Abstract

The cinema audience has in the past not been given a lot of room in film theory; insofar Annette Kuhn’s book ‘An Everyday Magic, Cinema and Cultural Memory’ (2002) fills a rather large gap. Kuhn explores how cinema-going affected people’s everyday life and how the film text became part of people’s personal memory. Cinema, Kuhn claims in her book, is an integral part of formation of identities, especially for the generation who were young in the 1930s and for whom going to ‘the pictures’ was their favourite leisure activity. Why were the 1930s so special? What kind of audience are we dealing with? When considering how popular it was to visit the cinema at the time we are inclined to think of cinema as mass entertainment, even just in reference to the sheer numbers - but what significance did cinema-going have and what role did the culture that surrounded cinema play in 1930s British society?

How to Cite:

Knorpp, B., (2017) “Book Review: Annette Kuhn (2002) An Everyday Magic, Cinema and Cultural Memory, London and New York: I.B. Tauris. ISBN: 1860648673”, Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture 2(1), 125-128. doi: https://doi.org/10.16997/wpcc.13