Richard MacDonald
Richard MacDonald - researcher and teacher at Goldsmiths, University of London - celebrates the post-war film society movement in Britain, fuelled by the initiative of volunteers across the country:
"If there was a eureka moment that jolted me in the direction of researching the post-war film society movement it occurred in the BFI Library reading room. With a vague plan to research the history of art cinema exhibition in the UK I had spent a week or two looking at assorted material on the fondly remembered Oxford Street Academy Cinema in the BFI's Special Collections. During a break from the Academy clippings file, I was flicking through an early issue of Films and Filming, a magazine I didn't previously know existed but quickly warmed to for its inclusive cinephilia and occasionally brilliant film writing from critics such as Dai Vaughan and Raymond Durgnat. At that time Films and Filming listed film societies' monthly programmes and here I saw a reference to a society meeting in my old suburban primary school where they watched Bunuel and Kurosawa films projected on 16mm. The image this created for me in my ignorance was of a practice both improbable and heroic, a combination that acted as a powerful stimulus to further inquiry.
"I came to know the film society movement partly through its archival traces at the BFI and local studies libraries around the country and partly through meeting the people who had devoted their energies into sustaining local and national film society activity. Their testimony helped to draw me closer to a movement that I had not experienced myself. What I discovered was an important phase of volunteer-led film culture activism whose ambitions and achievements had largely slipped through the gaps of British cinema history and which deserved wider acknowledgment. Researching the movement uncovered many surprises for me. I learnt that among the films made available in the mid-1950s partly through pressure from the Federation of Film Societies' Film Supply scheme were People on Sunday and Man With a Movie Camera (weren't we once told that this was a post-'68 discovery?). I discovered that the Federation of Film Societies arranged a lecture tour by the Soviet filmmaker Grigori Kozintsev and a visit was also planned from Maya Deren at the invitation of an activist at Bournemouth Film Society which had to be cancelled due to the filmmaker's deteriorating health. I discovered that Eastbourne Film Society along with a number of other societies screened Stan Brakhage's Interim in their 1958/59 season and that members of the Edinburgh Film Guild booked their leave from work so that they could help with the running of the Edinburgh Film Festival. I discovered countless filmmakers, critics, collectors and historians whose apprenticeship had been served as a volunteer in a film society.
"Above all what I repeatedly found in film society records, programmes and magazines was a collective commitment to film study and discussion, and this film educational role, manifested for example in the relationships film societies established with adult education organisations and universities became central to my account of the movement. It seemed to me that the post-war film society movement, then largely independent financially from the BFI, had been a powerful site for the acquisition of critical skills and film historical knowledge. Film societies held to an ideal of active participation in which all members might contribute to a constructive critical debate about what should be valued culturally and artistically in cinema. "
Richard's PhD thesis on this topic - Film Appreciation and the Postwar Film Society Movement - is held at the BFI Library.
His publications include:
- "The Vanguard of Film Appreciation: The Film Society Movement and Film Culture, 1945-1965" in The British Film Institute: The Government and Film Culture, 1933-2007 [ed. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith and Christophe Dupin] (Manchester University, forthcoming)
- "Screening Classics: The National Film Library's Film Appreciation Canon and the Post-War Film Societies" in Movies on Home Ground: Amateur Cinema in Theory and Practice [ed. Ian Craven] (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009)
- "Blissfully Whose? Jungle Pleasure, Ultra-Modernist Cinema and the Cosmopolitan Thai Auteur" (with May Adadol Ingawanij) in The Ambiguous Allure of the West and the Making of Thainess [ed. Rachel Harrison and Peter Jackson] (Cornell University and Hong Kong University Press, 2010)
December 2010
