Cinema Memories brings together and analyses the memories of almost a thousand people of going to the cinema in Britain during the 1960s. It offers a fresh perspective on the social, cultural and film history of what has come to be seen as an iconic decade, with the release of films such as A Taste of Honey, The Sound of Music, Darling, Blow-Up, Alfie, The Graduate, and Bonnie and Clyde.
Drawing on first-hand accounts, authors Melvyn Stokes, Matthew Jones and Emma Pett explore how cinema-goers constructed meanings from the films they watched - through a complex process of negotiation between the films concerned, their own social and cultural identities, and their awareness of changes in British society. Their analysis helps the reader see what light the cultural memory of 1960s cinema-going sheds on how the Sixties in Britain is remembered and interpreted.
Positioning their study within debates about memory, 1960s cinema, and the seemingly transformative nature of this decade of British history, the authors reflect on the methodologies deployed, the use of memories as historical sources, and the various ways in which cinema and cinema-going came to mean something to their audiences.
Melvyn Stokes is Professor of Film History, and Director of the AHRC-funded 'Cultural Memory and British Cinema-going of the 1960s' research project at University College London, UK. He has been a Visiting Fellow at Princeton, a Fulbright Exchange Professor at Mount Holyoke College and a Visiting Professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris He has written and edited twelve books, including D.W. Griffith's 'The Birth of a Nation': A History of 'the Most Controversial Motion Picture of All Time' (2007). He is currently President of SERCIA, the European film organisation.
Introduction
1. 'This is where we came in': cinema-going in the sixties
2. Sex and the Cinema
3. 'The times they are a-changin'?: American Sixties Films
4. Reflecting 'what life was like'?: British films of the 1960s
5. 'New Waves' from Europe
6. Postcolonial Audiences
7. Conclusion