1929 and 1930 were years of concentrated change within the British film exhibition industry. Sound cinema had quickly established itself as the essential attraction of the time, and cinemas throughout the country swiftly ...

The Kingsway Cinema in King’s Heath, Birmingham, opened in 1925 as a super cinema to serve a localised, habitually attending audience. It showed second-run screenings at low prices, and handily out-performed its only local ...

Historians tend to place the arrival of sound cinema within the public experience in 1927, with the American premiere of The Jazz Singer. Yet British audiences did not hear the talkies until the film’s London premiere in ...

A review of the various ways in which early sound films were received in Britain from the popular press, to fan magazines, literary critics, public intellectuals and modernist writers like Dorothy Richardson. The reception ...

The development of silent film music between the 1900s and 1920s up until the coming of sound cinema, largely reflected popular tastes and musical styles of the period. But many performances were improvised and not documented ...