Abstract:In the field of cinema history, an increased interest in social experience and context has challenged the centrality of the film and the primacy of textual analysis. The 'Early Cinema in Scotland, 1896Scotland, -1927' research project takes a contextual approach, using geo-database tools to facilitate collaboration. This article shows how spatially-enabled methods can also be mobilized to bring issues of representation back into a cinema history project. We argue that, when the films have not survived, their geographical descriptors as recorded by trade-press reviews and catalogues offer new avenues of analysis. The article argues that foregrounding location as a significant element in the film corpus creates a new point of interconnection between film text and context. The juxtapositions and divergences between the spatial patterns of film production and cinema exhibition are connected to pre-cinematic traditions of representation. The spatial distribution also sheds light on the differences between films made for local and international consumption, reflecting on Scotland's position in relation to discourses of modernity.

This article charts commercial cinema’s role in promoting the war effort in Scotland during the First World War, outlining three aspects of the relationship between cinema and the war as observed in Scottish non-fiction short films produced between 1914 and 1918. The existing practice of local topical filmmaking, made or commissioned by cinema managers, created a particular form of engagement between cinema and war that was substantially different from the national newsreels or official films. The article offers an analysis of surviving short ‘topicals’ produced and exhibited in Scotland, which combine images of local military marches with kilted soldiers and enthusiastic onlookers and were designed to lure the assembled crowds back into the cinema to see themselves onscreen. Synthesising textual analysis with a historical account of the films’ production context, the article examines the films’ reliance on the romanticised militarism of the Highland soldier and the novelty appeal of mobilisation and armament, sidelining the growing industrial unrest and anti-war activities that led to the birth of the term ‘Red Clydeside’. The article then explores how, following the British state’s embracing of film propaganda post-1916, local cinema companies such as Green’s Film Service produced films in direct support of the war effort, for example Patriotic Porkers (1918, for the Ministry of Food). Through their production and exhibition practice exhibitors mediated the international conflict to present it to local audiences as an appealing spectacle, but also mobilised cinema’s position in Scottish communities to advance ideological and practical aspects of the war effort, including recruitment, refugee support, and fundraising

Selecting and booking films to make up a programme that suited a particular audience was a crucial skill for exhibitors in the competitive conditions of the early cinema trade in Britain. This article argues that access to trade previews of the films was necessary for this choice to be meaningful, and it studies the emergence and regularisation of trade shows in Glasgow, Scotland, as an indicator of the forms of agency retained by independent cinema managers and renters. By documenting its different local manifestations up to 1920, the trade preview is shown to be a particular reception context, with its own spaces and codes of conduct. Furthermore, in a thriving non-metropolitan film trade, such as the Scottish one, it was an important social routine where informal networks could be nurtured and information shared. Thus, by looking at the micro-cosmos of the private projection room, it is possible to get a glimpse of how the trade functioned on the ground and how it understood its social position during a time of great upheaval, before it conformed to a more centralised, institutional model. Choice is a form of power in market relationships, and in the film trade, the exhibitor's ability to select a programme has been a crucial point in the struggles between different sectors of the industry. In the first quarter of the twentieth century, the new medium of the moving image emerged in the intersection of earlier entertainment practices, reaching a wide variety of audiences with the rapid expansion of commercial exhibition around the world. 1 The relatively decentralised structures of distribution and exhibition in the early film trade were in tension with its tendencies towards corporate concentration and institutionalisation, shaping

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‘Experiential’ forms of exhibition use liveness and site-specificity as strategies to valorize the eventfulness of an engagement with film. This chapter explores different practices and intentions of eventful cinema. It first examines liveness as a power struggle between exhibitor and text, which needs to be understood in relation to the showmanship tradition of early and classical eras. It then discusses site-specific screenings, considering different ways to modulate the encounter between environment and film projection, from the diegetically immersive to the distracted and relaxed. Finally, it returns to intermediality as a creative opportunity generated by non-theatrical exhibition.