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ABSTRACT
Using oral history interviews and questionnaires gathered as part of the ‘Cultural Memory and British Cinema-going of the 1960s’ project, this article recovers and analyses the reminiscences of people who were interested or involved in the British counterculture. By drawing on a broader range of experiences than typically represented in canonical accounts of the counterculture and those that have informed prior historical scholarship, it adds a wider range of experiences, understandings and behaviours when considering how people remember their discovery of the counterculture and its bearing on their social lives, understanding of film, popular culture, politics and society. The article demonstrates how film and, more generally, popular culture held significance in presenting ideas about counterculture as well as how cinemas and film clubs provided spaces for people to socialise and develop subcultural networks. It also suggests how significant class, locality, educational experiences and gender were in shaping how people did or did not enter countercultural scenes, how they understood themselves, their cinema-going experiences and the films that they watched.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Interview with Oscar, CMBCG, UCL, transcript number 0964.
2. Glen, “Exploiting the Daydreams.”
3. Kuhn, An Everyday Magic.
4. Interview with Mervyn, CMBCG, UCL, transcript number 0014.
5. Burgin, The Remembered Film, 50–1.
6. Foucault, “Of Other Spaces.”
7. Grossberg, We Gotta Get Out, 83–84.
8. Bourdieu, Distinction, 1–2.
9. Green, All Dressed Up, xi.
10. Booker, The Neopheliacs; Farren, Give the Anarchist; Melly, Revolt into Style; Taylor, Twenty Years Ago Today; and Miles, In the Sixties.
11. Campbell, “Accounting for the Counterculture,” 110–1.
12. Gemie and Ireland, “The Consul and the Beatnik,” 463.
13. Bingham, Family Newspapers? 121. See also Thomas, “Challenging the Myths.”
14. Donnelly, Sixties Britain, 124.
15. August, “Gender and 1960s Youth Culture”; Brunt, “An Immense Verbosity”; Campbell, “A Feminist Sexual Politics”; Jeffreys, Anticlimax; Jeffries, Anticlimax; and Rowbotham, In Place of a Dream.
16. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 7–8.
17. Gildart, Images of England; and Hall and Jefferson, Resistance through Rituals.
18. Maltby, Biltereyst, and Meers, Explorations in New Cinema History, 9.
19. Kuhn, An Everyday Magic; Smith, “A Riot at the Palace”; Puwar, “Social Cinema Scenes”; Stokes and Jones, “Windows on the World”; Jones, “Far from Swinging London”; and Pett and Stokes, “Cinema Space and Postcolonial Audiences.”
20. Ibid.
21. Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, New Perspectives from Unstructured Interviews.
22. Ibid., 2.
23. Kuhn, An Everyday Magic, 5–7.
24. Questionnaire by Joel, CMBCG, UCL, transcript number 0096. Our project was conducted on the basis of complete anonymity; pseudonyms only are used here.
25. Questionnaire by Sebastian, CMBCG, UCL, transcript number 0046.
26. Interview with Nathalie, CMBCG, UCL, transcript number 0759.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid.
29. Questionnaire by Danny, CMBCG, UCL, transcript number 0424.
30. Interview with Bob, CMBCG, UCL, transcript number 0704.
31. Gildart, Images of England, 9–10.
32. Interview with Kate, CMBCG, UCL, transcript number 0775.
33. Ibid.
34. Interview with Oscar.
35. Ibid.
36. Interview with Laura, CMBCG, UCL, transcript number 0249.
37. Ibid.
38. See note 34 above.
39. Interview with Sebastian.
40. Interview with Bob.
41. Hoggart, Uses of Literacy, 238–9.
42. Interview with Kate.
43. Interview with Danny.
44. See note 34 above.
45. Hogenkamp, Film, Television and the Left, 8.
46. See note 34 above.
47. Ibid.
48. Questionnaire by Dorian, CMBCG, UCL, transcript number 0707.
49. See note 43 above.
50. Ibid.
51. See note 40 above.
52. Interview with Nathalie.
53. See note 42 above.
54. See note 52 above.
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Patrick Glen
Patrick Glen is a Research Fellow in History at the University of Wolverhampton. He is an expert in the social and cultural history of post-War Britain, popular music, the press, audience research and discussions of social mores. He is the author of Youth and Permissive Social Change in British Music Papers, 1967–1983. At the time of researching this paper he worked at University College London as the Postdoctoral Research Associate on the AHRC-funded projects “Cinema-going and Cultural Memory of British Cinema-going” and “Remembering 1960s British Cinema-going”.