Picturegoers

Luke McKernan is a film historian with a particular interest in film audiences and the sociological study of cinema. He has been collecting examples of eyewitness testimony of cinemagoing for many years through the website https://picturegoing.com. His book Charles Urban: Pioneering the Non-Fiction Film in Britain and America, 1897-1925 (Exeter, 2013) won the 2014 Kraszna-Krausz Moving Image Book Award.

Contents



 



Acknowledgements



List of Illustrations



 



Introduction



First Encounters





Anon., ‘Department of Physics’
Anon., ‘Magic Lantern Kinetoscope’
Anon., ‘Sporting Notions’
Maxim Gorky, ‘Last Night I Was in the Kingdom of Shadows’
Jean Renoir, ‘My Life and My Films’
Junichiro Tanizaki, ‘Childhood Years’
Joan Courthope, ‘Diaries of Joan Courthope’
Mozaffar al-Din Shah Qajar, ‘Cinema in Iran’
Edward Wagenknecht, ‘The Movies in the Age of Innocence’
Filson Young, ‘Kinema’
Robert Roberts, ‘The Classic Slum’
Fermin Rocker, ‘The East End Years’
Ingmar Bergman, ‘Magic Lantern’
Leila Berg, ‘Flickerbook’
John Sutherland, ‘Magic Moments’
John Wyver, ‘Live from the Met’


 



Audiences





Andrei Tarkovsky, ‘Sculpting in Time’
Ben Thomas, ‘Ben’s Limehouse’
Dorothy Richardson, ‘The Front Rows’
Taizo Fujimoto, ‘The Nightside of Japan’
Maxwell Bodenheim, ‘East Side Moving Picture Theatre—Sunday’
Claude Roy, ‘Into China’
Min-Ch’ien T.Z. Tyau, ‘London Through Chinese Eyes’
Mary Helen Fee, ‘A Woman’s Impression of the Philippines’
Horace Green, ‘The Log of a Noncombatant’
Graham Greene, ‘The Lawless Roads’
George Jordan, ‘Bioscope & Cinematograph Shows’
Verónica Feliu, ‘Movie-Going as Resistant Community’
Louis Couperus, ‘Il Cinematografo’
Ruth Frances Woodsmall, ‘Moslem Women Enter a New World’
Harold Hobson, ‘Indirect Journey’
C.W. Kimmins, ‘The Cinema’
Alexander L. Pach, ‘With the Silent Workers’
Italo Calvino, ‘A Cinema-Goer’s Autobiography’
John Foster Fraser, ‘Russia of To-day’
Rudolf Rocker, ‘Alexandra Palace Internment Camp in the First World War, 1914–1918’
Richard Wollheim, ‘Germs’
Lauchlan MacLean Watt, ‘The Heart of a Soldier’
Arthur Ruhl, ‘The Other Americans’
Jack Common, ‘Kiddar’s Luck’
Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘Words’
Josef Morrell, ‘Tell Me Grandpa’
Georges Perec, ‘Things’
James Malone, ‘Family Life and Work Experience Before 1918’
Archie Bell, ‘The Spell of China’
Thomas Mann, ‘The Magic Mountain’
Luke McKernan, ‘Going to the Cinema’


 



Places





Khalil Totah, ‘Dynamite in the Middle East’
Edmund Wilson, ‘Red, Black, Blond and Olive’
C.M. Leicester, ‘A Holiday in Burma’
Edwa Moser, ‘The Mexican Touch’
‘Inbad’, ‘An Island Night’s Entertainment’
Gloria Swanson, ‘Swanson on Swanson’
Laurie Lee, ‘As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning’
Madhur Jaffrey, ‘Climbing the Mango Trees’
Frank Kessler, ‘Astor-Harmonie’
Harry A. Franck, ‘Working North from Patagonia’
Li Hung-fu, ‘Report from a Chinese Village’
Arthur Ransome, ‘The Crisis in Russia’
Miss Johnson, ‘An Evening at the Cinema’
Park Yeon-mi, ‘In Order to Live’
Otto Mänchen-Helfen, ‘Journey to Tuva’
Olga Briceño, ‘Cocks and Bulls in Caracas’
Jacob Tann, ‘Going to Watch a Movie in 3021’


 



Players





James Baldwin, ‘The Devil Finds Work’
C.H. Rolph, ‘London Particulars’
Molly Picon, ‘So Laugh a Little’
Arnold Bennett, ‘Journal 1929’
Lorna Sage, ‘Bad Blood’
Edward W. Said, ‘Out of Place’
Nelson Mandela, ‘Long Walk to Freedom’
J.B. Priestley, ‘Delight’
V.S. Naipaul, ‘The Middle Passage’
John Osborne, ‘A Better Class of Person’
Thomas Burke, ‘Nights in Town’
Anon., ‘Sociology of Film’
Es’kia Mphahlele, ‘Down Second Avenue’
‘Negro male student in High School. Age 17’, ‘Movies and Conduct’
Paul van Ostaijen, ‘Asta Nielsen’


 



Reality





Stefan Zweig, ‘The World of Yesterday’
Sydney Race, ‘The Journals of Sydney Race’
J.G. Ballard, ‘Miracles of Life’
Véra Tsaritsyn [Lady Colin Campbell], ‘Modern Gladiators’
Henry Newbolt, ‘The War Films’
Virginia Woolf, ‘The Cinema’
Tony Harrison, ‘Flicks and This Fleeting Life’
Ray Lankester, ‘Diversions of a Naturalist’
Gilbert Frankau, ‘Gilbert Frankau’s Self Portrait’
George Orwell, ‘Diaries’
Arnold Schwarzenegger, ‘Total Recall’
Paramahansa Yogananda, ‘Autobiography of a Yogi’
Mihail Sebastian, ‘Journal 1935–1944’
Anon., ‘Newsreels’
Joseph Roth, ‘Twenty Minutes from Before the War’
Taran N. Khan, ‘Shadow City’


 



Fears and Desires





Franz Kafka, ‘The Diaries of Franz Kafka’
Peter O’Toole, ‘Loitering with Intent’
Vernon Scannell, ‘Autobiographical Note’
Mrs K.J. Bills, ‘Facts about Birth of a Nation Play at the Colonial’
Elizabeth Bowen, ‘Why I Go to the Cinema’
J.M. Coetzee, ‘Boyhood’
Negley Farson, ‘The Way of a Transgressor’
D.H. Lawrence, ‘Mornings in Mexico’
Rrekgetsi Chimeloane, ‘Whose Laetie Are You?’
Canon H.D. Rawnsley, ‘The Child and the Cinematograph Show’
‘Shorthand typist secretary, 21, female’, ‘British Cinemas and their Audiences’
John Baxter, ‘A Pound of Paper’
Paul Rose, ‘My Memories of Star Wars Are Only True from a Certain Point of View’
Mary J. Breen, ‘The Legion of Decency’
‘College girl of nineteen’, ‘Movies and Conduct’
Robert Ferguson, ‘Scandinavians’
Philip Norman, ‘Babycham Night’
Roland Barthes, ‘Leaving the Movie Theater’


 



Coda





Frank Cottrell-Boyce, ‘A Love Letter to Cinema’


 



Bibliography

Index