The Appreciation of Film: The Postwar Film Society Movement and Film Culture in Britain

By Richard Lowell MacDonald

This book offers the first full account of the film society movement in Britain and its contribution to post-World War Two film culture. It brings to life a lost history of alternative film exhibition and challenges the general assumption that the study of film began with university courses on ‘Film Studies’.
Showing how film societies operated and the lasting impression they made on film culture, The Appreciation of Film details the history of film education in Britain.  The book illuminates the changing relationship between volunteer-run societies and professionalised agencies promoting film art such as festivals, specialist commercial distributors and public bodies such as the British Film Institute.
Drawing on original archival research and oral history interviews the book acknowledges the vigour and dedication of volunteer film society activists and presents contemporary readers with a record of their achievement.
Written in an accessible style, this is a study of 16mm projectors, associational life and the making of film culture in Britain. It reclaims the marginalised civic cinephilia of volunteer film society activists whilst providing an alternative narrative of the emergence of film study in Britain.

 

 

 

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Exeter Press
• Release date: Jul 31, 2019
• ISBN: 9780859899895

Richard Lowell MacDonald

Richard Lowell MacDonald is a lecturer in the Media and Communications department at Goldsmiths, University of London. His specific research interests include the history of cinema and visual culture, institutions of film criticism and pedagogy, the aesthetics of documentary and ethnographic film, and historic and contemporary modes of moving image exhibition beyond the cinema theatre.

Book preview

THE APPRECIATION OF FILM

The Appreciation of Film offers the first full account of the film society movement in Britain and its contribution to post-World War Two film culture. It brings to life a lost history of alternative film exhibition and challenges the general assumption that the study of film began with university courses on ‘Film Studies’. Showing how film societies operated and the lasting impression they made on film culture, the book details the history of film education in Britain.

Richard MacDonald illuminates the changing relationship between volunteer-run societies and professionalised agencies promoting film art such as festivals, specialist commercial distributors and public bodies such as the British Film Institute. Drawing on original archival research and oral history interviews he acknowledges the vigour and dedication of volunteer film society activists and presents contemporary readers with a record of their achievement.

Written in an accessible style, this is a study of 16mm projectors, associational life and the making of film culture in Britain. It reclaims the marginalised civic cinephilia of volunteer film society activists whilst providing an alternative narrative of the emergence of film study in Britain.

Richard Lowell MacDonald is a lecturer in the Media and Communications department at Goldsmiths, University of London. His published research explores the social practices and technological infrastructures that shape the circulation of moving and still images.

Exeter Studies in Film History

Published by University of Exeter Press in association with the Bill Douglas Centre for the History of Cinema and Popular Culture.

Series Editors: Richard Maltby, Professor of Screen Studies, Flinders University, South Australia and Steve Neale, Professor of Film Studies and Academic Director of the Bill Douglas Centre, University of Exeter.

Parallel Tracks: The Railroad and Silent Cinema, Lynne Kirby (1997)

The World According to Hollywood, 1918–1939, Ruth Vasey (1997)

‘Film Europe’ and ‘Film America’: Cinema, Commerce and Cultural Exchange 1920–1939

edited by Andrew Higson and Richard Maltby (1999)

A Paul Rotha Reader, edited by Duncan Petrie and Robert Kruger (1999)

A Chorus of Raspberries: British Film Comedy 1929–1939, David Sutton (2000)

The Great Art of Light and Shadow: Archaeology of the Cinema, Laurent Mannoni, translated by Richard Crangle (2000)

Popular Filmgoing in 1930s Britain: A Choice of Pleasures, John Sedgwick (2000)

Alternative Empires: European Modernist Cinemas and Cultures of Imperialism, Martin Stollery (2000)

Hollywood, Westerns and the 1930s: The Lost Trail, Peter Stanfield (2001)

Young and Innocent? The Cinema in Britain 1896–1930, edited by Andrew Higson (2002)

Legitimate Cinema: Theatre Stars in Silent British Films 1908–1918, Jon Burrows (2003)

The Big Show: British Cinema Culture in the Great War (1914–1918), Michael Hammond (2006)

Multimedia Histories: From the Magic Lantern to the Internet, edited by James Lyons and John Plunkett (2007)

Going to the Movies: Hollywood and the Social Experience of Cinema, edited by Richard Maltby, Melvyn Stokes and Robert C. Allen (2007)

Alternative Film Culture in Inter-War Britain, Jamie Sexton (2008)

Marketing Modernity: Victorian Popular Shows and Early Cinema, Joe Kember (2009)

British Cinema and Middlebrow Culture in the Interwar Years, Lawrence Napper (2009)

Reading the Cinematograph: The Cinema in British Short Fiction 1896–1912, edited by Andrew Shail (2010)

Charles Urban: Pioneering the Non-fiction Film in Britain and America, 1897–1925, Luke McKernan (2013)

Cecil Hepworth and the Rise of the British Film Industry, 1899–1911, Simon Brown (2016)

University of Exeter Press also publishes the celebrated five-volume series looking at the early years of English cinema, all reissued in paperback editions in 2014: The Beginnings of the Cinema in England, by John Barnes.

First published in 2016 by

University of Exeter Press

Reed Hall, Streatham Drive

Exeter EX4 4QR

UK

www.exeterpress.co.uk

© Richard Lowell MacDonald 2016

The right of Richard Lowell MacDonald to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 0 85989 888 1 Hardback

ISBN 978 0 85989 989 5 epub

ISBN 978 0 85989 972 7 PDF

Typeset by Carnegie Book Production, Lancaster

For my parents, Mike and Joan

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1Enthusiasm and Civic Duty: The Emergence of the Film Society Movement

2The Post-war Transformation of the Film Society Movement

3Popularising Film Appreciation: Roger Manvell’s Film

4The British Film Institute, the Film Archive and Film Society Programming

5Making the World our Home: Affirmative Internationalism and Film Societies

6Film Society Criticism, Middlebrow Taste and New Cinemas

7Film Societies, Universities and the Emergence of Film Studies

Conclusion: What was Film Appreciation?

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

1. Manchester and Salford Film Society, 1931 ‘Storm Over Asia’, handbill (Working Class Movement Library used with the kind permission of the Manchester and Salford Film Society)

2. Manchester and Salford Workers’ Film Society, 1931, Futurist Cinema, Guest Ticket (Working Class Movement Library used with the kind permission of the Manchester and Salford Film Society)

3. Leeds Jewish Film Group Cabaret and Dance Invitation Card (Alec Baron Archive, Leeds University Special Collections)

4. The Workers’ Film Society (Leeds), prospectus, 1935 (Alec Baron Archive, Leeds University Special Collections)

5. Front cover of the first edition of Roger Manvell’s Film published by Penguin Books in 1944

6. Advert for Contemporary Films Ltd from Sight and Sound , Spring 1957

7. British Federation of Film Societies, Autumn Viewing Sessions, 1969

8. Film (British Federation of Film Societies) Autumn 1963 edited by Peter Armitage with layout by Ivor Kamlish

Acknowledgements

Many years ago I was passing the time flicking through old copies of the eclectic and diverting film magazine Films and Filming. Across several issues I followed the thread of a column featuring news of film society screenings around the country, and was surprised to discover that a film society showing Buñuel and Kurosawa on 16mm projectors had met regularly at the primary school where I had been a pupil a decade or so later. This was my introduction to the film society movement. A deeper acquaintance came through the many people I met who generously shared their memories and experiences of being involved in film societies from the 1940s to the present, passed on programmes and magazines from their personal collections and extended warm hospitality to me. For their kindness and assistance I wish to record my gratitude to Sylvia and Peter Bradford, Sid Brooks, Gwen Bryanston, Anne Burrows, Percy Childs, James Clark, Brian Clay, Michael Essex-Lopresti, Denis Forman, Leslie Hardcastle, Alan Howden, David Meeker, John and Doris Minchinton, Gwen Molloy, Victor Perkins, Rommi Przibram, Mansel Stimpson, Mike Taylor, John Turner, Jean Young and Dave Watterson. I owe a special debt of gratitude to the late John Salisbury.

Some sections of Chapters 3 and 5 appear in different versions in articles published in The Canadian Journal of Film Studies and The Journal of British Cinema and Television respectively. In both cases I’m grateful to the anonymous reviewers and the editors. Special thanks are owed to the many colleagues and friends who provided support, encouragement, employment, comment, advice and conversation during the course of the research and since: Ian Craven, Natalie Fenton, Jon Hoare, David Morley, Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, Melanie Selfe, Cris Shore, Gareth Stanton, Martin Stollery and Martin Williams. Thanks also to the examiners of the PhD thesis upon which this book is based, Ian Christie and Jamie Sexton, and to Sean Delaney and Peter Todd at the British Film Institute Library and Information Services. For helping me navigate the long lean years of research I am indebted to Rachel Moore, who loves film and the movies more completely than anyone else I know. Above all, I want to thank the person from whom I have learnt the most, May Ingawanij, for all the fun and games along the way.

Introduction

This book looks back to a period when amateur initiative channelled and cultivated by film societies was a significant force in the making of film culture in Britain. Film societies were not-for-profit voluntary associations that used the subscriptions of their members to pursue objectives that typically included the exhibition of films that were difficult to access through commercial channels and the organisation of educational activities such as lectures, study and discussion meetings and exhibitions.

The first film society in Britain was established in London in 1925 by an actor, Hugh Miller, and Cambridge graduate Ivor Montagu, both of whom were more than usually knowledgeable about developments in mainland European cinema. From the example of the theatrical societies, already well established in the 1920s, the Film Society of London adapted practices of repertory programming and cultural sponsorship through membership subscription for the purpose of introducing unusual and artistic films to their members. At the end of the decade the convergence of several factors, including the transition to sound, quota rules which compounded exhibitors’ hostility to European productions, the heavy-handed censorship of Soviet films whose notoriety and fame preceded them and the increasing circulation of serious film criticism discussing films that could not be seen by most readers, led to a surge in the formation of societies by amateur activists around the country as the solution to the perceived cultural backwardness and homogeneity of the cinema available to audiences in Britain. By the early 1930s leading film critic Paul Rotha would identify film societies as a movement, and after a further decade of consolidation and growth for provincial film societies one supporter of this movement would write in Documentary News Letter in 1940: ‘Film societies owe their existence to groups of men and women who translate the unspoken need for study and discussion of the culture of cinema into practical action.’1 During the post-war recovery many new film societies were established and with the formation of the Federation of Film Societies in England and Wales, supported by the British Film Institute, the movement attained a degree of collective coordination and co-operation that had eluded it in the 1930s.2 Over the next decade the film society movement, through their Federations or acting alone, initiated Britain’s first film festival and the first national film conference, established an experimental film production fund, published three film periodicals and organised annual viewing sessions to promote films with limited commercial prospects to their members. The men and women who led the study and discussion of the culture of cinema on an amateur basis have not featured prominently in histories of film culture in Britain. This book aims to recover a sense of the organisational vigour and pioneering role of the film societies in organised film study activity, critical writing and debate about film and the development of distinctive traditions of film programming.

The film society method of amateur film exhibition sponsored through membership subscription has been moulded to widely varying educational and social purposes over the years, from workers’ film societies, committed to raising the consciousness of the industrial working class, to scientific film societies, promoting popular science education among the nation’s citizens. The main focus of this book is the commitment of film societies to encouraging the appreciation of film. Encouraging the appreciation of film as an artistic medium was how the vast majority of film societies framed the purpose of their activities during the fifty-year period discussed here. Appreciation, a term which is used unself-consciously in the publications and documents through which the movement’s past is reconstructed, has an archaic timbre in the present. Critics writing about film in the 1920s and early 1930s used the term liberally and with purpose to denote a disposition of seriousness and discrimination in relation to cinema that they wished to encourage in order that the medium might advance. Seeking for cinema the kind of cultural prestige enjoyed by the traditional arts, these critics borrowed the term ‘appreciation’ from its established couplings with literature, music and art appreciation. Appreciation is, therefore, closely aligned to a particular conception of progress for cinema. As Iris Barry put it in Let’s Go to the Movies, ‘seeing for oneself what the cinema’s function and its virtues are’, rather than indulging in blanket condemnation, is ‘the best way to help progress’.3 The antithesis of appreciation, Barry suggested, is an ‘unserious’ attitude to the cinema: a sensibility, she argued, that many educated people possessed.4 Among the handicaps for cinema in this regard was its mutability, ‘which makes it impossible for many of those who would appreciate the most novel, interesting, original films, ever to see them. It is important, really, that they should see them.’5 As an intervention in exhibition culture film societies sought to counter the medium’s mutability by both programming what were judged to be the most novel, interesting and original films and giving these films an afterlife through criticism and discussion.

In his illuminating account of the history of film teaching in schools and the Society of Film Teachers Terry Bolas has traced the term ‘film appreciation’ as it came to be used by teachers and educationists in publications such as Sight and Sound in the mid- to late 1930s. Bolas speculates that this use of the term was an import from the United States, where film study in formal educational institutions – movie appreciation – was far in advance of developments in Britain. For many of these pioneer schoolteachers film appreciation was the solution to the problem of children being exposed to the wrong kind of films. Anxiety about the influence of films on the behaviour of young people haunts the discussion of extra-curricular approaches to film appreciation within the school, and this anxiety tends to translate into a prescriptive pedagogical approach that introduces young people to the ‘right’ kind of films. Film societies with adult memberships and schools are both sites that gave practical shape to the idea of the appreciation of cinema, but they represent two very different environments and constituencies, with correspondingly different conceptions of how cultural and pedagogical authority is claimed and exercised. Whilst Bolas’s book reflects an increasing interest in the history of film study within formal educational institutions in the UK and the US, there has been less attention paid to the other site of film appreciation, the film society.6

Appreciation dwells in an ambiguous zone between possession and process, between the possession of discrimination and sensitivity and a process of study, acquiring knowledge and understanding. The latter implies an educational process that could be offered and undertaken through various means, some prescriptive and involving the acceptance of a canon of the great works of film history, others self-directed and concerned with more open-ended discovery through discussion or acts of watching and judgement. If film societies were founded on the enthusiasts’ dedication to supporting the development of cinema through appreciation, the movement evolved in close relation to a range of interventions that sought to extend the public appreciation of film: mass market paperback books, the lending catalogue of the National Film Library and adult education classes. The book is concerned to understand how film societies pursued this aim through their writing, their programming and their organised study activities, and how they related to other agencies of film education, criticism and exhibition. Exploring a range of these initiatives provides a way to critically assess the film society movement as an amateur intervention within post-war British film culture. Tracing the different manifestations of this distinctive hybrid of alternative exhibitor and popular educator and teasing out the notions of improvement implied by their different pedagogical practices constitutes one of the key preoccupations of the book.

The first chapter surveys the emergence of a film society movement in the late 1920s, charting relations between its two key motivating currents: the reformers’ desire for ‘better films’ and the political activists’ desire to raise working-class consciousness through film. The chapter teases out tensions between the private means of the membership club and the reformist ambitions of film societies seeking to make a public intervention, guiding and improving public taste and knowledge. Chapter two shifts from the organisational legacy of the interwar years to the extraordinary transformation of film societies as they move out of the cinema, becoming embedded in civic space and allied to adult education. At the close of the war a number of large urban film societies in Edinburgh, Manchester and Merseyside had been in continuous operation for over a dozen years. Acknowledging these continuities, the chapter then discusses a number of ways (technological, institutional, social and cultural) in which the post-war period marks a break in what might be termed the dispositive of film society activity.7 The concept of dispositive, as elaborated by Albera and Tortajada, sensitises us to the ‘network of relations between a spectator, the representation and the machinery that allows the spectator to have access to the representation’.8 The present study is premised on a recognition of the profound historical variability of this network of relations and contributes to recent efforts to decentre the cinema theatre in cinema history, acknowledging the diversity of moving image culture, screen venues and social spaces not as a recent development premised on digital technologies but as a condition of moving image spectatorship throughout the last century.9 This chapter charts the rise of 16mm film projection following its extensive use in the armed forces and on the home front and its adoption by new film societies. This method of projection made the model of voluntary association viable among smaller groups and fostered the film society renaissance beyond the dozen or so provincial cities that hosted societies in the 1930s. The film society movement’s adoption of 16mm film projection also brought it into closer relationship with adult education bodies energised by the wartime experiments in popular adult education, which had demonstrated the potential of film and radio. From this conjunction of adult education and voluntary association a distinctive mode of reception emerged in which critical discussion was a prominent component. Finally the chapter features profiles of a number of individuals drawn to film society activity. These profiles reveal the social backgrounds of newly recruited activists and suggest a number of motivations, including thwarted educational ambitions channelled into informal learning in voluntary associations.

The third chapter examines the consolidation of film appreciation as a pedagogical discourse through the circulation of accessible introductory textbooks on the subject. This chapter contrasts the concept of aesthetic appreciation developed by the theorist Rudolf Arnheim in his 1933 book Film with the understanding of film art proposed by Roger Manvell in his 1944 Penguin paperback of the same name.10 Even as Manvell’s book, read with great enthusiasm by the new generation of film society activists, drew upon the film aesthetic ideas of the 1930s, it substantially shifted the focus away from a concern with cultivating awareness of the medium.

Chapter 4 further develops the discussion of film appreciation by looking at the archiving practices of the National Film Library and their impact on film society programming. During the war the National Film Library reorganised its collection in order to make a limited number of films available on loan for film appreciation use. The authority of the National Film Library consolidated the reputation of these films as classics. The chapter is concerned with both the cultural authority that this film appreciation canon exercised within the film society movement and its limitations. The latter are explored through the distinctive programming traditions of the film societies, which enacted impulses that ran counter to the archive’s rigorous canon formation.

A distinctive aspect of film societies was their organisational form, which was structured around the two poles of voluntary activism and subscription-based membership. I have tried to tease out the significance of these characteristics for the exhibition and educational practices engaged in by film societies. The ethos of activism and the membership relationship led to a consistent emphasis on creating opportunities for participation and involvement. Active membership was identified with the activities of selecting and booking films, writing articles, reviews and programme notes, holding discussions and assuming organisational responsibilities within a formally democratic organisation. Whilst it needs to be acknowledged that voluntary association has long been understood as inextricably bound up with the formation of class identities, a fact that tends to be confirmed by the professional occupations of the individuals who held office in the voluntary societies, it should also be seen as an impulse to creating a different mode of reception to the alienating conditions of anonymous and passive consumption. As I have noted, film societies were an alternative cultural institution in the sense that they came into existence to exhibit forms of cinema excluded from the commercial cinemas, but they were also alternative in the sense of seeking to create a mode of film reception different from those possible within a commercial milieu through the organisational form of the voluntary society. The book considers the extent to which these two impulses were compatible, exploring the tension within the film society movement between the ideal of an active and participatory mode of film reception on the one hand and the often-repeated aspiration to be an audience supportive of the most challenging and advanced forms of filmmaking on the other. This tension also pertains to the financial basis of the film society as an organisation dependent on membership subscription. What conflicts arise from the competition between the impulse to support work in advance of public taste and that to retain members and their subscription income, and how are these contradictions resolved?

Chapter 5 takes as its theme the often-stated vocation of the cinema to facilitate understanding between peoples, a responsibility assumed, on account of the overwhelming dominance of American films in commercial cinemas, to be shouldered by alternative forms of exhibition. The chapter addresses the relationship between alternative film organisations such as film societies and cinematic representation of the non-Western world. It contrasts two modes of internationalism: on the one hand, an affirmative mode promoted within Britain’s first international film festival, Edinburgh, that included new forms of documentary production sponsored by international agencies such as the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) and the colonial film units in south-east Asia and Africa; and, on the other, a critical internationalism, explicitly anti-colonial, mediated by socialist distributors Contemporary Films and Plato. A final section deals with the work of Contemporary Films, who, with activists within the film societies, were able to construct a definition of world cinema that promoted films from culturally and cinematically underrepresented nations.

Chapter 6 is concerned with the film society movement’s contribution to film writing. It examines a distinctive reviewing practice developed in the magazine Film News, which featured reviews of films available for film society use written by film society organisers and circulated to booking secretaries to assist programme planning. Striking for the way in which the film society critics characteristically anticipated the responses of members to the film under discussion, these reviews provide valuable evidence of taste and judgement within the film society movement during the 1950s and early 1960s. The chapter explores the response of Film News critics to the film aesthetic and critical innovations of that period authoritatively promoted by professionally managed international film organisations.

The final chapter looks at the contestation of film appreciation ideas, focusing on the development of the film teaching movement and on the publication of Hall and Whannel’s The Popular Arts, which attacked the taste-improving philosophy of film appreciation and provided a radically different model for teaching with film centred on detailed study and criticism. The chapter considers the relationship of film societies to film appreciation as curriculum, exemplified by Ernest Lindgren’s The Art of Film, and the impact of the growth of film studies. Although the subsequent development of academic film studies coincided with a diminished commitment to organised study activity in the film society movement, the chapter resists a simple historical narrative of decline or eclipse. Throughout the chapter I look at the educational activity of Birmingham Film Society during this period of transition towards film studies situated in institutions of higher education. Birmingham Film Society put a renewed emphasis on its film study activities from the 1960s onwards and forged a highly innovative partnership with Birmingham University’s Centre for Cultural Studies.

The book is structured around detailed case studies relating to the film society movement’s involvement in exhibition, criticism and education. These case studies are grounded in some instances in the work of individual film societies and in others in activities sustained collectively by the movement through its Federation. The resulting account does not purport to be a comprehensive study of a geographically diffuse movement that numbered several hundred societies at its historical peak – clearly, that is a practical impossibility. The original research informing this book has drawn on a wide range of archival sources, including the records of a number of individual film societies around the country (Leeds Film Society, Edinburgh Film Guild, Manchester and Salford Film Society, Solihull Film Society, Birmingham Film Society, South London Film Society, Peterborough Film Society) and the archive of the British Federation of Film Societies at the British Film Institute. These collections include administrative records such as committee minutes, programme notes, commemorative publications, press cuttings and, in some instances, published and unpublished memoirs. For every film society that leaves behind a record of its activities in a local history archive, a bundle of programmes or committee minute books, there are countless others that have left no trace of their activities. Many societies formed, lasted a few seasons and disappeared. Programme notes, magazines and publicity pamphlets were thrown away, believed by their authors and owners to be of no interest to posterity. Having said that, there is a vast amount of documentation relating to film societies residing in local history archives around the country that I have not had the means to visit, and I hope that this book stimulates further research into the varied manifestations and contexts of film society activity. The archival sources were supplemented by a number of interviews with leading activists who were involved in film society activity from the 1940s to the late 1960s. Recollections are, of course, always selective – or, more to the point, past intentions and motivations are difficult to reconstruct from present reflections. Nevertheless, these interviews with activists brought me closer to the experience of the amateur organisers who were making film culture around the country. Moreover, the interviews proved to be an invaluable source of biographical information relating to the life trajectories of a generation of post-war film society activists.

There appeared to be a number of methodological alternatives for approaching a study of a movement composed of geographically dispersed societies of this kind. One possibility was a detailed and focused study of film societies in one locality. The considerable advantages of an in-depth localised approach have been amply demonstrated by Melanie Selfe’s study of film societies in Nottingham, which situates the city’s two film societies within the specific social and cultural space in which they operated whilst at the same time reconstructing their relationship to wider cultural geographies by virtue of their involvement in a national movement within which international films circulate.11 Building on this work, my aim with this book is to contribute towards a broad historical assessment of the movement. A second alternative I considered was to anchor the study around the institutional embodiment of the movement, the Federation of Film Societies, the national body set up and run by the film societies themselves to represent and advance their collective interests. The Federation sponsored certain important activities that cultivated a sense of a co-ordinated movement and these form an important part of this study – specifically, the publications of film criticism and the national viewing sessions, both widely valued by film societies. The Federation’s complex relationship with the British Film Institute also reveals something of the distinctive ethos of voluntary organisations relevant to this study. Like the film societies that were its members, the Federation operated without public money for most of the period with which the book is concerned.12 Reliant on membership subscriptions, the Federation was not in a position to disperse funds to support ambitious educational plans. Often the Federation’s schemes, such as those aimed at facilitating film supply, were conceived and executed on the slenderest of means. To have limited the scope of the study to the Federation alone would have meant neglecting the activities of individual film societies, some of which provided a sense of leadership and direction to the movement that the Federation itself was unable or perhaps unwilling to provide, although in all likelihood many societies would have strenuously resisted a national leadership with a strong policy agenda.

The central concern of the book with the changing meanings and practices of film appreciation, study and education influenced my decision to focus in some detail on the work of two culturally ambitious and dynamically led societies, the Edinburgh Film Guild and the Birmingham Film Society, both of which had their origins in the interwar film culture discussed in Chapter 1. Situated in large industrial centres, both societies represented the movement’s educational ambitions at their most compelling, creating practices of film study that ought to be more widely known. At the same time, I hope to have balanced this desire to represent exemplary film society activity with a broader understanding of practices that seem more representative of the character of the movement’s relationship to film education. Specifically, the publications and documents written by member societies, pamphlets of advice and guidance and magazines of film criticism, all of which circulated within the movement, are examined as indicators of the movement’s values.

The other important methodological concern was the pursuit of a broadly chronological trajectory, but one sensitive to shifts in the dispositive of film society exhibition, changing ideas about film art and education and institutional developments within film culture more broadly. The book opens