BFF: The 1939 Diary of a Belfast Cinema-Goer : The 20th Century Letterboxd

I have been a Letterboxd user for about four years now, much to the chagrin of those around me. After every film I watch, I am straight to the app to log my review and read the opinions of others. I love seeing what everyone else is watching, what they thought, how many stars they thought a film was worth.

I fantasise about one day being on a red carpet, the interviewer for Letterboxd asks me my top four favourites. And I pretend to be caught off guard. “My top four favourites? Of all time? God, that’s a tough one.” I would then pretend to rhyme off whatever comes to mind, nonchalant and cool but in fact I have had this entire interaction scripted for months.

I’m addicted.

So when I looked at the programme for the Belfast Film festival this year and came across Dr. Sam Manning’s presentation: The 1939 Diary of a Belfast Cinema-goer, I knew I had to go. As a budding cinephile and history enthusiast, it’s like this talk was made for me.

Hosted in the Black Box Theatre in the Cathedral Quarter, Dr. Manning brings us on a journey through the history of Belfast cinemas while also trying to piece together the identity of the diary’s mysterious author.

The diary contains no personal details of its owner. No name, no number. Nothing.

Except for a record of all the films they had watched and the sporadic scrawling of the Celtic scores on match days. When asking the Ebay seller of the £134 diary if she had any information, Manning reports that she did not. The seller says that she found the diary in a house clearing auction in England. Another dead end in this mystery.

In fact, there’s no personalisation within the diary whatsoever. The diarist was meticulous when cataloging the 325 films they watched that year. Each entry included the film’s cast, who produced the picture, and which cinema they went to. Nothing to say for who they went with, what they thought of the cinema, was there a child kicking the back of their seat for the duration of the runtime? Questions and answers lost to time.

However, if the comparisons to Letterboxd weren’t obvious enough, in the diary’s index there was a ratings system written by the anonymous diarist. Ten points in total. From one star (hopeless) to ten stars (beyond praise). They even listed their top 10 favourite films of the year, with Three Comrades taking the top spot.

The films watched paved the way for some interesting facts about the film distribution system in the 1930’s. Manning explained that most of the pictures watched by the diarist actually had been released between 1937-38. This gap is because of the hierarchy within film distribution. Hollywood films (which made up 300 of the films documented in the diary) made the rounds in America first. Then the film reel was sent to the UK, starting in London and doing the rounds before landing in Belfast. This explains why our mystery writer spent so much time in the Majestic cinema (25 trips in a year) as they would have been the first cinema in the North to receive the new film reels.

Out of the whole diary, there is one entry that is particularly striking given the year.

September 3rd, 1939. The page is all but empty except for two words written in block capitals in the centre: WAR DECLARED. When the page flashed across the screen of the slideshow, I felt goosebumps crawl up my arms. Something so simple and so haunting about writing a news headline, not knowing just how the war would unfold across the world’s stage.

At the end of the presentation, Manning allowed the audience to come up and have a look at the diary ourselves. Getting to hold it in my hands, feeling this connection to someone whose identity has been lost to history, it reminds you just how small you are in the grand scheme of things. And it’s easy to let that kind of feeling consume you entirely. Here is a diary, from someone who was infatuated with the cinema, who would have never assumed that I would be reading this 86 years later. It gets you thinking.

I grew up in a very interesting time in the technological boom of the 2000s. Young enough that my dad had to teach me how to use the computer but old enough that I had to teach him how to use his iPhone. My education began with a blackboard and ended with laptops. The digitisation of the world around us happened so quickly that I don’t think I had time to stop and think about it.

This isn’t me going full luddite. I love my laptop, it’s my baby. But I think we are losing such important historical records without even realising. In 50 years, no one is going to be snooping around and stumble across granny’s Letterboxd account. No one is going to write an elaborate presentation about the historical context and importance of quippy one-liners for Call Me By Your Name.

So there I was, experiencing the sublime on a random Sunday in Belfast. And not to start the new year’s resolutions early, but Manning’s passion for this project and his insightful presentation have inspired me to keep my own physical diary. I don’t think I’ll quite make it to 325 films but I’ll do my best. But I want to keep a note of it all: Where did I go? What did I see? Who was I with? What did I feel? Was the popcorn any good?

As for the eponymous Belfast Cinema-goer, I hope they lived a good, long life. I hope they continued obsessively watching as many films as they could right until the end. I hope they don’t feel too miffed that we have all read their diary. And I really hope they lived long enough to see The Godfather.