A century of cinephilia: the legacy of the Film Society

• The Film Society’s centenary will be marked by a special event at Cambridge Film Festival, 100 years to the hour, at 2.30pm on Saturday 25 October. 

“As weird a collection of unknowns as I have ever seen,” reported the Daily Graphic, “attracted, I imagine, by the promise of seeing uncensored films.” On the afternoon of Sunday, 25 October 1925, the New Gallery, London’s grandest cinema, situated on Regent Street just before it curves into Piccadilly Circus, became home to the Film Society. “Women in the most fantastically mannish clothes, and grotesque young men with bare heads and abundant cascades of hair surged out.” 

Most reporters focused on the celebrities rather than the unknowns. “It was an historic event,” wrote Edith Shackleton in the Evening Standard, “with artists like Mr. Augustus John in the middle of the circle and with Mr. E. Goossens, sen., conducting real music from a real orchestra, and a polyglot and fashionable chatter in the foyer afterward.” 

There were complaints in some quarters that no British film had been shown – in fact, one had – provoking a stout defence from one of the society’s founders, Iris Barry, in the Daily Sketch. “‘We want to help English films all we can,’ Miss Barry said, ‘and to that end we are inviting any bona-fide camera man in the country to come to our shows free. We want the best writers and artists to come and see the most artistic films that are being produced in the world.’”

The Film Society had many famous names associated with it – H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw were founder members – but at its inception the central figures, in addition to Miss Barry, bohemian film critic, were Sidney Bernstein, owner of a small chain of cinemas; Adrian Brunel, film director and proprietor of a (in modern parlance) post-production facility; Ivor Montagu, a monied, titled and well-connected recent Cambridge graduate, on his way to becoming a Communist; and Josephine Harvey, a concert agent who for the society’s first ten years, while the governing council mutated from season to season, handled “the tricky business of subscriptions, issue of tickets, accountancy and the rest”, as Barry put it. 

The Film Society was able to show uncensored films – though rarely without difficulty – because it was a private members’ club, but it was open to anyone who could afford the subs: a guinea a year, for eight performances, being the cheapest, representing about two days’ wages for most working men. 

It is unlikely that a high proportion of its members were working men, but Edith Shackleton was right: cultural history was made that afternoon, and on 107 subsequent Sunday afternoons between autumn 1925 and spring 1939. While the high society world into which the Film Society was born has gone, and the New Gallery is now a Burberry store, its legacy endures in the multifaceted and still tricky business of trying to show “the most artistic films that are being produced in the world”.

Here are seven ways in which the Film Society helped crown cinema as the seventh art.

In the mid-1920s practically all movies shown in Britain were Hollywood movies; not even British films stood much of a chance. There were no film festivals, and no state support for the arts, let alone for the movies, so the task of broadening the range of what could be shown fell in the first instance to the more adventurous film distributors, who had little reason and less ability to look outside Western Europe, and who, however adventurous they were, had ultimately to turn a profit. 

The main stimulus behind the Film Society was the arrival of German expressionist films from 1923, including The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler (1922) and The Last Laugh (1924), all of which had relatively normal commercial releases. (Previously, in the immediate post-war years, German films were boycotted.)

Those in the know knew there were more where they came from, and the Film Society was founded primarily to show them. One of the first films promised was Nosferatu (1922). The films of the first season, through its first seven programmes, were exclusively German, French, American and British, but the eighth programme, in May 1926, included the first Japanese film known to have been shown in Europe, Murata Minoru’s The Street Juggler (1925). (Nosferatu, after legal wrangling, was finally shown in 1928.) 

The films which the Film Society is best known for bringing into circulation are, however, those of Soviet Russia: of Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Dovzhenko, Dziga Vertov, and Kozintsev and Trauberg; and with their films came their ideas.

Showing films from Soviet Russia led to a titanic battle with the censors, state and local authorities, which considered them to be flaming Red propaganda. Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925) took Berlin by storm in the spring of 1926, and a print arrived in London shortly afterwards, but the Film Society was unable to show it until November 1929. Eisenstein was present and gave a series of lectures (five guineas). 

The films that generated the most heat were Pudovkin’s Mother (1926) and The End of St. Petersburg (1927), shown in October 1928 and February 1929 respectively. On the latter occasion it was alleged that the audience had cheered the title “Power to the Soviet” and hissed the national anthem, then customarily played at the end of cinema screenings. “Asked whether the membership of the Film Society was largely Communist,” reported the Daily Sketch, “Mr. Bernstein answered: ‘The list of members probably contains half the notability.’” 

Within a year, The End of St. Petersburg, which had at one point been subject to a warrant of confiscation by the home secretary, was passed for general exhibition. Winning the battle entailed gaining a comprehensive understanding of Britain’s far from straightforward censorship regime, embodied in Ivor Montagu’s 1929 pamphlet The Political Censorship of Films, and enlisting allies within Westminster, as Montagu did. (He was well placed on both counts: it was his cabinet minister cousin, Herbert Samuel, who had shepherded the 1909 Cinematograph Act that brought in the censorship regime.) 

The struggle to show these films, now seen as canonical and perhaps therefore staid, continued through the 1930s and beyond, and it is difficult to imagine it having prevailed without the Film Society’s groundwork.

Whether or not Iris Barry followed through on her promise to comp in a “bona-fide camera man”, one of the Film Society’s aims, announced in its first circular in 1925, was to put “films of the type proposed” in front of “present and (what is far more important) future British film-producers [ie, directors], editors, cameramen, titling experts and actors”. I wrote a whole book playing down the influence of the Film Society on Alfred Hitchcock, but even in Truffaut’s famous interview, published in the late 1960s, Hitchcock can be found preaching the gospel according to Pudovkin, and that goes back to the Film Society screening of The End of St. Petersburg. In a talk he gave afterwards, in a café on Regent Street, Pudovkin declared that the “chief task of the director’s art” was “‘montage’ – or constructive editing”, and expounded on the Kuleshov effect, as recited by Hitchcock decades later.

“All of us in Europe went mad about the Russian Revolutionary films and our editing was changed forever, and for good” – so said Michael Powell, a future British film director who presumably saw them at the Film Society since they weren’t shown anywhere else. Walter Mycroft, a member of the Film Society’s council, places Powell there, as well as Carol Reed – and Anthony Asquith was a key member from the start. It is arguable that the society’s real legacy in British cinema came after its demise, during the golden age of the 1940s. Another director who made his best films in that epoch, Thorold Dickinson, director of The Queen of Spades (1949), was a leading light within the Film Society in the 1930s.

It is arguable that the Film Society’s real legacy in British cinema came after its demise, during the golden age of the 1940s

The Film Society was in London, but it inspired more elsewhere, and directly served them, to the best of its abilities. By the time of its demise there were film societies across the country, and for decades these represented a substantial part of the audience for art films – or non-English-language films – in Britain. The first two were in Cambridge and Glasgow in 1929-30, and by 1932 there were enough for a Federation of Film Societies to be formed. This never quite worked during the 1930s, since it relied on the administrative machinery of the original Film Society, namely Josephine Harvey, who had enough to do as it was, but the Film Society was still a source of films and somehow the movement muddled through, even thrived, before war intervened.

The heyday of the provincial film society came after 1945, when the British Film Institute (founded in 1933) took a more active role, and this era has bequeathed to the present an image of 16mm projection, prolonged reel changes and unraked seats; but in the 1930s film societies were showing 35mm prints in actual cinemas. Moreover, they spread the idea of film culture in other ways. In 1936, for example, the Tyneside Film Society put on an exhibition devoted to the work of art directors, consisting of about 150 designs and sketches. The original Film Society had led the way with an exhibition of designs from Paul Leni’s film Waxworks (1924), shown in the first programme.

The most spectacular example of the film society movement’s influence outside London was in Edinburgh. “To say that the story of the Edinburgh Film Festival began in London in 1925 is not necessarily to be perverse or puzzling.” So begins Forsyth Hardy’s history of the festival. “Had the Film Society not been founded in London in that year there would have been no film society movement and no Edinburgh Film Guild, the society which, formed in 1930, launched the festival in 1947.” 

The EFG had a strong bond with the Film Society through John Grierson, leader of the documentary film movement, who was on the Film Society’s council from 1932, having premiered his first film, Drifters (1929), in the same programme as Battleship Potemkin.

The very first films shown by the Film Society were short ‘Absolute Films’, ie, abstract films, by Walter Ruttmann, and the society’s role as a seedbed of what we now somewhat reluctantly call ‘artists’ moving image’ is just as significant as its efforts on behalf of Soviet cinema. Indeed, the affinities between the Soviet films and the avant-garde films being made in Western Europe and the US have been a subject of discussion. 

Some of the avant-garde films were abstract, others were dadaist or surrealist, still others were not easy to categorise, but in every case these were films with next to no prospect of a screening in Britain before the advent of the Film Society. The screening Virginia Woolf attended and wrote up in March 1926 included Fernand Léger and Dudley Murphy’s Ballet Mécanique (1924). Most of these films were French or German, and the question why Britain did not produce equivalents is a vexed one. The Film Society showed the scattered low-budget, typically one-off British films made that could be compared with them, but while these are not negligible the mystique of 1920s Paris is difficult to supplant. 

Nevertheless, the Film Society launched the career of one major avant-garde filmmaker, the New Zealander Len Lye, whose debut film Tusalava (1929) an abstract cartoon, shown in December 1929, was made with the society’s financial support. The Film Society was also a consistent supporter of Lotte Reiniger, showing 15 of her silhouette films, at least one of them as a world premiere.

Films, as Iris Barry wrote in 1926, had a lifespan of three days. “If one cannot make the opportunity to see them, the chances are that one never will.” In general, “A picture is scrapped after about two years, sold as junk, or melted down for the sake of certain constituents of the celluloid.” There were no archives for entertainment films. From the start, the Film Society went to the “firms dealing in junk ”, digging out the western Why Broncho Billy Left Bear Country (1913) and Chaplin’s The Champion (1915) for its first programme.

They were still crate-digging a decade later. In March 1936 the Film Society showed “three primitives” from 1900-03, one of them by Georges Méliès, “found by Mr. [Alberto] Cavalcanti in the open-air market outside the Port d’Italie”. But by then something had changed: during 1935 film archives had come into being in London (the BFI’s National Film Library) and New York (the Museum of Modern Art). The Cinémathèque française followed in 1936.

One way of summing up the Film Society’s significance for the history of film preservation is to give the name of MoMA’s first film curator: Iris Barry. Another of its contributions is that when it closed the films in its vault were transferred to the BFI, including Reiniger’s The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926), the basis of the current print.

One could write a thesis about the connection between the Film Society and the BFI more generally, but the two characters most responsible for committing the BFI to what its first archivist Ernest Lindgren called the “film art movement” were marked by the Film Society’s influence. These were Lindgren himself and Olwen Vaughan, organiser of the BFI’s London Film Institute Society before and during the war, and later of the New London Film Society, successor to the Film Society and precursor of BFI Southbank – founded as the National Film Theatre in 1952, and serving we “unknowns” to this day.

Tickets for The Film Society at 100 can be booked on the Cambridge Film Festival website. The event will feature screenings of René Clair’s Entr’acte (1924) and Len Lye’s Tusalava (1929) and contributions from Inga Fraser (University of Cambridge) and Henry K. Miller (Anglia Ruskin University).