The UK’s first arthouse boom: how Contemporary Films blazed a trail in bringing world cinema to British viewers

For most cinemagoers, distributors are invisible. The Hollywood studios still provide the dominant image of how the movie business works, and historically they have distributed their own product, with the whole seamless operation resembling a pipeline. Faced with an unceasing stream of Americana during Hollywood’s 1930s golden age, the British government directed distributors to buy a quota of British films, and directed exhibitors to show them, but films made outside the Anglo-American industries had no such support. 

It was in this forbidding climate that Contemporary Films launched in 1951 – doubly forbidding since this was the height of the Cold War, and Contemporary’s stock-in-trade was films from the other side of the Iron Curtain. The company’s founder, Charles Cooper, the East End-raised son of Jewish refugees from the Russian pogroms, was a Communist whose first involvement in film was with Kino, distributor of such titles as Battleship Potemkin (1925) in the 1930s, when anti-Soviet censorship was at its height.

Kino operated in non-theatrical venues using 16mm projectors, and initially Contemporary too toiled in this unglamorous but flourishing field – the postwar era was the heyday of the film society movement. But towards the end of the 1950s, Contemporary reinvented itself, taking a central role in the extraordinary boom in art cinema that lasted into the 1980s. The hinge year was 1958, when Contemporary released Satyajit Ray’s Aparajito (in February), Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (March), Andrzej Wajda’s Kanal (June), and Bergman’s (again) Wild Strawberries (October).

These films all opened at the Academy Cinema in Oxford Street, Britain’s pre-eminent art cinema since the 1930s, run by the Hungarian George Hoellering, with distinctive posters designed by Hoellering’s countryman Peter Strausfeld. The first three had been shown at the first London Film Festival, at the National Film Theatre (now BFI Southbank) in 1957. Bergman’s films in particular expanded the art-cinema audience beyond the film society enthusiasts and the London cognoscenti – and this was partly Contemporary’s achievement. There was no pipeline for art films; they had to be selected, usually at film festivals, and handled with care. It was not a given that any of them would become cinephile household names, but they remain so a lifetime later.

Based in a series of offices in Soho, Contemporary Films was a family firm which Cooper ran with his Polish-born wife Cecilia, her brother Harry, and Harry’s wife Rose. In April 1958, in the midst of their year of triumph, Cecilia died aged 44, and Cooper considered closing down, but ultimately the trio persevered. Contemporary’s relationship with the Academy, and with Ray, Bergman and Wajda, continued into the 1960s, and its bond with Ray would be particularly enduring. Meanwhile, more future classics were added to the catalogue with every year. Contemporary played its part in the Nouvelle Vague, with early films by Claude Chabrol and Jacques Rivette, but its centre of gravity would remain in the East. In the 1960s Contemporary introduced British cinemagoers to filmmakers including Miklós Jancsó, Jerzy Skolimowski, Sergei Parajanov, and the Czechs Milos Forman, Jan Němec, Ivan Passer and Věra Chytilová.

Contemporary opened the latter’s Daisies (1966) in July 1968 – a month, as it happened, before the Soviet invasion that ended the ‘Prague Spring’ – at a cinema it had taken over in January 1967, the Paris Pullman, in South Kensington. By this time the Contemporary family had been joined by Kitty, Cooper’s second wife, also the child of Jewish refugees, in her case from Nazi Germany. They selected films together: “as we often have very different views as to what is ‘important’ and ‘new’, this makes for a wider selection of films than if we left it to the decision of just one person”, they once wrote in Sight and Sound. The Paris Pullman era saw the films get wilder – they opened with The Saragossa Manuscript (1965) – and more politically radical, reaching the youth audience shaped by the protest movement and the hippie underground of the late 1960s with late-night shows and films like Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s Cuban revolution drama Memories of Underdevelopment (1968).

Amid all this, in May 1972, Contemporary launched a director whose austere style could not be further removed from the ‘counterculture’: Mike Leigh, with his debut Bleak Moments, a study of non-communication in a London suburb. While remaining international in its reach, Contemporary supported a number of filmmakers who could be seen as Britain’s contribution to art cinema, Peter Whitehead and Jane Arden being other examples. 

The Paris Pullman closed in 1983, three years before the Academy, marking the end of the boom. Forty years later few if any commercial venues are solely dedicated to art cinema. Contemporary, however, survives. In the 1960s it had helped establish Jean Renoir’s reputation in Britain – he was largely ignored in his 1930s heyday – by releasing La Règle du jeu (1939) some two decades after its disastrous debut in Paris, and the company continues to distribute this, and many other classics, to this day.

Growing up in Manchester in the 40s and 50s, I went to the pictures as often as I could, and was passionate about the movies. But I never saw a film that wasn’t in English – the diet consisted exclusively of Hollywood and British films. So arriving in London as a student in 1960 was an explosive revelation. I discovered world cinema. Eisenstein, Ozu, Kurosawa, Renoir, Bergman, Buñuel, Satyajit Ray, to name but a few, not to mention the Nouvelle Vague and the Italian neo-realists, all brought to us by those unique, committed distributors, Contemporary Films.

What a joy and an honour it was, a decade later, that this revolutionary company embraced and distributed my first feature Bleak Moments. Charles and Kitty Cooper ran their friendly company like a loving family, and their enthusiasm and understanding of the film, and of how to sell it, was both inspiring and astonishing.

They were a legend. They have never been replaced.

– Mike Leigh 

Contemporary at 75 is a season of events across London venues this autumn. It opens with Bleak Moments and Mike Leigh in conversation at BFI Southbank on 3 September.