Charlotte Crofts introduces two recent smartphone apps which explore cinema history in the places where it actually happened: Curzon Memories App and The Lost Cinemas of Castle Park including World War 2 bombings, snogging in the back row and the Odeon cinema haunted by the ghost of Parrington Jackson, shot in 1946 during a screening of The Light That Failed, at the exact moment that gunshots went off on the screen... please note that this is a pdf of a powerpoint that had audio and video - links to the video are available but the audio is not available. Both apps are available on iTunes App Store and optimised for iOS6 (and Curzon Memories is also available on Android) and have an "armchair" mode for remote access to most of the content.

1. ‘“Old Wine in New Bottles”:
Researching Cinema Heritage
Through Pervasive Media’
Dr Charlotte Crofts
University of the West of England
charlotte.crofts@uwe.ac.uk

2. The End of Cinema is Nigh
• Cinema : Digital (2006)
• ‘Digital Decay’ Moving Image (2008)
• ‘Cinema Distribution in the Age of
Digital Projection’ Postscript (2011)
• Godfrey Cheshire / Paulo Cherchi Usai
• Screen heritage beyond the filmic text
• Cinema & the built environment
• Cinema-going & Cinema technologies

3. Cinema : Digital (2006)
http://www.watershed.co.uk/dshed/content/look-exhibition-and-display

4. Research Questions
• How do the conditions of production, exhibition and
spectatorship change in a mobile media
environment and what is the emotional and
physical affect and relationship of audiences to
these new technologies of seeing?
– Revisiting the Apparatus theory of the 1970s
(Baudry, Metz, Heath et al)
– How are we situated as enunciating and
enunciated subjects by mobile technologies?
– What might an App-aratus theory be?
– Interface theory / Human Computer Interaction

5. Research Questions
• How can locative media be used most effectively
to engage new audiences for and enhance
understanding of moving image culture beyond
the filmic text?
– How can locative media be applied creatively
to an indoor heritage context?
– How can these innovations be applied to other
heritage contexts in the UK and
internationally?

6. The Curzon Memories App

7. The Curzon Memories App

8. The Curzon Memories App

9. https://vimeo.com/44960163

10. Projection Hero

11. Projection Hero
http://curzonproject.wordpress.com/videos

12. Projection Hero
https://vimeo.com/37568683

13. Projection Hero
http://vimeo.com/37570933

14. AHRC REACT
‘Heritage Sandbox’
– City Strata: App Authoring Platform
– Cinemapping App – Bristol Cinemas
– The Lost Cinemas of Castle Park App
• Sandbox = 3 month rapid-prototyping
process
• Creative Economy partner Calvium and
Heritage partner Bristol City Council
• Knowledge Exchange and Innovation

16. Know Your Place
http://maps.bristol.gov.uk/knowyourplace/

18. Key points of reference:
• UCLA’s HyperCities project based on ArcGIS
database - “travelling back in time to explore
historical layers of city spaces in an interactive
hypermedia environment :
– http://hypercities.com
• ‘A Time Traveller’s Guide to Bristol’ which
uses geographically located archive films :
– http://www.atimetravellersguide.com/
• History Pin based on Google maps:
– http://www.historypin.com/

19. See also:
• Rebecca Solnit’s, Infinite City: A San
Francisco Atlas
– particularly Map No. 3: Cinema City
showing Eadweard Muybridge's legacy,
locations from Hitchcock's Vertigo, and
movie theaters past and present.

20. Cinema City:
Muybridge inventing movies, Hitchcock making Vertigo

21. Rebecca Solnit
UC Press Podcast
• “…there were certain things that were meaningful,
exciting, strange about San Francisco and about places
in general that were better told through maps than
through words. For example if I tell you there were
ninety-nine murders in San Francisco in 2008, that’s not
very exciting. But if I actually show you the maps with
the murders mostly on the east side of the city, kind of
scattered like buckshot across the geography and you
can imagine the particulars of place, and you can see
that it happened here, and it happened here and it
happened here, it’s much more immediate, visceral and
affecting” http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520262508

22. Locative Experience Design
• Dialectical montage between physical
location, media “content” and user
interface.
• Pervasive / ubiquitous / mobile
• Local / regional / specific
• Returning digital arts and humanities to
the “particulars of place” / presence /
aura

23. Iterative Design Process
• Single point of interest – Whiteladies
Picture House
• Multi point tour – The Lost Cinemas of
Castle Park App
• User evaluation of work in progress
• On-site and off-site testing
• Feeding back into the design process

24. Whiteladies Picture House

25. Whiteladies Picture House

26. Whiteladies Picture House

27. Lost Cinemas of Castle Park

28. Lost Cinemas of Castle Park

29. Lost Cinemas of Castle Park

30. The Olympia / Tatler 1910-1963
“I saw my first sub-titled picture shortly
after I arrived. It was at the Tatler, an art
house disguised as an exploitation flea pit
near Old Market – a 1939 Claude Autant-
Lara comedy called Fric-Frac starring
Fernandel, Arletty and Michel Simon. Not
long after that I saw my first neo-realist
film there, Rossellini's Paisa” (Philip
French).

31. The Queens Picture House 1910-1933

33. The Odeon 1938-present

34. Lost Cinemas of Castle Park

35. “What, the curtains?”
VALIE EXPORT
Tap & Touch
Cinema (1968)
Dennis Göttel
http://apertura.hu/
2008/nyar/goettel,
citing Laura Marks,
The Skin of the Film

36. Social Media

37. Key Findings
• Social media is compelling
• Ability to comment / add to the
database
• Call to action to use the app important
• Magic moments – when app interacts
with location
• Necessity for ‘Arm chair’ mode to be
equally compelling

39. Future Developments
• Flea Pit – portable Projection Hero
• Potential AHRC bids
– To extend the Cinemapping App
• Liverpool City in Film / Cinema Treasures
– To develop the City Strata Platform
• Work with developers & academics to create
other ‘layers’
• Explore a drag and drop interface to make
content management more accessible
• REACT ‘Objects Sandbox’ 2014…

40. Dr Charlotte Crofts
charlotte.crofts@uwe.ac.uk
http://www.eyefullproductions.co.uk/curzon
www.cinemmapping.co.uk
@charlottecrofts #curzonmemoriesapp #lostcinemas @cinemapping