Object of the week: Modernist brochure for the Film Society revealing its historic first 100 screenings

This attractive little booklet was printed to commemorate the 100th programme screened by the Film Society, in February 1938. Its cover screams the modernist style of Edward McKnight Kauffer, the artist and graphic designer behind some of the world’s most beautiful posters, including 1930s London Underground designs, as well as the titles for Alfred Hitchcock’s 1927 silent film The Lodger. Initialed by the artist, with geometric shapes, colour blocks and his specially designed Film Society logo, the design is elegant and simple.

The Film Society, which celebrated its centenary in 2025, was one of the world’s first organisations to foster the appreciation of film as an art. It was founded in 1925 by a group of cinema enthusiasts: producer Sidney Bernstein, actor Hugh Miller, artist Frank Dobson, film critics Iris Barry and Walter Mycroft, film director Adrian Brunel and actor, fixer, editor, print researcher, champion ping-pong player and spy Ivor Montagu. 

Miller and Montagu had hit on the idea while on a train from Berlin, conceiving it as an equivalent to The Stage Society, which put on one-off performances of non-commercial or banned plays (this is how Henrik Ibsen and George Bernard Shaw were launched in Britain). The group wanted to see and learn from uncensored, interesting and artistic films of a range of genres, which were not being screened by the commercial cinema. 

They showed a broad range of film from the medium’s then relatively short 30-year life span, particularly German expressionism, French impressionism and, once they eventually got hold of them, the great works of Russian cinema. There were also natural history films, experimental films, avant-garde surrealism, animation, absurdist comedy and interest films such as those of artists at work. It was at the Film Society that John Grierson screened the first film of the British documentary movement, 1929’s Drifters. They also championed women filmmakers such as Lotte Reiniger, Mary Field, Dorothy Arzner, Germaine Dulac and Olga Preobrazhenskaya and held a special screening of women’s work in 1930, which we are recreating in June at BFI Southbank.

Far from the type of screenings mounted by many local film societies or clubs, the original Film Society was a posh affair, pulling in huge audiences to the 1,450-seater New Gallery Cinema in Regent Street on a Sunday afternoon. In the silent film era, an entire orchestra would play to the films. Frequented by the intelligentsia, the society’s audience gained a reputation for bohemianism, occasionally ridiculed by the press and satirists such as Stella Gibbons in her 1932 novel Cold Comfort Farm.

Yet it was instrumental in inspiring the establishment of film societies all over the country as well as building demand for the study, documentation and archiving of film as an art and as a social record of life in Britain. These functions were taken on by the BFI in 1933 and its archive in 1935, so it was appropriate that the BFI National Archive should be the recipient of the Film Society’s papers and a collection of rare film prints.

Among the many artefacts in the papers, this booklet is fascinating not just for its design but for what it tells us about the Film Society’s early history. Inside are listed the names of the executive council and its very starry founder members. 

This is followed by a list of films screened, with dates, titles and the names of directors. The commemorative 100th screening echoes the first and sixth screenings, with the German expressionist classic The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) as the main feature.

It’s a handy list, as it is difficult otherwise to discover which films were shown. The screenings were not often advertised in listings, and newspapers reported on them only occasionally. Yet, these first 14 years of events left an impressive legacy. When Rachael Low, historian of the British film industry, tells us, “It was during the 1920s that people started treating the film seriously in Britain,” she is talking about this group of cinephiles. 

As Ivor Montagu wrote in a Sight and Sound article commemorating the society’s 50th anniversary in 1975: “Remember, that there were in the whole world, no Film Institutes, no film archives, no Oscars, no film festivals, no film schools, no really functioning educational cinema, scientific research cinema, historical record cinema, even advertising cinema; no specialised cinema theatres except the Vieux Colombier in Paris… practically no serious writing on cinema…practically no serious criticism or regular film reporting.” 

More than a century later, we have all those things, but the struggle to show interesting films continues.

Produced with the support of the BFI Screen Heritage Fund, awarding National Lottery funding.