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FROM MODERNITY TO MEMORIAL: The Changing Meanings of the 1930s Cinema in Nottingham By Sarah Stubbings, BA, MA. Thesis submitted to the University of Nottingham for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, August 2003 c1INGy G2ýPF 1sinr Uß CONTENTS Abstract Acknowledgements ii Introduction 1 PART ONE: CONTEMPORARY REPORTING OF THE 1930S CINEMA 1. Contested Space, Leisure and Consumption: The 1929 36 Reconstruction of the Market Place and its Impact on Cinema and the City 2. Luxury in Suburbia: The Modern, Feminised Cinemas of 73 the 1930s 3. Selling Cinema: How Advertisements and Promotional 108 Features Helped to Formulate the 1930s Cinema Discourse 4. Concerns Over Cinema: Perceptions of the Moral and 144 Physical Danger of Going to the Pictures PART TWO: RETROSPECTIVECOVERAGE OF THE 1930S CINEMA 5. The Post-war Fate of the 1930s Cinemas: Cinema Closures - 173 The 1950s and 1960s 6. Modernity and Modernisation: Cinema's Attempted 204 Transformation in the 1950s and 1960s 7. The Continued Presence of the Past: Popular Memory of 231 Cinema-going in the 'Golden Age' 8. Preserving the Past, Changing the Present? Cinema 260 Conservation: Its Context and Meanings Conclusion 292 Bibliography 298 ABSTRACT This work examines local press reporting of the 1930s cinema from 1930 up to the present day. By focusing on one particular city, Nottingham, I formulate an analysis of the place that cinema has occupied in the city's history. Utilising the local press as the primary source enables me to situate the discourses on the cinema building and the practice of cinema-going within the broader socio-cultural contexts and history of the city. The work incorporates all the different forms of local press coverage of cinema: editorials, advertising, news, features and letters. It argues that the meanings of the 1930s cinema alter significantly over time with regard to changing perceptions of the city and the suburb, of modernity and tradition, of the value ascribed to cinema architecture, and the significance attached to popular memory. It also demonstrates that the meanings of the 1930s cinema are defined by the different agendas of particular groups, and that the local press is significant in determining which of these agendas are prioritised and portrayed as representing the consensus. Part One of the thesis surveys the contemporaneous reporting of the 1930s cinema and Part Two looks at the retrospective coverage. This method of analysis differentiates my work from most of the existing studies of cinema as a social practice. Studying contemporaneous and retrospective accounts of 1930s cinema enables me to illuminate the shifts in perspective which inform how the 1930s cinema was regarded in that decade and how it has been understood in later periods. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank the British Academy, whose funding enabled my thesis to be written. At the University of Nottingham I want to thank my supervisors, Dr Paul Grainge and Professor Mark Jancovich, who have provided the most expert knowledge, advice and guidance throughout the course of my PhD. This has proved an invaluable resource. In the university as a whole, in the academic community, the friendship and goodwill of many other PhD students has been greatly appreciated. Of these, I am particularly grateful to Ian Brookes who has offered much-valued time, support and friendship throughout. I would also like to thank the staff of Nottingham City Library, who have regularly and uncomplainingly produced countless newspapers and pamphlets for me to consult, and who have dealt helpfully and courteously with my many requests. My very heartfelt thanks go to Christine Hudson, Myra Woolfson and Dr Patrick Vesey, without whose different but complementary input and intervention since December 2001 I would have been unable to complete my thesis. I would like to dedicate this to my mother who, growing up in the 1930s, was regularly to be found in those picture palaces that so characterise the decade. Her passionate belief that future generations should benefit from the education that was unavailable to her, along with her sustained confidence in my abilities, have given me the commitment and self-belief to undertake my PhD. Thank you. A version of Part One of this thesis informs Part Three of The Place of the Audience: Cultural Geographies of Film Consumption, Mark Jancovich and Lucy Faire with Sarah Stubbings (London: BFI, 2003). A version of "The Continued Presence of the Past: Popular Memory of Cinema-going in the Golden Age" is published in Paul Grainge (ed. ) Memory and Popular Film (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003). INTRODUCTION I This thesis studies cinema and cinema-going in the 1930s and takes as its primary referencesource the local presscoverage of cinemain the city of Nottingham. However, the researchtakes into accountnot only the local press reports of 1930s cinema in that decade, but also the subsequent coverage of 1930s cinema. Through an analysis of both contemporaneous and retrospective accounts, the thesis traces the changing meaning of the 1930s cinema within the wider context of the city and its suburbs,taking in account the cinema building as well as the cinema-going experience. It argues that those meanings are constructed according to the different concerns of each period and the agendasof different interest groups, and that the local press itself is instrumental in constructing the changing discourses on cinema and cinema-going. Although some very well-regarded work has already been undertaken in this area, film studies has traditionally focused on film texts, whether it be in the form of textual analysis or through reception studies, which examines the audience's responseto films. This point is made by Annette Kuhn in An Everyday Magic. Kuhn statesthat "films as texts" are the "primary objects of inquiry" for film studies and that when spectatorship is studied the work is "predominantly about a spectator addressed or constructed by the film text - the `spectator-in-the-text"'. 1 Therefore, responses to films rather than to cinemas is the principal focus of audience studies. The meanings which the I audience makes of films is the object, rather than the meaning of the cinema itself. While work on cinema as an institution rather than on film texts has expanded significantly in recent years and produced some valuable studies, many areas remain largely unexplored. The meanings of cinema-going for actual historical audiences, for example, and the meanings that cinema buildings had, or continue to have, are little studied. Yet, cinema-going has occupied a very significant place in social history because of its centrality to so many people's lives. As AJP Taylor, writing of the interwar period, suggests: "the cinema was the essential social habit of the age.s2 Furthermore, the extent of the popularity of films in the first half of the twentieth century meant that a substantial number of cinemas were built to accommodate their audiences and this also had an impact on the architectural forum and on the usage of city space. The existing studies which take into account the meanings of cinema- going and cinema buildings can be divided into the following three major areas: economic histories; architectural histories; and audience studies. Douglas Gomery's economic history of cinema, Shared Pleasures,' is one of the most significant histories of cinema exhibition yet written. The scope of Shared Pleasures is such that it begins with the earliest days of exhibition in the USA, continuesthrough to the showing of films on video and cable in the early 1990s (when the book was written), and also includes a series of in-depth case studies. For example, Gomery utilises his study of the major cinema chain Balaban and Katz in 1920s and 1930s New York, to support his argument that successful exhibition was more dependent on location, decor and facilities than on the films shown. This point is highly 2 significant for the study of audiences and the meanings of cinema-going, working as it does against the `common-sense' understanding that people have gone to the cinema primarily to seea particular film. Instead,the environment in which the films are seen and the position of the cinema are revealed to be centrally important. Hence, Gomery's work informs us that studying the film text and the audience'sresponse to it is not in itself sufficient to obtain a full understandingof films and their meanings. Shared Pleasures is an economic history, the primary focus of which is the business side of exhibition. While Gomery does consider the social and technological aspectsof exhibition, issues such as the meanings of cinema to the audiences,its impact on leisure and commercial entertainmentpractices as a whole, and cinema's effects on its locations are not the predominant concerns of his work. However, Gomery argues that economic and business developments,such as the rise of cinema,can havemajor socialimplications. Thus, he claims that: "although Shared Pleasures does not set out to fashion a social history of moviegoing, it will lay out the social implications of the industrial basis of moviegoing. "5 The wide range of sources Gomery utilises, which includes the trade and business press and the newspapers of major cities such as New York and Los Angeles, indicates the potential for future research in this field. More specifically, Gomery's work lays down the foundation for utilising presscoverage in order to analysethe meaning of cinema-going. Architectural histories provide a further approach to studying cinema as an institution. While these provide some information on the meanings of cinema buildings and how these buildings have changed over time, their primary focus is the intentions of the architects rather than the ways in which 3 6 buildings were actually experienced by the audience. Britain's cinema architecture has traditionally been held in low regard by the architectural profession.

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