ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the experience of British cinemagoing in the period 1945-65 and the changes that took place during that time. It is not so much concerned with the industrial and economic aspects of the cinema at the time (the emerging Rank/ ABPC duopoly and the statistics for declining audiences) but with how the experience of cinemagoing in Britain was described and discussed. I want to place cinemagoing within discourses that helped to define its role in cultural life and shaped the way in which people thought about and used it. This involves thinking about cinema in relation to other entertainment formats, as well as focusing on its own specific pleasures, and looking at how the practice of going to the pictures was explained through, for instance, the age and gender of its perceived audiences. In attempting to do this, I will call on some of the material provided by and about the cinema from cinemagoers at the time and from those who commented on them – the sociologists, psychologists, teachers and others concerned with the values and effects of cinema. I will set these contemporary accounts beside reminiscences about going to the pictures by those looking back to their cinemagoing past.1 In addition, this chapter will look at how British films of the period represented mass entertainment and how they positioned cinema within the popular forms of leisure activity that were incorporated into their stories and locations. I hope that these various sources will give usa senseof the ways in which British cinema was thought about, a sense of how it was constructed, not so much in bricks, mortar and capital as through the ideas and expectations of different audiences and their commentators. Positioning the specificities of British cinema within this broad cultural context should put us in a better position to understand the overall changes in British cinemagoing during this period and thus place the later discussion of individual films in a more specific context.
