Paris is busy building new cinemas for old films. In November last year the major French film company Gaumont-Pathé opened a 5-screen cinema called Les Fauvettes in the thirteenth arrondissement. Not only is the name Les Fauvettes a throwback to the cinema’s previous existence as a Music-Hall called La Fauvette (1895 – 1930s), but the…
Originally posted on Adam Smith: Historian:
Churchill at an American Thanksgiving Celebration, Royal Albert Hall, 1944 The extraordinary thing about the Gettysburg Address, which was given 150 years ago on Tuesday, is that people still venerate it as they do. It is, on one level, a pretty standard piece of wartime rhetoric, polarising the issues…
People are wonderful, surprising creatures. Their memories are even more so. This is true both in terms of their capacity to recall small, obscure details over many decades and also often in the ways that the content of the memories themselves can force us to rethink what we thought we knew of an era. One…
Aviemore and Inverness are very different places in which I attended very different events. In Aviemore, a small town in the Cairngorms National Park that caters to tourists interested in outdoor pursuits, I was lucky enough to be able to be at a birthday party to celebrate the 15th anniversary of Screen Machine, the mobile…
Yesterday saw the first film screening of the Cultural Memory and British Cinema-going of the 1960s project’s tour of Scotland. It was something I’d been looking forward to since I started planning this research trip across the Highlands in spring, not least because it was my first opportunity to ask people who live in rural…
UCL History’s Cultural Memory and British Cinema-going of the 1960s project has hit the road! I’m going to be in Scotland for the next two weeks, hosting special screenings of 1960s films and collecting local memories of going to the pictures at a time when the world faced the possibility of nuclear war and humanity…
The Great Gatsby seems to be everywhere at the moment. There are posters at bus stops, adverts on the television and articles in every publication I pick up. In recent weeks it has been impossible to escape the publicity. Baz Luhrmann’s new adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic American novel is one of the most…
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