To Örebro University

In this chapter, cinema memories collected in Sweden from the 1950s—when cinema-going peaked—are compared with ditto a decade later, when attendance had drastically dropped. The comparison is based on 40 interviews divided into two age groups and includes men and women who come from a variety of social backgrounds and who lived in urban as well as rural locations. The selection allowed us to tease out similarities and differences in the memory narratives related to the mentioned intersecting features, to determine whether they had an impact on the rupture of cinema-going. Our results show that gender accounts for the most prominent difference. In the interviews with male participants, delightful memories of childhood matinées are especially salient, and we could only detect slight variation in the memories of this group when we compared the two time periods. In the interviews with female participants, matinées are mentioned only briefly, and we found stark differences in the memory narratives of the two time periods. Cinema-going is remembered by female participants as a special event in the 1950s, while in the memories from the 1960s, it is recalled as a subdued activity in a broader youth culture involving music, dancing, and fashion.

In this article, we discuss oral history interviews and memories as a method for media-historical research in the Baltic and Nordic regions from theoretical and practical points of view. We present an overview of relevant theoretical work in film studies (New Cinema History, Oral History, Cultural Memory, Cinema Memory). Furthermore, we demonstrate how we have designed and applied oral history in the Swedish Cinema and Everyday Life project: A study of cinema-going in its peak and decline, financed by the Swedish National Research Council, 2019–2022, and reflect on what we have learned from this example. We also disclose how we adjusted the methodology to comply with the social restrictions enforced due to the COVID19 pandemic.

Academic and industry discourses in Sweden blamed the rapid decline of cinema-going in the late 1950s on the introduction of television. Complicating the issue, Swedish television ties in with radio as a domestic medium, making the conceptual links between television and cinema seem less obvious. If we write a history of media characterized by replacement, we tend to overlook how new and old media exist simultaneously in everyday life. Our article investigates how television features in memory narratives of cinema in the context of quotidian life in the late 1950s and 1960s in Sweden. The study draws on memories collected through 60 oral history interviews in two large-scale projects. With a focus on cultural practices and Lisa Gitelman’s concept of ‘associated protocols’ in media use, we ask how cinema and television are conceived in relation to each other in hindsight when remembering television as new.

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

Marshall McLuhan famously noted that each new medium represents its predecessors, undermining the teleological view that new technologies succeed and replace old ones. Contrary to this understanding, the “death of cinema”-rhetoric in academic and public discourses in Sweden in the 1960s blamed the demise of cinemagoing on the introduction of television (Furhammar, 2003:249). Also among respondents in an interview project focusing on cinema memories from the 1950s and 60s, television was mentioned as the direct cause of cinema’s rapid decline. This points to a strong conceptual affiliation between cinema and television, and the idea that television arrived to replace cinema. However, a closer analysis of the memory narratives suggests a more complex conceptual relationship between the two media. Television is mentioned only in the margins of the memory narratives of the respondents and seems not to  have played such a significant role in their everyday lives.

Complicating the issue further, early Swedish television was modelled on the production protocols and consumption patterns of noncommercial, public service radio. Thorslund (2018:43) writes: "one could argue that television in Sweden in the 1950s hardly was a medium in its own right, being so closely linked to radio." A seminal ethnographic study of early broadcast media in Sweden confirms the affinity between the two media forms (Höjer, 1998). The overlap between the two domestic forms of broadcast media makes the threat of television to cinema ever more enigmatic.

Our paper aims to investigate how television features in memory narratives of cinema in the context of quotidian life in the late 1950s and 1960s in Sweden. The study will draw on memories collected in two large-scale memory projects, Swedish Cinema and Everyday Life and European Cinema Audiences. With a focus on cultural practices and Lisa Gitelman’s definition of media as “socially realized structures of communication, where structures include both technological forms and their associated protocols,” (Gitelman, 2006:7) we ask how cinema, television, and to some extent radio are conceived in relation to one another in hindsight, when remembering television as new.

Leif Furhammar was an esteemed professor of Film Studies at the University of Stockholm. In 1990 he produced a report on filmgoing in Stockholm during the 1930s. The report is little known to film scholars, especially outside of Sweden. Furhammar takes a novel approach to investigate what films people watched by counting film programmes listed in a daily city newspaper. Using similar methods to POPSTAT, Furhammar produces charts of the annual best-attended films in Stockholm for the decade, including all Swedish movies released. His work introduced an entirely new type of evidence concerning film popularity. This chapter discusses his methods, replicates his results (where data permits), and analyses his findings.

This data paper and the data collection from which it emerges aim to present a fully harmonized data set originating in several research projects on post-war cinema pro-gramming. The paper will reflect on the collection and structure of this aggregated data set, that consists of titles of feature films screened for public viewing in cinemas in the cities Bari (Italy), Antwerp and Ghent (Belgium), Gothenburg (Sweden), Leices-ter (United Kingdom) and Rotterdam (Netherlands) for the year 1952. As comparisons of movie-going patterns between European countries are still rare, this paper offers a model for constructing a data set which can be replicated, scaled up and used to com-pare, contextualize, and eventually theorize practices of cinema-going across coun-tries at a global level.