Cinema Beyond the City

Judith Thissen, Clemens Zimmermann

• Publisher: British Film Institute
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781838715021
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Film et vidéo

Cinema is often perceived as a metropolitan medium – an entertainment product of the big city and for the big city. Yet film exhibitors have been bringing moving pictures to towns and villages since the early days of itinerant shows. This volume presents for the first time an exploration of the social, cultural and economic dynamics of film culture in the European countryside. Spanning more than a century of film exhibition from the early twentieth-century to the present day, Cinema Beyond the City examines the role that movie-going has played in small-town and rural communities across Europe. It documents an amazing diversity of sites and situations that are relevant for understanding historical and current patterns in film consumption. In chapters written by leading scholars and young academics, interdisciplinary research is used to address key questions about access, economic viability, audience behaviour, film programming and the cultural flows between cities and hinterlands. With its wide range of regional studies and innovative methodological approaches, the collection will be of interest not only to film historians, but also to scholars in the fields of urban history, rural studies and cultural geography.

PART I

LOCAL DYNAMICS

1

Small-Town Cinema in Scotland: The Particularity of Place

John Caughie

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

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 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.

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 li...