Tis the Season for Cinema: Going to the Movies on Christmas Day, 1950
The Citizen, 9 December 1950, 4.The Citizen, 23 December 1950, 4. The Citizen, 23 December 1950, 4. Christmas day in St Andrews in 1950 differed from previous years. While recent years had been unseasonably warm, on this morning the townspeople were greeted by a glistening blanket of frost. The overnight temperature had slumped to fifteen degrees below freezing. The children met this cold weather with delight as they tried out their new ice skates, and games of curling were played on the skating pond (St Andrews Citizen, 30 December 1950). Though there was holiday merriment, St Andrews...
Read MoreLive Shows and the Cinema: The Gypsy Baron Premieres in the New Picture House
The Gypsy Baron is an operetta by Johann Strauss II first produced in 1885. It envisions a landowner’s marriage to a gypsy girl, daughter of a Turkish bashaw, at the height of Ottoman rule in Europe. The operetta created a sensation upon release and as a result, it was continuously adapted onto the stage across the world and adapted into film more than five times in the first half of the twentieth century. The operetta enjoyed a different kind of rendition when put on by the St Andrews Amateur Operatic Society for the first time in St Andrews in 1966. The Society formed in 1939 to gather...
Read More‘Caligari Comes To Town: A decline in impact of the classic German horror?’
In 1949, The St. Andrews Film Society – formerly known as The Dundee and St. Andrews Film Society – relaunched on its own, with an opening performance of Raymond Bernard’s Les Otages. For this opening event at the New Picture House on 20 February, each of the 150 members in attendance were personally greeted by Mr. A. B. Paterson, the original founder of The Byre Theatre and a key figure in St. Andrews’ artistic community. While the society would become an integral part of the town’s artistic community – through its Sunday evening screenings – its second performance on Sunday...
Read MoreMonarch News: Long Live the Cinema!
1943: The allies capture Tripoli from the Nazis; Television Broadcasting continues to be suspended; George Harrison is born; and two St. Andrews students begin their film magazine, Monarch News! The ambitious Monarch – a hand-made magazine – was produced from 1943-1944. Manufactured against the backdrop of war, it provides a valuable glimpse into the period from the perspective of students, prospective film critics and members of the armed forces – all rolled into one. Founded by two St Andrews Students, Rollo Mitchell and Bob Edwards, and produced in Cowdenbeath,...
Read MoreMapping the town’s cinema history
While the importance of St Andrews in the history of photography is now widely known, there is far less understanding of the early history of cinema in the towns and indeed of the connections between photography and moving images in the 19th century. Sam Mills has investigated some of these links in a series of new posts for the site and, moreover, has created a map highlighting some of the key locations and movements in the cinematic history of St Andrews. You can visit the map...
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