatial structure is sometimes referred to as one of urban sprawl or a diffuse ‘fog city’, Nevelstad Vlaanderen, where the periphery is by definition not urban, where large tracts of land have no distinct function, and lie somewhere between city and rurality.25 The idea of the ‘fog city’ might be considered a critical concept, referring to an isotropic, fluid morphological structure, 230

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where there seems to be a lack of hierarchy by axial direction or centre formation, with much city and little countryside, and with lots of interspaces. For many geographers, urban planners, policy-makers and architects, the ‘fog city’ represents a nightmare, whereas for others, scarcity of open space is considered to be a challenge for acting within this specific spatial context of a highly urbanised area. However, the concept of the fog city is not necessarily at odds with notions of functional spatial hierarchies, where the compact city is the centre of human, economic or capital mobility, or of cultural activity. In the Flemish case, policy-makers and geographers have been trying to counteract the prevailing tendencies of urban sprawl, for instance by trying to (re)concentrate housing, economic and other activities in urban areas, urban networks and economic nodal points. The hierarchy in the spatial structure of Flanders is often related to the idea of the ‘diamond’, or an area with the geometrical shape of a diamond. This is a reference to the most urbanised, industrialised and prosperous area in Belgium. The economic activities in this relatively larger metropolitan area are related to the port of Antwerp and the Brussels area, the conglomeration which dominates the hierarchical system of the entire country in terms of mobility, economic, political and other activities. The Flemish ‘diamond’ also covers cities like Ghent, Mechelen and Louvain. Turning to the history of film exhibition, the question is to what degree this ‘diamond’ is reflected in the distribution of film venues, and to what degree film exhibition has been concentrated or not in the ‘diamond’ and how this may have changed over time. When looking at the number of cinemas and screens in the five major urban centres inside the ‘diamond’ area, it is clear that since the multiplex phenomenon of the 1990s film exhibition has been strongly concentrated in these areas. Whereas in the heydays of film exhibition, other parts of Flanders had a major share of cinemas and screens (Table 14.5), this has changed quite dramatically in the 2000s, where the five city centre cinemas in the ‘diamond’ area count more screens (54.1 per cent) than those located elsewhere (45.9 per cent). Table 14.5  Number of screens in five major cities inside the ‘diamond’ (1925–2011)  

1925

1938

1960

1980

2000

2011

Brussels

104

101

39

23

68

77

Antwerp

47

53

48

25

44

48

Ghent

26

25

26

11

22

22

Mechelen

6

6

9

4

12

11

Louvain

8

7

9

6

12

8

191

192

131

69

158

166

44.8%

30.7%

15.8%

26.5%

49.5%

54.1%

235

433

700

191

161

141

55.2%

69.3%

84.2%

73.5%

50.5%

45.9%

Flemish Diamond % Rest of Flanders % Cinema in the ‘Fog City’

231

Urban areas, functional hierarchies and cinema Another approach to understanding the relationship between sociogeographic and spatial structure and film exhibition concentrates on the notion of urban networks and economic nodal points. Arguing that, although the distinction between urban and rural has come under pressure, hierarchies still exist, geographers recognised that particular urban areas or networks are important in terms of their position in, and functions for, a wider region. In Flanders, major and smaller urban areas operate within city-regions, which in turn are part of even larger urban networks. Figure 14.1 illustrates how this spatial hierarchy can be reduced to five urban networks, the ‘diamond’ being the biggest with Brussels, Antwerp and Ghent acting as major cities, each of these forming their own, more limited city-region. This hierarchy in the spatial structure of Flanders can be linked to theories on the role played by these cities as central places for particular functions, providing goods and services to the surrounding region. Central-place theory explains the geography of settlements as part of economic geography, using economics to explain the character of cities and towns in an urban system. The question is, of course, to what degree film exhibition fits into this theory, at least for the Flemish case. The spread of multiplexes in Figure 14.2 reveals an almost perfect match. Kinepolis, the largest player on the Flemish market, decided to operate in both the metropolitan areas and major regional centres. UGC is only active in Brussels and Antwerp, whereas Utopolis and Ciné-Invest focus on the regional cities. A few independent commercial exhibitors are active in the major cities, but most of them have found a niche market in regional centres and smaller cities, locations left over by the groups that specialise in multiplex exhibition (Figure 14.3). Thus, they play a key role in maintaining the culture of cinemagoing in towns and villages outside the

Figure 14.1  Hierarchy in the Flemish spatial structure. Based on Van Nuffel and Saey, ‘Commuting, Hierarchy and ­Networking: The Case of Flanders’ (2005), p. 314; and Ruimtelijk Structuurplan Vlaanderen (Brussels: Ministerie van de Vlaamse Gemeenschap, 1998) 232

Cinema Beyond the City

city-regions. In economic terms, this strategy is best defined as one of trying to evade the dominance of the multiplex companies. A closer look at the geographic distribution of art-house film venues (Figure 14.4) is also revealing because these cinemas tend to have an inverse strategy. Unlike the independent commercial exhibitors, most art houses are located in the very centre of the major urban networks. This chapter does not aim to engage in a discussion on quality and distinction in film offerings, but it is clear that art-house cinemas and multiplexes tend to co-exist within the same areas and that they are able to co-exist because they show different kinds of movies. Except for Bruges, it is also notable that art-house cinemas only flourish in the major student cities. Another distinctive economic feature is that some of these venues are supported by local or regional state subsidies.

Figure 14.2  Spread of multiplexes in the Flemish spatial structure. Based on data from the Flemish Institute for Visual, Audiovisual and Media Art (BAM)

Figure 14.3  Spread of independent commercial cinemas in the Flemish spatial structure. Based on data from the Flemish Institute for Visual, Audiovisual and Media Art (BAM)

Cinema in the ‘Fog City’

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Figure 14.4  Spread of art-house cinemas in the Flemish spatial structure. Based on data from the Flemish Institute for Visual, Audiovisual and Media Art (BAM)

Conclusions Inspired by the New Cinema History’s ambition for multidisciplinary research, this chapter attempted to use data, concepts and theories imported from outside the Humanities. More precisely, we tried to establish a relation between different kinds of cinema-related data like the geographical distribution, number of theatres and screens on the one hand, with information on demography, population density and other sociogeographical data on the other hand. After a historical overview and a structural analysis of the different circuits of film exhibition in Flanders, we applied different sociogeographical entries on the complex, ‘foggy’ Flemish spatial structure in order to understand the different locations, interrelations and dynamics in the contemporary film market. In general, it is clear that the analysis confirms the idea of central places since the results underline that cinemas are mainly localised in large cities and urban networks, assuming that particular cities are central places, providing goods and services to the surrounding population. However, different kinds of dynamics were identified, not only between the three main categories (multiplex chains, independent commercial cinemas, art houses), but also within each category (for instance, between the major multiplex groups). We know that this contribution is limited to one relatively small region. Flanders is a region with one of the highest population densities in Europe. For future research, it would be interesting to apply the same analytical principles to similar densely-settled, ­highly-urbanised regions, or inversely, to regions with a low population density and urbanisation grade. Sociogeographic factors, however, are not the only parameters for understanding the dynamics in the film market. For instance, parameters which should be elaborated in more detail are public support programmes and the strength of private initiatives. We will also have to relate film exhibition to other societal, cultural and economic functions offered in urban nodal points. As David Morley points out, only by applying a non-media/film-centric position will we be able to fully understand cinema’s social and cultural role.26

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Notes   1. Gita Deneckere, ‘Nieuwe geschiedenis van België’, in Els Witte et al. (eds), Nieuwe geschiedenis van België I: 1830–1905 (Tielt: Lannoo, 2005), p. 460.   2. John Trumpbour, Selling Hollywood to the World: U.S. and European Struggles for Mastery of the Global Film Industry, 1920–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 213.   3. For transport and distribution of motion-picture reels to the north, see Ivo Blom, Jean Desmet and the Early Dutch Film Trade (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2003), p. 147. On cinema before World War I, see Guido Convents, Van kinetoscoop tot café-ciné: De eerste jaren van de film in België 1894–1908 (Louvain: Universitaire Pers Leuven, 2000).   4. Liesbet Depauw and Daniel Biltereyst, ‘De kruistocht tegen de slechte cinema: Over de aanloop en de start van de Belgische filmkeuring (1911–1929)’, Tijdschrift voor mediageschiedenis vol. 8 (2005), pp. 3–26.   5. Marc Crunelle, Histoire des cinémas Bruxellois (Brussels: Ministère de la région de BruxellesCapitale, 2003); Cindy Van Handenhove, ‘Antwerpen kinemastad’, MA thesis, Ghent University (2002); Leen Engelen (ed.), Cinema Leuven. Een studie naar de Belgische filmaffiche aan de hand van de collectie van het Leuvens stadsarchief (Leuven: Peeters Publishing, 2012); Lies Van de Vijver, ‘Gent Kinemastad. Een multimethodisch onderzoek naar de ontwikkeling van de filmexploitatie, filmprogrammering en filmbeleving in de stad Gent en randgemeenten (1896– 2010) als case binnen New Cinema History onderzoek’, PhD thesis, Ghent University (2011); Michel Bedeur and Paolo Zagaglia, Cinémas 1896–1993 Verviers (Andrimont-Dison: Editions Irezumi, 1993); Michel Arnold, Petite histoire du cinéma à Namur (Namur: Édico, 1990).   6. The main data come from Ann Overbergh, Voorbij de vertoning: Analyse van het Vlaams audiovisueel vertonings- en distributieveld (Gent: BAM, 2011) and The ‘Enlightened’ City: Screen ­Culture Between Ideology, Economics and Experience. A Study on the Social Role of Film Exhibition and Film Consumption in Flanders (1895–2004) in Interaction with Modernity and Urbanisation, a research project funded by the FWO-Flanders (2005–7), which was based at the universities of Antwerp and Ghent.   7. See e.g. Paul Vermeulen, ‘Countryside in the Nevelstad’, Oase: Tijdschrift voor architectuur vol. 20 (2002), pp. 103–7.   8. Blom, Jean Desmet and the Early Dutch Film Trade, p. 93.   9. It was also in this period that the first substantial taxes on film exhibition were introduced all over the country. 10. Convents, Van kinetoscoop tot café-ciné. 11. Howard T. Lewis, The Motion Picture Industry (New York: Van Nostrand, 1933), reprinted in Ian Jarvie, Hollywood’s Overseas Campaign: The North Atlantic Movie Trade, 1920–1950 ­(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 141. 12. Sylvain François, ‘Les représentations cinématographiques en Belgique’, Revue des sciences économiques (1938), p. 53; J. Alicoate, The 1938 Film Year Book (New York: J. B. Brulatour, 1938), p. 1173. See also Clara Pafort-Overduin, John Sedgwick and Jaap Boter, ‘Explanations for the Restrained Development of the Dutch Cinema Market in the 1930s’, Enterprise & Society vol. 13 (2012), p. 635. 13. John Van Heghe, ‘Film als bron voor geschiedschrijving (in België tussen 1920 en 1940)’, Master’s thesis, Ghent University (1978). See also the data for the period between 1924 and 1929 in the Belgian trade journal for the spectacle and leisure industry Annuaire du spectacle de la musique et du cinéma (Brussels: Editorial Office).

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14. Van Heghe, Film als bron, p. 48. 15. Luc Schokkaert and Rik Stallaerts, Onder dak. Een eeuw volks- en gildehuizen (Ghent: Bijdragen museum van de Vlaams sociale strijd/Uitgave provinciebestuur Oost-Vlaanderen, 1987). 16. Daniel Biltereyst, ‘“I Think Catholics Didn’t Go to the Cinema”: Catholic Film Exhibition Strategies and Cinema-going Experiences in Belgium, 1930s–1960s’, in Daniel Biltereyst and Daniela Treveri Gennari (eds), Moralizing Cinema (New York: Routledge, 2015), pp. 255–71. 17. Jan-Pieter Everaerts, Film in België, een permanente revolte. Inleiding tot een geschiedenis en actualiteit van de filmproductie, -distributie en –exploitatie in België (Brussels: Mediadoc, 2000). 18. According to FOD Economy. 19. FOD Economy, inhabitants on 1 January 2013. 20. Ibid. 21. Richard Maltby, Daniel Biltereyst and Philippe Meers (eds), Explorations in New Cinema ­History (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011). 22. Eurostat, Eurostat Regional Yearbook 2011 (Brussels: EU, 2011), p. 26. 23. This division between urban and rural regions was based upon a study by Van Hecke and Van Der Haegen in 1997 (Hiërarchie van de stedelijke kernen in Vlaanderen, studie opgemaakt in opdracht van AROHM, May 1997). 24. For a more expanded version of this analysis, see Daniel Biltereyst and Philippe Meers, ‘Mapping Film Exhibition in Flanders (1920–1990). A Diachronic Analysis of Cinema Culture Combined with Demographic and Geographic Data’, in Julia Hallam and Les Roberts (eds), New Spatial Methodologies in Cinema and the Moving Image (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014), pp. 80–105. 25. Vermeulen, ‘Countryside in the Nevelstad’; N. Van Nuffel and P. Saey, ‘Commuting, Hierarchy, and Networking: The Case of Flanders’, Tijdschrift voor economische en sociale geografie vol. 96 (2005), pp. 313–27. 26. David Morley, ‘For a Materialist, Non-media-centric Media Studies’, Television & New Media vol. 10 (2009), pp. 114–16.

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15 Ch no ‘Town Title Centres First’: The Relocation of the Cinema from ­Out-of-Town to the Town Centre in Britain Author Stuart Hanson

Cinema exhibition in Britain has been in flux over the past ten years, with the total number of cinemas undergoing dynamic change, though overall they have risen from 678 in 2003 to 756 in 2013.1 The number of screens has also risen correspondingly, reflecting the continued growth and dominance of the multiplex.2 A look at the geographical distribution of cinemas reveals that most multiplexes in Britain are still situated outside the urban centres, whereas the overwhelming majority of Britain’s traditional cinemas are located in town and city centres.3 The latter have fewer screens per site, four screens on average compared to 9.8 screens per multiplex. The fluctuation in the fortunes of cinemas has tended to be more pronounced among non-multiplexes, but they are doing better than before. Over the last four years some fifty-three new c­ inemas have opened, of which forty-three were non-multiplexes (‘traditional and mixed-use sites’).4 In several respects, 2012 marked a turning point. It was the first year since 1984 when the increase in the number of traditional screens was greater than that of multiplex screens.5 More significantly perhaps, most of these new venues were located in smaller towns rather than large metropolitan centres and in inner cities rather than outside the urban centre.6 This year-on-year increase in city and town centre cinemas suggests that new planning laws and a greater stress on inner-city regeneration have stimulated the re-emergence of the cinema as a key feature of the urban landscape. Indeed, in towns across Britain new cinemas are opening. In Newquay in Cornwall (27,000 inhabitants), the four-screen Lighthouse Cinema opened in May 2011. After a vigorous public campaign, a new two-screen cinema opened in the small town of Thurso in Scotland (population 7,900) in the renovated former All Star Factory. In Whitstable in Kent (population 32,000) the single-screen Whitstable Electric Theatre opened in August 2011. In Northampton (population 212,000) the Errol Flynn Filmhouse opened in June 2013, even though the town has two multiplexes. In Knutsford in Cheshire (population 13,000) the independent chain Curzon opened their first cinema outside London, in the former Studio Cinema, in February 2013. This was followed by the opening of the two-screen Curzon in the small Yorkshire market town of Ripon (population 16,700) in October 2013, some thirty-one years after the previous cinema in the town closed. In 2014 Curzon opened a three-screen cinema in a former dance hall in Canterbury in Kent (population 54,800). So, what exactly is happening to precipitate so many developments? Historically, the cinema had been an important part of the urban landscape. When the new town of Milton Keynes was selected for Britain’s first multiplex in 1985 by AMC (in partnership

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237

with leisure company Bass), it signalled the beginning of a new type of cinema building, in which multiplex development was linked with the emergence of out-of-town shopping centres and the suburb became the main geographic focus. With ten screens, 2,026 seats, mass free parking and a wide range of food and drink, The Point in Milton Keynes represented a radical departure from the traditional experience of c­ inemagoing. Also new was the form of marketing adopted as the multiplex cinema was seen as part of a wider leisure imperative, combining entertainment and shopping. Within a 15-mile radius of The Point was the proposed catchment area, in which approximately 1.5 million people lived within a 45-minute car drive. The main selling feature was ‘choice’ with the facility to operate up to 300 film showings of some fourteen different titles per week.7 The opening of The Point marked the beginning of cinema’s movement out of town. In the past ten years, the cinema’s place in the town has been re-established. In both cases, as I will argue, the impetus for these changes was determined by two intertwined forces: urban planning and the market. THE MULTIPLEX AND THE MOVE OUT OF THE TOWN The key to understanding the evolution of the multiplex cinema is to pay particular attention to urban planning as inherently ideological, shifting and changing in line with broader political, economic and social considerations. The first periods of accelerated growth in multiplex development between 1988 and 1999 coincided with a relaxed planning environment, in which the town centre was seen as less attractive to investors and developers than the area around the urban core. The corollary of relaxed planning, driven by neo-liberalism and the importance of markets, was the development of large out-of-town shopping centres on the edge of many of Britain’s conurbations. There seems no doubt that there existed a synergistic relationship between the multiplex and these centres, which were important in the spread of these new cinemas in Britain. By the early 1990s Britain had become the most developed multiplex market in Europe, with forty-two new sites in the first five years after The Point opened and eighty-two within ten years.8 In that first decade multiplex developments were intimately caught up with the shift in shopping and leisure from the urban centre to the periphery, and were dominated to a large extent by increases in car ownership, the historical process of urban decentralisation, a lack of suitable sites for development in city/town centres, cheaper land and property rents in out-of-town sites and the introduction of development zones with a concomitant relaxation in planning.9 From 1985 the number of multiplexes increased and so did the number of annual cinema admissions, which rose steadily to reach a peak of 175.9 million in 2002 and though it fluctuated thereafter stood at 165.5 million in 2013.10 Here one must recognise that the architectural and cultural aspects of multiplex developments were key, especially in relation to planning, which is best expressed in the discussion of urban regeneration and the role multiplexes came to play in the leisure-based economy in a post-industrial context. As significant as the new planning legislation in the immediate post-war period was on cinemagoing and its contraction, so was the range of planning and economic legislation in the 1980s on its resurgence, albeit at the continued 238

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expense of traditional cinema.11 The Local Government, Planning and Land Act 1980 was a primer for multiplex development in that it covered the setting-up of Urban Development Corporations and Enterprise Zones, which sought to speed up the planning process and create a relaxed regulatory environment. Coupled with the ‘shaking out’ of traditional industries, emphasis was increasingly placed on the rapid development of out-of-town shopping and leisure complexes across Britain, often on old industrial sites. These would act as primers for the regeneration of regional economies and were in part predicated on increased ownership of motorcars and, crucially, the role of private capital. The new shopping and leisure complexes that were built in the late 1980s were the location for the first round of multiplex developments and set the template for many years of development to come. In its press pack, UCI Cinemas was very specific about its choice of location: UCI bears one factor in mind when choosing a location for its cinema complexes – accessibility. Whether it’s a shopping centre or leisure park, or a free-standing unit, the site must be easy to get to by private or public transport. Almost always it’s out of the town centre but still at the centre of the community.12

If prospective sites were defined by criteria like ample population, accessibility by car, parking facilities, a nearby leisure or shopping complex, infrastructure and lack of nearby multiplex competition, then these are more often than not in areas on the periphery of towns and cities. One of the prime motivations for this position apart from the perceived advantages of space and accessibility was that land was considerably cheaper than in the centre. City and town centre sites for multiplexes were initially rare since the real-estate and development costs outweighed potential profits. This had an effect on the centrally located older cinemas. Depending on local circumstances, the impact was either positive or negative. In towns such as Dudley, Peterborough and Swansea, for instance, Rank closed its prime-site cinemas because of competition from other companies’ multiplexes nearby. This pattern of the removal of operational cinemas from their traditional places in the metropolitan area was repeated all over the country in the first ten years of multiplex development. In the large town of Wolverhampton the closure of the last major cinema in 1991 was such a cause for concern for the local council that it embarked upon an initiative to develop an ‘Entertainment Quarter’ in the town. This centred upon the oldest part of the town around the theatre and a recently modernised former Victorian factory, which housed a media centre and a small subsidised cinema. Occasionally cinemas got a new lease of life as independent cinemas, but more often than not exhibitors were looking to exploit their prime-site real-estate value. THE RESURGENCE OF THE TOWN: THE CINEMA MOVES BACK From the early 1990s onwards there was a growing anxiety about the impact of out-of-town developments on Britain’s urban centres. This concern found expression in new and more restricted planning guidelines emphasising the importance of ‘Town Centres First’

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the urban core rather than the edge. Specifically, these began under John Major’s Conservative government and its introduction of planning restrictions designed to halt the out-of-town shopping centre. The new policy was further developed after 1997 under Tony Blair’s Labour government with its call for ‘sustainable development’ and the regeneration of Britain’s towns and cities. This saw a variety of strategies, two of which – the designation of cultural zones or quarters and the identification of areas for redevelopment as shopping centres – were particularly common.13 In retrospect, the key moment in the transition in both the fortunes of the urban centre and the cinema were the opening of the Trafford Centre near Manchester and ­Bluewater, off the M25 motorway in Kent. The opening of these enormous complexes in respectively 1998 and 1999 marked the effective end of the giant ­out-of-town shopping centre in favour of town and city centre developments. However, the emphasis remained on mixed shopping/leisure development, in which the cinema was an important element. Out-of-town developments came to be seen increasingly as encouraging excessive car use, having poor public transport links and building on increasingly valuable greenfield land. The cities, developers were told, were full of ‘brownfield’ sites (former industrial land, for instance) that could and should be redeveloped. Though seemingly wedded to the areas around towns and cities, the shift in the planning environment meant that many large multiplex operators looked anew at the urban centre as a potential site for the cinema. This was driven by a growing trend for town centre management schemes, in which councils entered into partnerships with commercial property companies, to develop the town centre in a strategic fashion in order to enhance retail, cultural, residential and leisure developments.14 The renewed interest in city centres is characteristic of a process Neil Ravenscroft calls ‘recentralisation’.15 Town centre management stresses the role leisure and shopping developments could have in sustaining the ‘vitality and viability’ of urban centres, as bars, restaurants and cinemas would encourage visitors outside of normal shopping and work hours. The explicit aim was the creation of a more vibrant night-time economy – the so-called ‘leisure-led renaissance’. Across Britain local councils have begun to undertake feasibility studies for their town centres, propose action plans and establish town centre management initiatives, most of which stress the importance of developing mixed retail and leisure developments in which the multiplex cinema is an anchor tenant. These include West Bromwich, Orpington, Grantham, Wilmslow, Selby, Swindon and Telford. A 1,300-seat Vue multiplex with nine screens opened in 2013 in the centre of Cramlington, a medium-sized town in Northumberland. It was the first of a series of similar developments in other towns in the northeast of England, such as Gateshead, Bishop Auckland and Darlington. All were spurred on in part because of the desire to regenerate what are former industrial towns and boost employment. A study by north-east-based planning consultancy Nathaniel Lichfield & Partners concluded that ‘[t]raditional high streets are having to evolve in order to meet changing consumer demands and economic conditions. Our research is showing that cinemas can become key anchors in the high street of the future.’16

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CASE STUDY: CORBY – A POST-INDUSTRIAL TOWN Typical of the adoption of town centre management strategies to encourage regeneration is Corby in Northamptonshire, a post-industrial town of 80 square kilometres. In the early 1930s, Stewarts and Lloyds opened what was then one of the largest steelworks in Britain, attracting new workers, especially from the economically depressed west of Scotland, and swelling Corby’s population so that by 1941 it had more than doubled in a decade from 4,600 to over 9,000. The demand for entertainment by the growing population heralded a new prestigious Odeon cinema, built in 1936 and designed by local architect Lawrence M. Gotch, who also designed a garden-suburb-inspired housing scheme for Stewarts and Lloyds’ workers. In 1950, Corby was designated a New Town, in part to manage the growing demand for housing, as steel manufacturing developed and the population grew dramatically, reaching some 57,000 by the 1970s. The fortunes of the Odeon cinema fluctuated in this period until it closed down in 1969. For two years, the town had no cinema until the Jerry Lewis Twin opened in 1973 as part of a new shopping centre.17 The 1970s saw the contraction and eventual closure of the main steelworks in 1980. Since then the fortunes of the town have rested on the efforts of Corby Borough Council to attract investment in the shape of alternative industries and improve the town centre, which lost its only cinema in 1992 after a long series of changes in name and management. In their Arts Strategy for Corby (2004), the Borough Council highlighted the absence of a cinema and recognised that Corby’s residents were forced to travel out of town to the multiplex cinema in Kettering (18 kilometres away).18 In the report, reference was made to a survey undertaken in 1998 in which the cinema was highest ranked of the leisure facilities that residents wanted, with support from 39 per cent of the respondents.19 In 2008, the Borough Council committed themselves to ‘[f]acilitate the opening of a multiplex cinema complex by 2010’.20 However, unable to finance improvements to the ageing shopping centre and adjacent land, the council sold it to a property company – Helical Bar – in 2011. This effectively meant that the centre of the town was privately owned and managed (which is not uncommon in Britain). On an adjacent plot of land the local council built a swimming pool in 2009 and Corby Cube in 2010, which houses the council chamber, registry office, library and a theatre called ‘The Core @ Corby Cube’. The theatre is also equipped to show films and when it opened it was the first cinema in Corby for nearly twenty years. The development of Corby Cube and swimming pool were part of a strategy on the part of the Borough Council to regenerate the town centre, outlined in the Corby Town Centre Area Action Plan published in 2006.21 The plan noted a series of priorities including the intention to: promote an active and dynamic heart for the town, offering a comprehensive range of new cultural, retail and entertainment facilities. The transformation will take place within a distinctive setting of attractive new buildings, quality public realm and new public spaces. – To promote a rich diversity of uses throughout the day, making it an attractive place to live and work, supported by a growing evening economy and leisure and entertainment offer.22

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Design for the Vue Cinema, Corby. Artist impression (Source: www.northantstelegraph.co.uk)

Savoy Cinema, Corby, 2015 (Photo by the author)

Having had no cinema since 1992, Corby was by 2013 subject to two separate multiplex cinema proposals for a town of 61,000 inhabitants. In 2011, a small multiplex chain called Savoy Cinemas, based in the East Midlands, obtained planning permission for a six-screen cinema complex including three restaurants on a site near the Corby Cube. Two years later, Helical Bar, the owners of the nearby Willow Shopping Centre, submitted a proposal to renovate the shopping centre and include an eight-screen multiplex operated by Vue, Britain’s third largest multiplex chain. Although this would mean two rival projects, there were no obvious objections from the council. In June 2014, however, work on the Vue site stopped following an appeal by the developers of the new Savoy Cinema, who argued that the new multiplex (at only half a mile from the construction site of the Savoy) would have a negative impact on their own development. In a press release, the council clarified its position, arguing that ‘Corby Borough Council, as the local planning authority, is not in a position to pick one operator over another’ and that ‘having two national cinema operators wanting to open in Corby only shows the confidence that they have in Corby’s future’.23 In January 2015, Helical Bar finally won permission for their cinema development with a narrow vote in the council chamber. The decision disregarded the concerns that Corby would not be able to support two separate cinemas in favour of the conclusion of an independent report, which stated both venues ‘will help to deliver the significant improvements to the evening economy that have long been sought by the borough council’.24 In July 2015, the new six-screen Savoy opened. The plans for the Vue multiplex were shelved when the company pulled out, citing the proposed Savoy as the reason. Until the Savoy complex opened, the closest cinema for the inhabitants of Corby was the eight-screen Odeon located on a retail park, on the edge of the neighbouring town of Kettering and accessible only by car. Kettering once had five cinemas, but each closed in turn leaving only one – a small independent called the Ohio. The latter closed in 1997 when the Odeon multiplex opened. Its year of opening was significant as eighteen months earlier a new emphasis placed upon regenerating urban centres had been explicitly signalled in new planning guidelines issued by central government. PPG6 Town Centres and Retail Developments (June 1996) sought to reverse the trend for out-of-town developments, and while not outlawing them completely it sought to encourage edge of centre or town centre developments.25 Kettering’s multiplex is an 242

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example of what was increasingly referred to as ‘out of centre’, defined as a ‘location which is not in or on the edge of a centre but not necessarily outside the urban area’.26 Cinema developments like the Odeon in Kettering were part of a developing national trend as the number of screens in city centres or edge of centre cinemas increased by over 20 per cent between 2001 and 2004.27 THE IMPORTANCE OF LOCAL CINEMA Though Northamptonshire is largely a rural county, Corby and Kettering have a combined population of over 120,000 people, which is more than 150,000 if one includes the whole of the Borough of Kettering. One might expect such an area to be attractive to a multiplex operator. However, in Britain’s smaller market towns, especially those in more isolated rural areas, the situation is rather different, with many such towns losing their cinemas. In 2005, the BFI sought to consider the impact of local cinemas on their communities in a study of five town and rural cinemas.28 The impetus for the report was a recognition that in the previous decade there had been an increase in multiplexes of 232 per cent but a decline of 28 per cent in traditional cinemas, with the key issue being the propensity for multiplexes to be opened in higher population areas.29 In 2002, the report argued, only 1 per cent of multiplexes were in areas with populations of less than 55,000, with the result that ‘[m]any smaller communities or areas with low population densities have therefore lost access to cinema through the closure of so many traditional sites and the inability/reluctance of larger operators to take their place.’30 This loss of cinema had effects that extended beyond simply the absence of a venue in which to show films; rather it contributed to a decline in the attractiveness of the town centre, particularly in the evenings. Thus, the report concluded that cinemas contribute both ‘to the vitality and vibrancy of town centres, encouraging the evening economy and increasing footfall’ and ‘to the local economy through audience and visitor spend’.31 Though the majority of multiplex operators focused on the areas around large conurbations, there were some that saw the commercial benefits of opening in smaller towns. One such chain was Apollo Leisure, which made a marketing virtue out of opening or taking over existing cinemas in some of Britain’s smaller, regional towns, as a ‘local alternative to the greenfield multiplex’.32 Similarly, in the 1980s and 1990s London-based Mainline Pictures proposed to extend out of the city and open cinemas in what company founder Romaine Hart described as ‘decent country towns’.33 In reality these lay primarily within the prosperous south-east of England. Case Study: Melton Mowbray – a rural market town The focus in the BFI report on the regenerative benefits of small-town cinemas was part of a broad shift in thinking about cinema. In 2000, the Labour government published their Rural White Paper, which argued for the importance of a vibrant night-time economy and the explicit importance of the cinema in small to medium-sized towns. Towns with a population of 10,000–25,000 people, it recommended, should have a fulltime local cinema.34 ‘Town Centres First’

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The authors of the Rural White Paper might well have had in mind Melton Mowbray, a small, rural market town with a population of approximately 27,000 people, in the East Midlands of England. Its art deco design Regal Cinema dates back to 1934, when it opened with a seating capacity of 879. It continued operation as a single-screen cinema in its original form until 1979, when a bingo company acquired the building and converted the lower stalls area into a bingo club. The upper circle area remained in use as a cinema. Though the cinema continued, the bingo club was subsequently closed, sold off and converted into a bar. In 2000, the lease of the building was purchased by John Merryweather, who had worked in the cinema exhibition industry since he was seventeen, first with national chain ABC and latterly as general manager of Apollo Cinemas. Along with his family, John Merryweather operated the Regal as a first-run independent cinema until 2012, when he died and the cinema went into voluntary liquidation and closed. Whereupon the owner of the property was looking for a new tenant who would renew the lease and run a cinema. Within weeks the ‘Save Regal Melton Group’ was formed, with a membership in excess of 100 and the stated aim of running the cinema part-time using a social enterprise business model called a Community Interest Company (CIC) – a limited company that exists to benefit the community rather than private shareholders. Tony and Amanda Mundin registered an interest in the vacant cinema. They already operated another cinema (previously closed for fifteen years) in the small town of Belper in rural Derbyshire. At the Regal, their plan was to implement the same structure as in

Regal Cinema, Melton Mowbray, 2015 (Photo by the author)

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Belper: refurbish the interior and exterior; reduce seat numbers; instigate a membership system; utilise social media to promote the cinema and stay in touch with cinemagoers; and operate as a second-run cinema (taking films after general release and thereby getting them at reduced cost and with more advantageous arrangements with distributors) with up to seventeen screenings per week.35 To convince the ‘Save Regal Melton Group’ that their commercial proposal would be in the interests of the town and satisfy many of the group’s demands, the Mundins invited ‘local people to attend a meeting with us to discuss our ideas and also to encourage them to put forward their thoughts on how they wanted the cinema developed’.36 With the support of both the ‘Save Regal Melton Group’ and the local newspaper, the Mundins took out a twenty-five-year lease and invested £152,000 (€204,000) in the renovation, refurbishing the auditorium and reducing the numbers of seats from 216 to 108. The cinema reopened in March 2013. The business plan incorporates an optional membership system that offers reduced entry prices, free tickets, members’ events and a monthly programme delivered in advance. This was pioneered at the Ritz in Belper, where membership currently exceeds 2,000, and provides not only an income stream, but is seen as encouraging loyalty and inclusivity. In Belper, the reopening of the Ritz with its 56,000 admissions annually is claimed to have stimulated the town’s economy with five new restaurants opened since 2006.37 The significance of Melton Mowbray as a location for a cinema is its catchment profile, with the nearest multiplexes located at least 24 kilometres away in Grantham, Leicester, Loughborough or Nottingham. In this part of Leicestershire, public transport, particularly in the evening, is poor, while Melton Mowbray is the market town and focal point for a large rural area. According to the BFI the East Midlands is one of the least densely screened areas in Britain with 4.7 screens per 100,000 people, while the national average is 6.1.38 LOOKING AHEAD Like Corby and many other towns in Britain, Melton Mowbray was seeking to make itself both attractive to prospective visitors and provide amenities for residents. The adoption of strategies to enhance ‘vitality and viability’ rest upon the importance of leisure and extending the economy of the town centre throughout the day and into the evening. Indeed, Planning Policy Statement 6 (PPS6): Planning for Town Centres (2003), which replaced PPG6 (1996), urged local authorities to plan for: a range of complementary evening and night-time economy uses which appeal to a wide range of age and social groups, ensuring provision is made where appropriate for a range of leisure, cultural and tourism activities, such as cinemas, theatres, restaurants, public houses, bars, nightclubs and cafés.39

The Borough Council had already articulated the perceived importance of a cinema in Melton Mowbray in 2002 when they undertook a ‘Town Centre Vision, Strategy and Action Plan’.40 Echoing the then pervasive emphasis upon the town centre as a focus for leisure the report stressed: ‘Town Centres First’

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Leisure uses increasingly have to be considered in relation to retailing in the modern town centre. Cinemas, bowling alleys, nightclubs and health and fitness clubs provide attractions for the town and can extend the hours of trading. As a rural market town Melton Mowbray cannot, nor would it want to achieve the 24-hour economy of the large city centre, but leisure activities will bring more people to the centre and provide an incentive for retailers and caterers to extend their opening hours.41

Today, cinemas are key features of the evening cultural landscape, though there are a series of tensions with regard to the extent to which they are attracting a broader range of cinemagoers. As Georgina Ennis-Reynolds argues, the opening up of more public houses, bars and clubs has encouraged a form of ‘leisure “grazing” predominantly by young males’.42 In some towns this courting of young people has benefited cinemas. A recent study shows that cinema attendance was the most popular monthly activity among eighteen- to thirty-five-year-olds.43 If one looks at admissions historically, this age group has always constituted cinema’s core audience. Nevertheless, this age group is statistically declining as a proportion of the total population and this might have a substantial effect on cinema attendance patterns. It will be over thirty-fives who assume a greater proportion of the population in the next decades and their higher disposable income and demand for a more diverse range of commercial and cultural amenities has implications not only for town centres and their economies, but also for film exhibitors. In many ways, the story of film exhibition in Britain since 1985 marked first a break in cinema’s relationship with the town centre, only for it to be re-established in the opening decade of the twenty-first century. Though the out-of-town shopping complex remains an important feature of leisure and consumption patterns in Britain, it is possible to identify a series of shifts in the relative position of the periphery and the core, with the town centre once more the focus for development. It is not possible to understand the changes in the place of cinema in Britain during the past twenty-five years without considering the complex dynamic between planning and the market. Much of the impetus for change was and still is a response to a supposed crisis in Britain’s town and city centres, particularly around the decline in retailing and the relative attractions of the town and city centre. This further supports the contention that consumption is still the ideological mantra for urban development, with Britain’s new cinemas increasingly relocated to the town and city, as part of the new leisure economy. Just as the urban centre declined in relative importance as a place of leisure and entertainment in the late 1970s, precipitating a commercial flight to the edges, so it is now seen as undergoing a ‘renaissance’. In the 1930s, especially with the development of the suburbs, the urban centre was a spectacular attraction for visitors, offering new kinds of spaces and entertainments.44 In 2013, the urban centre is increasingly the focus of a series of civic initiatives aimed at regeneration, predicated upon the space as once again spectacular. Notes   1. The number of multiplexes has risen every year since the first one opened in 1985. Over the last decade, their dominance in the market continued to increase. In 2003, 71 per cent of screens were in multiplexes, while in 2013 the multiplex accounted for 75 per cent of screens; BFI Statistical Yearbook 2014 (London: BFI, 2014), p. 105. 246

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  2. Ibid., p. 106.   3. In 2013 the British Film Institute (hereafter BFI) reported that 48.2 per cent of Britain’s 3,867 cinema screens were in town or city centres, 13.8 per cent in edge of centre sites, 34.3 per cent in out-of-town sites and 3 per cent in rural areas; BFI Statistical Yearbook 2014, p. 106.   4. Ibid., p. 105.   5. The year saw the opening of twenty-one traditional and mixed-use sites out of a total of twenty-four new cinemas; Dodona Research, Cinemagoing 22 (Leicester: Dodona Research, 2013).   6. In total, sixty-three screens were added in 2012 to city and town centre sites; BFI Statistical Yearbook 2013 (London: BFI, 2014), p. 117.   7. For a history of The Point see Stuart Hanson, ‘A “Glittering Landmark for a 21st Century Entertainment Centre”: The Story of The Point Multiplex Cinema in Milton Keynes’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television vol. 33 no. 2 (2013), pp. 270–88.   8. Dodona Research, Cinemagoing 9 (Leicester: Dodona Research, 2001).   9. Stuart Hanson, ‘From Out-of-Town to the Edge and Back to the Centre: Multiplexes in Britain from the 1990s’, in Karina Aveyard and Albert Moran (eds), Watching Films: New Perspectives on Movie-going, Exhibition and Reception (Bristol: Intellect, 2013), pp. 245–59. 10. BFI Statistical Yearbook 2014, p. 11. 11. In the two decades after World War II the movement of working-class communities out of the city, usually as part of slum-clearance programmes, to new suburbs and towns on the periphery of the conurbation played a significant part in the decline of cinemagoing. In most of these areas there were no cinemas. Thus, the catalysts for these changes were The New Towns Act 1946 and the Town and Country Planning Act 1947. In many of these new areas planners made no provision for cinemas and cinema chains were less inclined to invest in new cinemas. See Stuart Hanson, From Silent Screen to Multi-screen: A History of Cinema ­Exhibition in Britain since 1896 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), pp. 94–6. 12. Press information pack (UCI Cinemas [UK] Ltd, London, 1991). 13. See Hanson, ‘From Out-of-Town to the Edge and Back to the Centre’. 14. See Gary Warnaby, Andrew Alexander and Dominic Medway, ‘Town Centre Management in the UK: A Review, Synthesis and Research Agenda’, International Review of Retail Distribution and Consumer Research vol. 8 (1998), pp. 15–31. 15. Neil Ravenscroft, ‘The Vitality of Viability of Town Centres’, Urban Studies vol. 37 no. 13 (2000), pp. 2533–49, here p. 2533. 16. Reported in Karen Overbury, ‘Curtain Could Go up on More Cinemas’, The Journal (18 December 2013). 17. The cinema was significant in that it was one of the few cinemas opened in Britain by the Network Cinema Corporation, which was part owned by the actor and comedian Jerry Lewis. However, after only opening two of a planned thirty-two cinemas Network Cinema Corporation sold out to a former boxer called Billy Walker, who incorporated them into his Oscar Cinemas chain. 18. Corby Borough Council, Arts Strategy for Corby, March 2004. 19. Ibid., p. 15. 20. Corby Borough Council, Corporate Plan: ‘One Corby’. Building a Bigger, Better, Brighter Corby 2008–2013 (2008), www.corby.gov.uk/sites/corby.gov.uk/files/documents/files /Corporate%20Plan%202008%20-%202013.pdf, accessed 25 August 2014.

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21. Corby Borough Council, Local Development Framework for North Northamptonshire: Corby Borough Town Centre Area Action Plan Preferred Options (May 2006). 22. Ibid., p. 5. 23. Corby Borough Council, ‘Clarification of Corby’s Cinema Plans’, Press release, 11 April 2014, www.corby.gov.uk/press-release/clarification-corbys-cinema-plans, accessed 24 August 2014. 24. ‘Vue Cinema Gets Green Light in Corby’, Northamptonshire Telegraph, 23 January 2015, www.northantstelegraph.co.uk/news/top-stories/vue-cinema-gets-green-light-in -corby-1-6536024, accessed 9 February 2015. 25. Department of the Environment, Town Centres and Retail Development, Planning Policy Guidance, PPG6 (London: HMSO, 1996). See Hanson, ‘From Out-of-Town to the Edge and Back to the Centre’. 26. Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, Planning for Town Centres, Planning Policy Guidance, PPG6 (London: HMSO, 2005), p. 31. 27. UK Film Council, Statistical Yearbook/Annual Review 2004/05 (London: UK Film Council, 2004), p. 40. 28. BFI, The Impact of Local Cinema: Overview (London: BFI, 2005). 29. Ibid., p. 9. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid., p. 3. 32. Apollo Leisure, ‘Making Local Cinema Work! ...’, Promotional Feature, Screen International no. 827 (4 October 1991), pp. 18–19. 33. Screen International no. 645 (26 March 1988), p. 24. 34. Deputy Prime Minister and Secretary of State for the Environment, Transport and the Regions, and the Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, Our Countryside: The Future. A Fair Deal for Rural England (Cm 4909) (London: Stationery Office, 2000), p. 77. 35. For a brief history of developments see Bill Chew, ‘Return of the Regal’, Cinema Technology no. 21 (March 2013), pp. 40–1. 36. Amanda Mundin, quoted in Bill Chew, ‘Return of the Regal II’, Cinema Technology no. 22 (June 2013), pp. 72–4, here p. 72. 37. The Regal Cinema, Melton, unpublished presentation by Amanda Mundin, 2012. 38 BFI Statistical Yearbook 2014, p. 109. 39 Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, Planning Policy Statement 6: Planning for Town Centres (PPS6) (London: HMSO, 2003), paragraph 2.23, p. 12. 40 Melton Mowbray Town Centre: A Vision for the Future, a Centre Vision Project for Melton Borough Council, Leicestershire County Council and Melton Town Forum. Prepared by the Civic Trust Regeneration Unit with Chesterton Consulting, July 2002. 41. Ibid., p. 18. 42. Georgina Ennis-Reynolds, ‘Sustainable Development and Multiplexes’, Journal of Leisure Property vol. 2 no. 4 (2002), pp. 317–31, 326. 43. The Civic Trust, Night Vision: Town Centres for All (London: Civic Trust, 2006), p. 26. 44. See David Chaney, Lifestyles (London: Routledge, 1996).

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Index

Notes: Non-English titles of films or institutions are given in the original language, with a crossreference from the English (where alphabetical separation makes this necessary). Page numbers in bold indicate detailed/extended treatment. Those in italics refer to illustrations. n = endnote. t = table/diagram. 55 Days at Peking (1963)  62 A Taste of Honey (1961)  123, 124 Abbott and Costello Meet Captain Kidd (1952)  61 Abeln  90, 97, 98, 156, 157 Abrams, Lynn  32 admission prices  11, 13, 33, 59, 67, 88, 90, 96, 100, 113, 117, 166, 167, 199, 200, 202, 213, 214, 217, 218, 225, 226, 238, 245, 246 advertising of cinemas/programmes  27, 30–1, 34, 44, 56–61, 79–81, 112, 157, 158, 159, 189 Aerograd (1935)  221 age (of films shown)  8–9, 45, 46, 56, 78, 80–1, 82–3, 97, 112, 170, 176, 186, 205 Agence pour le développement régional du cinéma (ADRC)  214, 216, 218 Index

Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes (Aguirre, Wrath of God, 1972)  189 Alice’s Restaurant (1969)  186, 187 Allen, Robert C.  1, 2, 3, 36 amateur theatre/performances in cinemas  30, 32, 39, 53, 57, 61, 90, 96, 112, 151 ambulant film exhibition see travelling cinema Amsterdam  9, 87–9, 93, 159, 163n34 Anderson, Gilbert  33 Anderson, John  34 Angels with Dirty Faces (1938)  56 Apollo Leisure Group  243 architecture, cinema  8, 26–7, 40–1, 55, 95, 96, 108–9, 110, 157, 167, 215, 244 Arnheim, Rudolf  202 Art & Essai cinemas  13, 15, 16, 167, 178, 213–22

art house films/programmes  14, 15, 16, 62, 67, 181, 187, 188, 189, 190, 218, 219, 221, 228 venues  14, 15, 16, 160, 187, 189, 190, 226, 227, 228, 233–4 see also Art & Essai cinemas Asquith, Herbert  30 Astaire, Fred  97 attendance decline  5, 17, 48, 59, 60, 90, 97, 102, 103n18, 116, 117, 118, 121, 156, 163n37, 178, 190, 213, 224, 225, 229, 243 increase  6, 12, 13, 15, 67, 68, 69, 81, 87, 88, 89, 90, 100, 101,103n14, 165, 175, 204, 213, 223, 225, 226, 229, 230, 237, 238, 243 seasonal variations  4, 5, 8, 11, 25, 32, 45, 52, 54, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 85n28, 87, 88, 89, 94, 98, 114, 135, 141, 151, 152, 155, 170, 218

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Attree, Douglas  55, 61 Attree, Douglas, Jr.  55, 62 Aveyard, Karina  1 Barnen från frostmofjållet (The Children, 1945)  80 Barnstijn, Loet Cohen  153 Bathing Beauty (1944)  80 Baudet, Han  151, 153 Bazin, Réné  168 Becker, Jacques  170 Belgium  16, 17, 88, 102n4, 141, 142n45, 223–34 Beneath the 12 Mile Reef (1954)  64n25 Benjamin, Walter  23, 36 Bergheimat (Mountain Home, 1934)  137 Bergman, Ingmar  187 Bert, Albert  226 Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2011)  205 Billerbeck (Germany)  4–5, 38–48, 41, 42 Billy Liar (1963)  62 bingo halls  5, 26, 27, 33, 54, 55, 61, 244 Bio Nisses Tältbiografer (travelling cinema)  85–6n28 Björkman, Carl  82 Blair, Tony  17, 240 block booking  43, 85n16, 73–4, 111 Blow-Up (1966)  122, 123 Blue Movie (1971)  103n18 Boesch, Paul  137, 138 Bogarde, Dirk  62 Bogart, Humphrey  56 Bo’ness (Scotland)  4, 25, 26, 26–31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36 Bordeaux (France)  8, 105, 106, 108, 109, 111, 113, 114, 115n1  Boter, Jaap  92, 163n36 Bourvil, André  113

250

The Bowery Boys  57 Box, Kathleen  117 The Boy from Oklahoma (1954)  61 Brando, Marlon  113 The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)  62 British Federation of Film Societies (BFFS)  197–8, 200–2, 203, 204–5, 210n4 British Film Institute (BFI)  200–2, 203, 247n3 Buñuel, Luis  175 The Caddy (1953)  57 La Cage aux filles (1950)  172, 173 Calder, Robert and Sarah  32 capacity (of cinemas)  24, 26, 27, 30, 33, 40, 47, 55, 67,69, 70, 76, 77, 78, 80, 85n28, 87, 91, 95, 99, 103n14, 104n35,104n38,108, 117, 151, 218, 226, 227, 238, 240, 244, 245 Carcerés, Benigno  215 Carr, Joe  64n30 Carry on Camping (1969)  57–8 Carry on films  57–8 Carry on Jack (1963)  58 car ownership/use  9, 47, 87, 97, 120–2, 160, 225, 238, 238, 240, 242 Castle Acre (England)  207 Catholic Church  4–5, 7, 11, 12–13, 38–40, 42–8, 88, 89, 91–3, 153, 157, 165–78, 186, 189, 214, 224 Caverto, J.F.  32 censorship  13, 43, 44, 45, 48, 50n18, 92, 93, 166, 167, 223

Central Booking Agency  201 Chaplin, Charlie  56, 186 Chapman, Anya  59 Chapman, James  124 Charnacé, Françoise de  175–6 Châtelain, Hélène  221 children  2,11, 12, 28, 29, 30, 32, 47, 54, 56, 57, 58, 59, 61, 64n30, 111, 114, 125, 126, 133, 135, 138, 140, 143, 155, 166, 190 see also youth Chilowicz, François  217 Cholvy, Gérard  170 Christie, Julie  123 Church of Scotland  28 ciné-clubs  13, 14, 15, 97, 102, 169, 175, 176, 177, 178, 214 Cinematograph Act 1909 (UK)  30 class 5, 10, 15, 19n10, 39, 53, 54, 60, 61, 62, 73, 75, 77, 82, 88, 91, 93–4, 100, 101, 102, 119, 135, 140, 165, 168, 175, 182, 189, 201, 202, 247n11 CNC (Centre national du cinéma, France)  7, 106, 111 Cochran, C.B.  54 Cockshott, Gerald  203 The Colditz Story (1955)  62 Comité catholique du cinématographe (CCC)  166 communists  97, 100, 101, 102, 104n44, 182, 189 community cinemas (UK)  15–16, 197–210 Community Interest Companies (CICs, UK)  244 Convents, Guido  224 Corby (UK)  241–3, 242, 245

Cinema Beyond the City

The Countryman and the Cinematograph (1901)  1–2 Coutras (France)  7–8, 105, 108, 109–12, 113–15 Coward, Noël  57 Cream Farewell Concert (1968)  187 Creative Arts East (charity)  206 Croquet, Jean-Robert  216 Crossed Swords (1954)  57 Cuba Cabana (1952)  43 Cul-de-Sac (1966)  189 Darling (1965)  122, 123 Delorme, Danielle  172–3, 174 DeMille, Cecil B.  56 Desmet, Jean  151 Devine, Thomas Martin  28 Dibbets, Karel  7, 89, 90, 91, 152, 160 Dickinson, Margaret  117 Dickson, Louis  27, 29, 30, 31 Die Maggi-Werke in Singen am Hohentwiel (Maggi Works in Singen at Hohentwiel) 147–8n50 Die (France)  15, 16, 18, 214–22, 215 digital projection  15, 200, 204, 206, 221, 222n14 Disney, Walt  56, 61, 62 distribution/distributors  4, 23–4, 33, 35, 43–4, 74, 78, 85n16, 92, 149, 153–4, 185–6, 201, 204, 214, 218, 221, 245 see also block booking Dixie, Flo  34 Doctor in Distress (1963)  62 Donaldson, Geoffrey  161n4 Dorset Moviola  204 Dovzhenko, Aleksandr  221

Index

Dr Oetker (food industry)  139, 144 Drukker, Jan Willem  151, 153 Dumazedier, Joffre  215 Duvivier, Julien  175 East–West Festival (Die) see Festival Est–Ouest Easy Rider (1969)  187 L’École buissonnière (1949)  172 Ennis-Reynolds, Georgina  246 Eva und der Frauenarzt  43 Evans, Liz  199 Every Girl Should Be Married (1950)  172 expanded cinema  144, 148n55 Faradi, Ashgar  218 Farrebique (1946)  170 Farrow, Mia  186 Fassbinder, Rainer Werner  187 Fédération loisirs et culture cinématographique (FLECC)  169, 176 Fernandel  113, 175 Festival Est–Ouest (Die,France)  215, 220–1 Film-Dienst (Catholic film review)  42–5 film societies ( UK)  15, 197–9, 200–4 Filmägarnas kontrollförening (Film Owners’ Control Bureau, Sweden)  69 Flanders  16–17, 228–34 Flash Gordon (serial, 1936)  79 Flight of the White Heron (1954)  59, 60 Flynn, Errol  57

Folkets Husrörelsens Riksorganisation (FHR –National Federation of People’s Houses, Sweden)  6, 70, 73–4, 79, 81, 82, 85n15 Follow That Dream (1962)  58 Formby, George  54 Forming and Running a Film Society (BFI/BFFS guide)  201, 202, 203 Forte Group  59, 63n14 Fortune Hunter (1954)  58 France  2, 7, 8, 11, 12–16, 74, 88, 105–15, 141, 146n20, 147n 45, 149, 165–78, 213–22, 224, 225 French Connection (1971)  186 The French Line (1954)  58 Friesland (Netherlands)  87–8 , 91, 93, 101, 152, 156 Froboess, Conny  97 The Fugitive (1948)  172 Fuller-Seeley, Kathryn  18n1 Furhammar, Leif  67, 82 Fury, Billy  59 Gabin, Jean  113 Gardner, Robert, Rev.  28 Garncarz, Joseph  150, 160 Gaudreault, André  2, 10, 134, 136 gender  32, 34, 54, 123, 133, 135, 139, 143, 144, 168, 169, 170–6, 177, 217, 246 Genevieve (1953)  61 Germany  4–5, 7, 14, 38–48, 50n18, 80, 139, 144, 146n20, 148n50, 150, 181–90, 224, 225

251

Germersheim rock festival (1972)  183 Gironde (France)  7–8, 105–15 Glasgow  24, 25, 27, 28, 32, 34, 35 The Glenn Miller Story (1954)  61 Gorleston-on-Sea (UK)  5, 52–6, 60–2, 208 Gotch, Lawrence M.  241 Gothenburg (Sweden)  67, 80, 83n3 Goulag (2000)  221 Goupi–Mains rouges (1943)  170 Grant, Cary  172 Grease (1978)  9 The Great Escape (1963)  61 The Great Gatsby (2013)  205 Great Yarmouth (UK)  5, 8, 52, 53–60, 55, 61, 62 The Greatest Show on Earth (1952)  56 Groningen Province (Netherlands)  7, 88, 93, 94–102 Groupe de Recherches Archéologiques et Historiques de Coutras (GRAHC)  105, 115n4, 116n11 Gunga Din (1939)  97 Guntersblum (RheinlandPfalz, Germany)  186, 187–90 Guthrie, Arlo  186 Hagemann, Dr  47 Hallam, Julia  123–4 Hammerdal (Sweden)  78–9, 79, 80–3 Hanson, Stuart  117–18 Harold and Maude (1971)  187, 189 Hart, Romaine  243

252

Harvey, Laurence  123 Haveman, Jan  101 Heimatfilme  137–8 Henkel Company  139, 144 Henry, Gérard  216, 221 Herzog, Werner  189 Herzog Film  43 High Flyers (1937)  97 Highlands and Islands Film Guild  118 Hitchcock, Alfred  186 Hobson’s Choice (1954)  61 Holiday on the Buses (1973)  58 Hollinshead, Ailsa  199 Hollywood  2, 8, 9, 11, 16, 19n16, 27, 56–62, 80–3, 96–7, 111, 113, 118, 122, 140, 172, 186–7, 217, 218, 223, 226 Homoet, Bernard  41, 44, 45 Howerd, Frankie  57 I, the Jury (1953)  58 I Have a New Master see L’École buissonnière I’ll Be Seeing You (1944)  159 The Incredible Journey (1963)  62 independents (exhibitors)  6, 16, 17, 18, 68–9, 70, 76, 78, 90, 102, 108–9, 111, 199, 216, 218, 221, 226, 227, 232–3, 237, 239, 242, 244–5 Ipswich Film Society  203 The Italian Job (1969)  121 Ivens, Joris  215 James, Robert  52 James, Sid  57 Jämtland (Sweden)  6–7, 69, 70, 75–81, 83, 85n28 see also Hammerdal (Sweden); Östersund (Sweden)

Jay, Jack  54 Jay, Peter  54 Jeffrey, John (Bo’ness)  30 Jeffrey, John (Lerwick)  33 Jeune rurale/ Promesses (periodical)  169, 170, 172, 173 Jeunes forces rurales (periodical)  173, 175 Jeunesse agricole chrétienne (JAC)  165, 168–70, 180n36 Jeunesse agricole chrétienne féminine (JACF)  168–73, 175–8 Jeunesse étudiante chrétienne (JEC)  169 Jeunesse ouvrière chrétienne (JOC)  168–9 Jeux interdits (Forbidden Games, 1952)  175 Jones, Janna  199 Jones, Margaret  34 Jour de fête (1949)  8, 215 Julietta (1953)  173 Kalatozov, Mikhaïl  221 Kaurismäki, Aki  217 Kelly, Terence  121 Kessler, Frank  2, 133 Kettering (UK)  241–3 Kid Galahad (1962)  58 Kilbom, Karl  73, 82 Kinepolis Group  17, 226, 227, 232 King Kong Versus Godzilla (1962)  62 The King’s Speech (2010)  205 The Kinks  59 ‘kitchen sink’ cinema  9–10, 117, 123–4, 124 Kluge, Alexander  187, 189 Knef, Hildegard  47 Kögel, Eberhard  189 Kolping Society (Catholic organisation)  44–5

Cinema Beyond the City

Konchalovsky, Andrei  221 Kraus, Peter  97 Kuhn, Annette  120 Labour Party (UK)  17, 201–2, 240, 243 Lambert, Maurice  112–13 Langtry, Lillie  55 Laurel and Hardy  56 Lavaud, M.  109 Lerwick (Scotland)  4, 24–5, 31–6 Let It Be (1970)  189 Letter Never Sent (1959)  221 Leuzinger, Willy  134 Lewis, Howard T.  224 Lewis, Jerry  57, 241, 247n17 Light, Duncan  59 Ligue de l’Enseignement (Educational League)  166, 220 Lindgren, Georg  80, 86n32 Lindores, Geoffrey  33 Lit (Sweden)  80–1, 83 Little Big Man (1970)  187 Local Government, Planning and Land Act 1980 (UK)  239 London  1, 10, 15, 16, 53, 117, 122–5, 123, 126, 127, 197, 208, 237, 243 London Film Society  197 The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962)  123 The Long Ships (1962)  62 The Lost World (1925)  33 Love Thy Neighbour (TV, 1972–6)  57–8, 64n20 Lumière Brothers (company)  1, 105 MacDonald, Richard  202–3 MacDonald, Scott  197

Index

Maggi, Julius  135 Maggi Food Corporation  11, 134–44 magic lantern shows  11, 12, 32, 134–7, 144, 165–6, 185 Mainline Pictures  243 La Maison de la Bonne Presse  165–166 Major, John  240 majors  68–9, 70, 74, 77, 82, 221, 225, 226–7 Maltby, Richard  3, 11, 105, 144 Manvell, Robert  202–3 Marais, Jean  173 Marantz-Jaen, Eléonore  109 Marion, Philippe  2, 10 Marker, Chris  215–216, 221 Marshment, Margaret  123–4 Martin, Dean  57 Marx Brothers  186 Mary Poppins (1964)  124–5 Melton Mowbray (England)  243–6, 244 Melvin, Murray  124 Mendras, Henri  213 Merryweather, John  244 Metz, Christian  2, 19n10 Miedema, Jac  90, 152, 156–60 Miedema, Johan  90, 152, 153, 156 Miedema, Swier  152, 156 Milton Keynes (UK)  17, 237–8 Mischke, Fritz, and wife  40, 42–3 Les Miserables (1925)  33 modernity  1, 5, 7, 8, 26, 28, 33, 36, 60, 68, 81–2, 102, 105, 108–10, 113, 157, 160, 169

modernisation  9, 11, 35, 36, 40, 89, 90, 100, 102, 109, 113, 136, 138, 140, 143, 165, 169, 175, 181, 214 Mods and Rockers  58–9 Mondon, Guy  106–7, 111, 115, 116n6 Monségur (France)  107–8, 107, 108, 112 Monte Carlo or Bust! (1969)  121 Moore, Paul  2, 10 Morelli, Alice  208 Morley, David  234 Moss, Louis  117 Moullet, Luc  217 Mounier, Emmanuel  215 Mullens, Willy  151 Müller, Franz  40 Müller, Fritz  143 multiplex cinemas  15–18, 55, 103n18, 214, 218, 220, 226–7, 231–4, 237–43, 245, 246n1 multipurpose/-functional venues  6–7, 10–12, 19n16, 27, 40, 41, 68–70, 73, 75, 77, 81, 83, 83n2, 87, 89, 90, 91, 95, 96, 98, 100, 101–2, 105–6, 108, 111, 112, 118, 135, 150–3, 155, 156–8, 166–7, 176, 184, 190, 198, 206, 208–9 Mundin, Tony/ Amanda  244–245 Münster (Germany)  40, 45, 46–7, 48, 49n4 music hall see variety acts Musser, Charles  28 När seklet var ungt (When the Century Was Young, 1944)  75, 82

253

National Federation of People’s Houses (Sweden) see Folkets Husrörelsens Riksorganisation National Society for Temperance Houses (Sweden) see Ordenshusens Riksförening Nestlé  140, 143 Netherlands  7, 11, 12, 50n13, 87–102, 141, 147n45, 149–60, 224 Netherlands Cinema Alliance (NBB)  12, 89, 92, 149–50, 153–7 New Cinema History  3, 27–8, 53, 228, 234 Nilsson, John  85–6n28 Norton, Graham  121 Los olvidados (The Young and the Damned, 1951)  175 On the Buses (TV, 1969–73)  57–8 oral history  7, 9, 105–6, 112, 113–15, 116n4, 118–27, 128n12 Ordenshusens Riksförening (National Society for Temperance Houses, Sweden)  75, 78–9, 80, 81 Ormonde Family  32 Östersund (Sweden)  8, 70, 75–7, 77, 79–83 Pafort-Overduin, Clara  92, 163n36 Paris  1, 2, 8, 13, 23, 57, 106, 165, 171, 173, 176, 177 Paris Playboys (1954)  57 Pasternak, Iossif  221 Pathé-bébé/Pathé-rural projectors  12–13, 166 Paul, Robert William  1

254

Les Paysans noirs (Black Peasants, 1949)  172 People’s Houses (Sweden) see Folkets Husrörelsens Riksorganisation Perry, George  121 Peter Pan (1953)  61 Le Petit monde de Don Camillo (1952)  175 Pettersson, Linus  78, 82 Pfeffer, David  188 pillarisation in Belgium  224 in the Netherlands  7, 91–4, 101 Pink Floyd Live at Pompeii (1972)  187 Polanski, Roman  186, 189 Pony Express (1953)  61 programming  4, 5, 13, 14, 15, 27, 31, 32, 33–4, 35–6, 41, 42–4, 47–8, 52–3, 56–60, 61–2, 73–4, 77–8, 79–81, 82–3, 84n13, 96–7, 100, 111–13, 118, 137–9, 151–2, 156–9, 163n44, 166–7, 176–7, 185–8, 203, 205–6, 213, 214, 217–20, 221, 245 see also age of films; arthouse films; Hollywood; ‘X’-rated films Protestants  5, 7, 39, 40, 42, 47, 75, 87, 88, 91–4, 96, 101–2, 151, 156, 163n36 The Quiet Man (1952)  177 Raimu  113 Redcliffe-Maud, Lord  198 Resnais, Alain  215–216 Riech, Heinz  40–1 Riozzi, A.D.  151 The Robe (1953)  60, 64n25 rock music  181, 182–3, 187

The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)  187, 189 Rogers, Ginger  97 Rosemary’s Baby (1968)  186, 186 Rouquier, George  170 Routes barrées (Blocked Roads, 1957)  177 rural life in films  1–2, 82, 168–9, 170, 172, 175, 177 Russell, Jane  58 Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960)  123–4 Savalle-Henry, Catherine  216–18, 221 Saving Mr Banks (2013)  205 Sayer, Derek  4, 23, 36 Schade dass Beton nicht brennt (1981)  189 Schouten, D.J.  151, 155 Schweizer Schul- und Volkskino  134, 136, 139, 140–1 Sciuscià (Shoeshine, 1946)  112 Scotland  4, 23–36 Seale, Wendy  208, 209 Sedgwick, John  92 Selfe, Melanie  199 Semeuses de France (periodical)  169, 170 The Sex Pistols  60 Shetland (UK)  4, 24–5, 31–6 see also Lerwick Siberiada (1979)  221 Simenon, Georges  175 sitcoms (TV)  57–8, 59, 64n20 Sjöholm, Carina  68 Smethurst, Jack  57 Smith, J.M.  33 Social Democratic Party (Sweden)  67, 73–4, 81, 84n5

Cinema Beyond the City

social democrats  (Netherlands)  91–4 The Sound of Music (1965)  62, 124–5 Spraos, John  119, 120, 122 Steel, Matthew  26–7 Stetten (nr Stuttgart, Germany)  183, 185, 187–9 Stockholm (Sweden)  8, 67, 70, 74, 82, 83 Stokes, Melvyn  9 The Stones in the Park (1969)  187 Street, Sarah  117 Die Sünderin (The Sinner, 1951)  47 Surles, Jean-Pierre  221–2 Svarta rosor (Black Roses, 1945)  80 Sveriges Folkbiografer AB (People’s Cinemas of Sweden Ltd)  74 Sweden  6–7, 67–83 ‘swinging London’ films  9–10, 117, 122–3, 123 Switzerland  11, 133–44, 224 taste/audience preferences  9–10, 13, 14, 16, 27–9, 52–4, 57, 61, 80–2, 113, 122–5, 169, 170, 172–3, 175–7, 186–9, 201 taxes  44, 92, 100, 216, 224, 235n9 The Sword in the Stone (1963)  62 Tarzan and the She Devil (1953)  61 Tati, Jacques  8, 214–15 television competition with cinema  48, 90, 98, 114, 117, 121, 121, 143, 178, 225

Index

sitcoms, reworkings for stage/screen  57–8, 59 Telgte (Germany)  4–5, 38–48 Temple, Shirley  159 La Terre qui meurt (The Dying Land, 1927)  168–9 Thatcher, Margaret  205 Thévenot, Germaine  216 Tichadel, Pierre  112 Tobor the Great (1954)  58 Le Tombeau d’Alexandre (1992)  221 Tommy (1975)  187, 189 tourism  5, 8, 25, 39, 52–62, 89, 141, 160, 245 travelling cinema  7–8, 11–13, 18, 25, 30, 33, 40, 46, 78, 85n14, 85n28, 88, 89, 90, 96, 97, 98–100, 101–2, 105, 106–8, 111, 112, 114–15, 116n6, 133–44, 149–60, 176, 184, 218 Travolta, John  9 Treasure Island (1950)  61 Turks Fruit (1973)  103n18 Tushingham, Rita  124 UCI Cinemas  239 Uncle Josh at the Picture Show (1901)  1–2 United Kingdom  4–5, 9–10, 15, 17–18, 23–36, 52–62, 117–27, 197–210, 237–46 urbanisation  17, 67, 68, 73, 81, 82, 83, 109, 135, 138, 156, 160, 184, 228–9, 234 Usureau, Georges  107–8, 111, 116n6 Usureau, Jean  107, 108–9, 111

van der Maden, Frank  150, 151 van der Velden, André  94 van Oort, Thunnis  38, 50n13 variety entertainment/acts 4, 26, 27, 30–2, 34–5, 53–5, 57, 60–1, 88, 112, 224 Verdier, Simone  173 La Vérité sur Bébé Donge (1952)  175 Village Screen (community cinema project, UK)  206–9, 207, 209 Vink, Ton  220 Visconti, Luchino  217 Walker, Billy  247n17 Walker, George W.  32 Wäsche – Waschen – Wohlergehen (1932)  144 Wayne, John  113 weather see attendance, seasonal variations Welte, Carl  151–2, 155, 162n17 Welte, Carl, Jr.  152, 153 Wenders, Wim  187 West Side Story (1961)  58 Wilde, Oscar  54–5 Wilinsky, Barbara  199 Williams, Kate  57 Willink, Luc  150 Winiger, Anna  135–6, 137 Winschoten (Netherlands)  90, 94, 95–7, 95, 96, 100, 101, 104n43, 152 Wisdom, Norman  54 Without Warning (1952)  58 Woodstock (1970)  187 Woodstock Festival (1969)  182–3 World War I  8, 12, 25, 27, 32, 34, 88, 105, 107, 109, 111, 134, 166, 223, 224, 235n3

255

World War II  13, 42, 46, 55, 67, 81, 89–90, 94, 97, 100, 106, 108, 116n7, 138, 144, 154, 165, 168–9, 177, 215, 247n11 ‘X’-rated films  5, 58–9, 97 Yarmouth see Great Yarmouth

256

Yarmouth Mercury (local paper)  56, 57, 58, 59–60 The Yearling (1948)  172 The Young and the Damned see Los olvidados Young Bess (1953)  61 youth  5, 8, 10, 12–4, 16, 40, 43–5, 47–8, 58–60,

61–2, 68, 73, 88, 90, 92, 97, 100, 101, 105, 113–15, 160, 165–78, 181–90, 208, 220, 226, 246 see also children Zumbusch, Theodor  40, 44

Cinema Beyond the City