Doing it all: Single screen spaces, community building and labour 1900s and today

This paper examines the role of the ‘all in one’ film exhibition worker in coastal Kent at opposite ends of film industry history and argues that their labour gives them a unique role as builders of community. In the 1890s-early 1910s, the precarious labour of traveling film shows in the public gardens and variety halls of the seaside towns of Broadstairs, Margate and Ramsgate led to the development of film only spaces. Since the late 2000s the area has, once again largely in the absence of cinemas, returned to one in which it is the precarious labour of individual entrepreneurs creating the single screen spaces for film. Drawing on Gabriel Menotti’s description of film curation as ‘a matrix of reproductive labour tasked with the maintenance of media practices and institutions’ [1], I will explore how the labour of the ‘all in one’ worker does this in part as investment in local people and place. Film exhibition is part of my research into the neighbouring towns’ linked histories of film, cinema and tourism/heritage, initially focusing on a definitive chronological industrial and social mapping including oral history interviews. I am co-owner of the last remaining cinema in the three towns and plan to incorporate grounded theory analytic strategies in an autoethnographic approach to provide insight into labour practices past and future.

[1] Gonring, G. M. P. (2021, February 10). Always already post: subaltern epistemologies in cinema curation. https://doi.org/10.33767/osf.io/ukah9