Introduction

The rise and fall of the cinema is one of the most dramatic stories in the social history of this century. In 1900 there were almost certainly no purpose-built cinemas in Britain. By 1940 there were over 5,500 and going to the cinema was the main form of leisure activity for the majority of the population. What people went to the cinema for was, as C. Day Lewis suggested, cheap, enthralling, escapist entertainment.

The surroundings were, for most people at that time, luxurious, but also communal, not private: the whole audience laughed together or cried together. The moment’s pause in a big cinema at the end of a powerfully moving drama was exactly the same as in the theatre.

Then came an almost equally rapid decline until by 1985, 80% of those cinemas were no longer showing films and had either changed their use or been demolished. This rapid decline means that, to most young people today, a film is something hired from a video shop or seen on TV. Yet the great cinema-going generation is still alive; many cinemas are actually still standing.

In the last few years there has been a considerable revival in the number of people going to cinemas. This situation makes the cinemas and cinema-going habits of the past a particularly fruitful topic for investigation by pupils.

This online resource offers a range of other materials to support such investigations in the school curriculum. It is in two parts:

• Part 1 is a brief illustrated history of cinemas, which is intended for teachers, but which is written so that pupils may also make use of it.
  
• Part 2 offers suggestions for work at two levels: Key Stage 2 and GCSE.

The Key Stage 2 topic fits well into the History National Curriculum, Unit 3b, "Britain since 1930", where cinema and television are specifically mentioned. It would, of course, also be appropriate to study local cinemas under Study Unit 5, local history.

The suggestions in this resource focus on opportunities for oral history, model making and mapwork. Most of the Key elements for history for this Key Stage can be met through this work. Pupils will be balancing their political history with some social and cultural history, they will find out about the ideas, attitudes and beliefs of people in the past, they will have to explain the reasons for changes and consider different interpretations of these reasons, they will have to use a variety of types of evidence not much encountered in other topics, and they will have to communicate their findings, perhaps in some of the ways suggested.

These pages also resource two types of Coursework at GCSE:

• A site investigation for the Schools History Project Unit, "History Around Us".
• A document study targeted on evidence evaluation and interpretation