‘The story of the reel that went for a swim’: Cinema Memory and the History of the Highlands and Islands Film Guild as Narrated through Oral History Interviews and surrounding Metadata

Abstract

This article draws from existing work relating to the creative writing strand of the Major Minor Cinema project, which was inspired by the surprising discovery of project's pilot study that some cinema-goers from the period of research had been inspired to write poems or stories in response to their experience of going to the Film Guild screenings. Building on an earlier publication in the journal Participations (May 2019), which largely focused on the project's use of creative methodologies and creative writing workshops as a way of exploring cinema memory, this article will consider the way which cinema memory was narrativised in project's oral history interviews and their surrounding metadata, focusing in particular on the specificities of cinema-going in rural Scotland, and taking into consideration the significance of Scotland's oral history and storytelling traditions in relation to the arrival of cinema to the Highlands and Islands.