'Reel to Rattling Reel': Telling stories about rural cinema-going in Scotland

Abstract

As Annette Kuhn explains in relation to her pioneering research on cinema culture in 1930s Britain, ‘how people remember is as much a text to be deciphered as what they remember’ (2002: 6). This article, drawing from research conducted as part of a three-year AHRC-funded project looking at the history of the Highlands and Islands Film Guild (The Major Minor Cinema Project: Highlands and Islands Film Guild 1946-71, University of Glasgow and University of Stirling), 1 will examine the ways in which cinema memories are narrativised. The article will focus in particular on the creative writing strand of the project, which was inspired by the surprising discovery of the project’s pilot study that some cinema-goers from the period of research had been inspired to write poems or stories in response to their experience of going to the Film Guild screenings. Through a consideration of the project’s oral history interviews, alongside correspondence with respondents and other written accounts, including poems, short stories and other forms of creative writing, the article will consider the ways in which cinema memory (as a very particular form of cultural memory) may offer its own unique inflection to the ways in which stories are told.