The Bioscope on the pier at Weston-Super-Mare, c.1910

From Silent Screen to Digital Screen: A Century of Cinema Exhibition is a two-day conference to be held at De Montfort University, Leicester, 10-11 July 2010. The conference, to be hosted by the Cinema and Television History (CATH) Research Centre in DMU’s Faculty of Humanities, will celebrate a century of cinema exhibition since the Cinematograph Act 1909, the first major legislation relating to moving pictures in Britain, coming into force on 1 January 1910.

Keynote speakers will include Richard Gray of the Cinema Theatre Association, and others to be confirmed.

Proposals are invited on any aspect of cinema exhibition including:
audiences, technologies, cinema design and building, programming,
legislation and other aspects of the cinemagoing experience. If interested you should sent abstracts (500 words) with a short biography including contact details to Stuart Hanson (shanson [at] dmu.ac.uk) and Steve Chibnall (schib [at] dmu.ac.uk) by 23 April 2010. There isn’t a web page for the conference as yet, but I’ll add one to this post just as soon as one appears.

The conference gains its title from Stuart Hanson’s recent book From Silent Screen to Multi-screen: A History of Cinema Exhibition in Britain Since 1896, a commendable and rather useful work, which was covered by the Bioscope (a little too nitpickingly, I fear) here.

Update: The deadline for abstracts has now been put back to 14 May.