Cine-clubs
A B C D E F G H I
JK
L M N O P R S T U V
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1900s there were around fi fty companies issu-
ing cards in the UK and Ireland. Refl ecting the
dominance of the British Empire, the cards
represented many military issues, along with
major inventions of the time – the motor car and
the aeroplane. Exploration and discovery, and
the Edwardian craze for collecting things – birds’
eggs, butterfl ies, porcelain – were prominently
refl ected in the choice of subject-matter, as were
the music hall and the scouting movement.
Early in the First World War (1914–18) the
Wills company actually issued cards as minia-
ture recruiting posters, while Gallahers put out
several series of Victoria Cross Heroes in 1915
and 1916. Carreras issued Women on War Work
and Raemaekers’ War Cartoons portraying the
Germans as barbarians.
Later examples of these cultural ephemera
were Gallahers’ Boy Scouts, Fables and Their
Morals; Wills’s Cinema Stars and Radio Celebri-
ties. Ogdens produced a series on Broadcasting.
With the approach of the Second World War
(1939–45) Carreras produced Britain’s Defences
(1938); Players issued Aircraft of the RAF in the
same year, and in 1939, Modern Naval Craft. Th e
most ambitious cigarette-card enterprise of the
period was the Imperial Tobacco Company’s Air
Raid Precautions, made available in a variety of
cigarette brands.
Cigarette-card production remained popular
in the post-war era, though the 1960s saw a
marked decline. In the 1970s came the much
sought-after series from Player, Th e Golden Age
of Motoring, packed in Doncella cigars. The
Golden Age continued with Steam (1976), Flying
(1977) and Sail (1978). See picture postcards.
Cine-clubs Th ese played an important role in
the development of cinema in many countries.
Where, in the commercial fi lm theatres, popular
entertainment monopolized programmes, the
cine-clubs showed new experimental and often
non-fi ctional work. John Grierson (1898–1972)
organized the first British showing of Sergei
Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin at the London
Film Society (formed in 1925) in 1929, along with
his own seminal documentary Drifters. Minister
of Propaganda in Nazi Germany, Goebbels,
outlawed all cine-clubs because of their ‘subver-
sive’ nature and a similar fate befell the cine-club
movement in pre-Second World War Japan.
Th e Depression and the failure of the media
to meet its causes head-on helped give belated
birth to the US cine-club movement. Th e Work-
ers’ Film and Photo League, soon renamed the
National Film and Photo League, was formed in
New York in 1930. Members of the League made
text and pictures; then it becomes churnalism.
Pressures of competition and commercialization
result in corner-cutting, facts not checked-out
thoroughly, dependence on single rather than a
variety of sources and over-readiness to opt for
sensation over verifi able truth.
In Flat Earth News: An Award-winning
Reporter Exposes Falsehood, Distortion and
Propaganda in the Global Media (Vintage
Books, 2009), Nick Davies writes that pressures
on modern journalists are such that ‘only 12
of their stories turn out to be their own work;
and only 12 of their key facts are eff ectively
checked’.
Davies believes that the ‘problems of churnal-
ism have become even worse with the arrival of
news websites involving reportage whose prime
principle is speed imposed on reporters for the
press and TV alike’, the majority activity being
recycling second-hand stories. He writes of ‘the
tendency for the media to recycle ignorance’,
producing what he terms ‘flat earth’ stories
- news stoked up by conjecture and headline-
seeking but with questionable, or no, substance.
Th e author cites as a fl at earth story the wild
predictions concerning the Millennium Bug
which, according to media predictions, would
cause catastrophic mayhem as computers
adjusted from 1999 to 2000. As it turned out,
nothing could have been smoother; a transition
without fuss. Blame is laid at ‘the behaviour of
the new corporate owners of the media who have
cut editorial staffi ng while increasing editorial
output, slashing the old supply lines which used
to feed up raw information from the ground;
and, with the advent of news websites, added the
new imperative of speed’. See the Media Stan-
dards Trust website churnalism.com, created to
track and publicize cases of churnalism and to
expose plagiarism.
Cigarette cards: cultural indicators A US
company, Allen Ginter, produced the forerun-
ner of the fi rst British cigarette card when they
packed with their Richmond Gem brand a pair
of oval cards held together by a stud, one section
of which was a calendar for 1884, with UK parcel
postage rates on the back. By the 1890s the larger
British tobacco companies were issuing cards,
beginning with advertisements then progressing
to series on particular themes such as soldiers,
ships, royalty, sport and famous beauties.
Th e fi rst company to issue photographic ciga-
rette cards on a large scale was Ogdens who, in
1894, began their Guinea Gold and Tabs cards
covering, in the next thirteen years, practically
every facet of life of that period. In the early
