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The popularity of cinema from its earliest days in small-town settings emphasises the importance of local circumstances in explaining the medium's success. This article employs surviving business records relating to the Picture House in the Scottish burgh of Campbeltown to explore aspects of cinema-going peculiar to that corner of rural Argyllshire, including a propensity, hitherto unidentified among Scottish audiences, to support the productions of the British film industry. Beyond this, the Picture House has a broader significance. As a monopoly provider of commercial entertainment to an enclosed market, it offers telling insights into a key point of transition for cinema, that from silent to sound film. Placed in the context of national trends, documented by data relating to the taxation of entertainments, Campbeltown provides compelling evidence that the advent of the talkies marked a fundamental discontinuity in the history of the medium at all levels, from the local to the national. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cinema Memories: A People's History of Cinema-going in 1960s Britain: by Melvyn Stokes, Matthew Jones, and Emma Pett, London, New York, and Dublin, Bloomsbury Publishing on behalf of the British Film Institute, 2022, xii + 237 pp., £80.00 (hardback), ISBN 9781911239895, and £27.99 (paperback), ISBN 9781839025297 In light of the popular aphorism that if you remember the 1960s, you really weren't there, it may seem ambitious to collect and analyse recollections of cinema-going in that decade. An early chapter on the cinema-going experience as a whole begins by endorsing the view advanced by this school of thought that film was not the principal factor determining attendance. [Extracted from the article]