Exhibition: A Museum of Everyday Life: Cinephilia and Collecting


The Peltz Gallery at Birkbeck, University of London, will be exhibiting a selection of curious, unseen works picked from the collections of The Cinema Museum.

A Museum of Everyday Life: Cinephilia and Collecting will showcase the intricate handmade archives, indexes and scrapbooks painstakingly recorded by filmgoers and cinema obsessives, from World War Two to the present.

A Museum of Everyday Life showcases a selection of the Cinema Museum’s extensive array of personal archives and records built by amateur film enthusiasts, largely unnoticed by visitors and researchers until now.

The exhibition looks at how these fascinatingly personal, creative and intricate collections begin to form a kind of life writing or autobiography, documenting the everyday lives of cinema enthusiasts. From Vic Kinson, an amateur cinephile, who amassed an archive of over 36,000 index cards – each card intricately detailing the careers and personal lives of the film stars he saw on the silver screen; Peter Ewing, whose scrapbooks and film diaries record his cinema-going teenage years in London through the Blitz and the remainder of the Second World War; to Graham Head, who painstakingly snipped off squares of celluloid from every reel of film he projected and kept them in little brown envelopes.

The exhibition will be complemented by a Cinephilia Film Programme at the Birkbeck Cinema on Friday 21 and Saturday 22 October 2016.