Campbeltown Speaks: Small-Town Cinema and the Coming of Sound

Abstract

The popularity of cinema from its earliest days in small-town settings emphasises the importance of local circumstances in explaining the medium’s success. This article employs surviving business records relating to the Picture House in the Scottish burgh of Campbeltown to explore aspects of cinema-going peculiar to that corner of rural Argyllshire, including a propensity, hitherto unidentified among Scottish audiences, to support the productions of the British film industry. Beyond this, the Picture House has a broader significance. As a monopoly provider of commercial entertainment to an enclosed market, it offers telling insights into a key point of transition for cinema, that from silent to sound film. Placed in the context of national trends, documented by data relating to the taxation of entertainments, Campbeltown provides compelling evidence that the advent of the talkies marked a fundamental discontinuity in the history of the medium at all levels, from the local to the national.