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FOR THOSE OF US who have grown up with the cinema as one of a multitude of entertainment choices, it is difficult to grasp just how essential a visit to the pictures became in the first half of the 20th century.
Across Britain, cinema fever peaked in the interwar years. Having started as a sideshow attraction during the Victorian era, by the end of the First World War it had blossomed into the habitual entertainment for the masses, and with it came a culture of cinema-going that has attained almost mythical status.
With European filmmaking at a low ebb, Hollywood raced to the dominant position that it maintained for the rest of the century, supplying the majority of movies to British audiences. The idiosyncratic way in which cinema developed in Wales during this era is the subject of a new book by Dr Peter Miskell, lecturer in Business History at the University of Reading. It reveals a rather more complex relationship than one of simple colonisation by American cinema.
Miskell finds that while many British cinemagoers frequented newly converted theatres and chain-owned picture houses, for the smaller communities of Wales the local ‘fleapits’ endured. They tended to remain under local ownership and management, creating a distinctive juxtaposition: the stream of American culture that formed the mainstay of the movie schedules was consumed within a local, Welsh context.
“I don’t think cinema is unique in this regard,” comments Miskell. “Ultimately, of course, all forms of culture or entertainment are consumed and interpreted at the most local level of all – that of the individual.
“The interesting thing about cinema is that it is publicly consumed, so the process of consuming and interpreting the pictures is a social activity as well as an individual one. I can’t think of many other examples of people gathering in such large numbers on a regular basis to watch other ‘foreign’ entertainments.”
For the Welsh communities dominated by the sermonizing of the pulpit and the economic realities of coal-mining, the cinema provided glamour and escapism. While ‘Liberal Wales’ may have been disturbed by the moral degradation of Hollywood films, and ‘Labour Wales’ by their lack of social and political realism, the cinema-going public voted with their wallets and purses.
As cinemas across Britain attempted to smarten themselves up for the middle classes – a legacy that includes the dubious renaming of many buildings to include ‘Palace’ or ‘Royal’ in the title – the cinema of the Welsh fleapits remained predominantly a working-class phenomenon, until audiences began to decline in the early 1950s.
One of Miskell’s most telling observations is that what are often remembered as the ‘golden years’ of Hollywood do not coincide with the peak popularity of cinema-going. To understand this, suggests the author, is to glimpse cinema’s true nature:
“I think the one thing I have really learned is that the types of films that end up getting made and distributed to mass audiences are influenced as much by economic forces as cultural ones,” he says. “In the 1950s and 60s, for instance, as the regular habit of weekly cinema-going declined, so did the profitability of regular medium-budget pictures. The studios realised that the production of big budget technicolor ‘spectaculars’ (which were as distinct as possible from TV entertainment) offered the best chance of attracting audiences and making profits.”
With the waning of the fleapit, many of the anxieties and criticisms, such as those expressed by Canon D W Thomas, transferred to the small screen. In television, Miskell points out, Welsh culture has been much more successfully reflected that it ever was in film.
So does a study of modern cinema-going in Wales hold any appeal for Miskell?
“Cinema is no longer, as JB Priestley put it in the 1930s, ‘the essential social habit of the age’, ” he says. “It simply isn’t that significant a feature of the social history of late twentieth century Wales. If we were to seek out more modern public institutions where consumers gather in their thousands on a weekly basis, our attention would more likely be drawn to supermarkets or shopping centres. In some ways that would require a rather different type of study, but many of the same issues remain.”
A Social History of the Cinema in Wales 1918 to 1951, Pulpits, Coal Pits and Fleapits, by Peter Miskell, is published by the University of Wales Press.
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