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 ...
Business records constitute a fundamental source of primary empirical evidence, which illuminate the granular details that collectively form wider regional and national trends. Their rarity has meant that each discovery ...
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 ...
The coming of sound was a swift and decisive moment in cinema history. In the space of half a decade, the paradigms for film production and exhibition underwent a sea change largely unparalleled elsewhere in the medium’s ...
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 ...
In the 1900s as Edwardian women musicians moved from music teaching into public performance, cinemas offered a safe place: out of the spotlight and in the relative anonymity of the darkened auditorium. The rapid growth 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 ...
This presentation will look at the ways in which women in the British film industry contributed to the transition between silent and sound cinema. It will look at issues that affected their roles both in front of, and ...
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 ...
A review of the British cinema industry in the 1920s before the arrival of sound which examines the reasons behind the industry's downturn and near-bankruptcy in 1926, including economics, lack of modernisation and capital ...