Freak scene: cinema-going memories and the British counterculture of the 1960s

Abstract

© 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. 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.