To Örebro University

Between the years 1877 and 1962 Allan Holmström kept a diary recording his actions every day after work at the factory. Holmström worked as a clerk and supported a wife and three children. The diary reveals Holmström’s passion for theatre and film stars, press clippings of which were inserted in the bursting diary notebooks. His celebrity-based scrapbook practice has been explored as an early example of converging and consumer-participant media culture (Jarlbrink 2009, 2010). However, the notes about his visits to the cinema - which provide unique insight into how cinema during its process of institutionalization (Gaudreault and Marion 2002, Moore 2013) became an integrated part of a white-collar worker’s life – has not been studied.

My intention is to test a method for analysis of Holmström’s cinema going borrowed from geography which has a focus on time, rather than space. The time-geography method (Hägerstrand 1970, 1973, 1985, Ellegård 2019) captures how cinemagoing interacts with (and replaces) other activities and events in Holmström’s life. His cinemagoing habits will be analyzed in relation to the process of institutionalization of cinema with a focus on the years 1914 to 1920.

References:

Ellegård, Kajsa (2018). Thinking time geography: concepts, methods and applications. First edition New York: Routledge Gaudreault, André and Marion, Philippe (2002) The Cinema as a Model for the Genealogy of Media, Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 8:4, https://doi.org/10.1177/1354856502008004 Jarlbrink, Johan (2010). En tidningsläsares dagbok: Allan Holmströms klipp och läsvanor 1877-1962. Presshistorisk årsbok. 2010, s. 7-27 Moore, Paul S (2013) The grand opening of the movie theatre in the second birth of cinema, Early Popular Visual Culture, 11:2, 113-125, DOI: 10.1080/17460654.2013.783148