European Cinema Audiences: Entangled Histories and Shared Memories

How do we compare the experiences of going to the cinema in the 1950s in the United Kingdom, Sweden or Greece? Which genres of films and stars were loved in different European cities? What influenced audiences' views or choices? European Cinema Audiences is the first comparative project that focuses on cinema audiences across Europe. It aims to collect and analyse memories of their experiences, which are contextualized by unique local archival material on cinema-going, in order to gain a better understanding of the shared memories and the entangled histories of cinema-going in seven mid-sized European cities.

Focusing on Bari (IT), Brno (CZ), Ghent (BE), Gothenburg (SE), Leicester (UK), Rotterdam (NL), and Thessaloniki (EL), the project will investigate differences and similarities in the way cinema-going was practiced, experienced, and remembered across Europe. Our respondents are, in fact, the last surviving generation for which going to the cinema was the only way to experience movies and collecting their memories before they are lost will provide a vital contribution to the understanding of the transnational and comparative history of European cinema culture.

The project will be led by three academic experts in the history of cinema audiences - Daniela Treveri Gennari (Oxford Brookes University), Lies Van de Vijver (Ghent University) and Pierluigi Ercole (De Montfort University) - who will be working in partnership with heritage and educational organizations across Europe.

The absence of any empirically-based research on the experience of film audiences across Europe leave unanswered crucial questions about the most popular leisure time activity for Europeans in the 1950s. The European Cinema Audiences project will bridge this gap by working in partnership with local archives and communities to create initially a digital repository of historical material related to the cinemas of the chosen cities. The material collected will be used to both trigger memories of cinema-going experiences and obtain a greater understanding of the cinema culture across Europe. Filmed interviews with audience members reminiscing about their experience of cinema-going will be conducted. The oral histories collected will be analysed using NVivo software and following a protocol (previously tested in a pilot project) which will address the challenges of such a multilingual project, both in terms of cultural and language differences. The video-interviews will be read against data related to film exhibition, reception and programming, in order to open up new perspectives on the relationship between the institutional context of film consumption and the remembered experiences of cinema-going across Europe.

The project's results will be validated through a variety of academic (conference papers, a monograph, a special issue in an academic journal and a peer-reviewed article) and non-academic (public engagement events and digital archive) outputs. At the core of the European Cinema Audiences project is the interaction with community groups and local associations. Thus, in each city a researcher will coordinate the activities with the general public, who will learn to interact with the digital archive and share the significance of their memories with other generations of cinema-goers. Archivists and researchers, as well as local communities will work together in order to take ownership of the cultural and historical materials collected through a series of impact activities. The project's collaboration with Google Arts and Culture will enable researchers and communities to become curators of special virtual exhibitions based on the material collected, while the aggregation of the data with the Europeana collection will allow further dissemination of the project.

European Cinema Audiences aims to engage with: 1) academic community and educators; 2) cultural stakeholders; 3) general public, especially those interested in cinema, cultural and digital heritage.
1) The project will engage with academics in the fields of Film Studies, European Audience Studies, Oral History, Cultural Memory, Digital Humanities, Cultural Heritage, History, as well as more broadly Digital Heritage and Leisure Studies, but also Ageing Studies. (See Academic Beneficiaries for details). Educators will have the opportunity to use the digital archive as pedagogic material. This has been tested in the Italian Cinema Audiences project, where schools worked successfully with the project's material.
2) The project will enable our cultural stakeholders (the archives involved: Mediateca regionale pugliese, Archive of the Thessaloniki International Film Festival, Brno City Archive, Media Archive for Central England, Regional State Archives in Gothenburg, City Archive Rotterdam, City Archive of Ghent) to achieve greater visibility and expand the outreach of their collections. The broad scope of the data that European Cinema Audiences will bring together and make available for reuse will allow archives to reach a wider public, ensuring networking and engagement with organizations and people both at local, national and European levels. The project's digital archive will offer stakeholders and cultural institutions - as well as scholars and the general public - the opportunity to engage in the interpretation of the entangled histories of cinema audiences across Europe. In a transnational collaboration among cultural organisations in different European cities, the project will open up opportunities for archivists, and cultural specialists to make use of the project's results, both at global and at local level. At a global level, the project will increase the outreach of the collection through: a) Memoro, that will collect the oral histories and disseminate our project on their website which has over 3 million visitors worldwide. b) Google Arts & Culture, which works with over 900 cultural institutions across the word and have so far reached 240 million page views, will collaborate with researchers and communities in creating virtual collections for each case study and special exhibitions from the digital archive's material; c) Europeana, which weaves together over 3000 cultural heritage institutions, and whose website had only in 2016 over 4 million views worldwide, will make our material available to their users.
3) European Cinema Audiences involves the memories of audiences of the postwar period, which has produced significant impact on non-academic communities in national projects of a similar nature. At a local level, the general public will be involved in a series of events in the seven cities selected. The first series of events (launch of the digital archive) - organized in collaboration with the local archives - will promote public access to the project's digital archive and invite elderly interested in sharing their own memories of cinema-going. The second series of public engagement events will be organised so that community group members will learn to interact with the digital archive and add their memories to it. Such events will replicate the model tested in the Sharing Memories events organised in Italian Cinema Audiences and proven to be extremely successful. In some cases, these events will be organized in collaboration with film festivals who have local impact, but international visibility: the Film Fest Ghent, the Thessaloniki International Film Festival, and the International Film Festival Rotterdam. The closing event of the project will take place in the Winter Circus in Ghent. This event will bring together academic researchers, cultural stakeholders, but also aging experts, and the general public.