We chat to the organisers behind some of the UK’s best-loved film societies – from the very new to the very old…
This article first appeared in Film Stories issue #52.
On 2nd April 1939, 17-year-old Marjorie Ainsworth attended her first meeting of the Manchester and Salford Film Society. 85 years later, she’s still going. Formerly ordinary member, then committee member, treasurer, caterer, programme note writer, celluloid film splicer, general factotum and now President, the 102-year-old is the longest-serving member of the oldest continually operating volunteer film society in the UK.
Founded in the grip of economic hardship in 1930, Manchester and Salford’s 94th season contains everything from Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Mepris to Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers. Its December screening of Buster Keaton’s The General celebrates one of comparatively few films older than the society itself.
Belfast’s Ghouls on Film, meanwhile, held its first screening in 2021. With a focus on female and non-binary horror, its recent Uncanny Valley season included a Satanic Slumber Party and a screening of Todd Haynes’ Safe (1995) paired with a series of classic public information films. It even has its own zine.
Working with both is Cinema For All – the national charity for the support and development of community cinema. Its CEO, Jaq Chell, joined the team as an admin assistant in 2008, and has remained there ever since.
“When I started, there was a general sense that this was something that was perhaps nearing the end,” she remembers. “That it was a tradition that might not last very much longer. Now, I think it’s stronger than ever.”
Some of the societies in that tradition are membership-based; some put on public screenings in the local library; but all involve, in one way or another, herding a group of people into one room to enjoy a film together.
With eco-friendly travelling screens rubbing shoulders with the grandees of the cinema club tradition, the 1600-plus societies Cinema For All supports have certainly gotten more varied since the charity started in 1946. While the commercial cinema landscape looks increasingly grim, volunteer-led projects have been quietly chugging along in the background
Alternative fare
Approaching a hundred years since the Manchester and Salford Film Society (then The Salford Workers’ Film Society) first opened its doors to the public, the aims of your average cinema group often sound pretty familiar.
“A large number of adult picture goers are sick of the Hollywood sob-stuff,” Salford’s mayor said at the club’s first screening in 1930. “[They] want something with more meat in it.”
Intrigued by news of similar clubs coming up from London via the Manchester Guardian, members of Salford’s new Workers’ Arts Club united around an ambitious idea.
“London had the benefit of these intellectuals and people who had a certain status who could get it going,” Manchester and Salford’s current Chair, Carol Moores, tells me. “I mean, it was just ordinary people in Salford. It wasn’t anybody who financially could get it going. They had to somehow work out a way of doing it.”
Committed to showcasing the best films the world had to offer, the society soon arranged screenings of films far beyond the Hollywood offerings of local commercial outfits. Its first season concluded with Vsevolod Pudovkin’s Storm Over Asia. The 1928 Soviet propaganda flick – promoted by the club as “The Film that Salford must NOT see” – was banned by Salford authorities, prompting the society’s move to Manchester.
Censorship was less of an issue in 2021 Belfast, but Ghouls on Film founder Isabella Koban still found mainstream cinema fare a little lacking.
“I started it because I was interested in horror and spectatorship,” she told me. “And I found that all of the horror exhibition spaces were really male dominated. They focused on slasher films, which are interesting, but my interest, personally, isn’t so much with slasher films.”
This highlights what might be one of the most significant changes to the film society space in the last century. “Communities are not around locations so much anymore,” says Jaq Chell. [They’re about] shared interests, activism, shared backgrounds.”
“I really wanted to create a safer, more inclusive space to watch films,” Joban adds. “Where people can feel like there are trigger warnings, or if they feel uncomfortable at any point, there’s no shame in taking a step outside. A lot of the films in the genre can be very triggering, but I don’t think that means that we shouldn’t watch them and have a kind of communal experience.”
Beyond the box office
For many people in the UK, volunteer cinema has been not just an alternative to a mainstream multiplex, but their only way of seeing films on a big screen. Traditionally emerging in rural communities without a cinema of their own, the increasingly regular closure of commercial venues in recent years has left film societies to plug in the gaps.
“If they’ve had a local cinema change or move out of their town, or moved out to the outskirts, which is something that happened in a lot of cities, those sites crop up to replace that,” Chell says. “Organizers come together… That’s why it’s such a special thing, because it’s not created by commercial interest and it’s not driven by profitability. It’s driven by: “We’ve not got a cinema anymore. We really want one.”
Though plenty of societies begin as a practical solution – where can we see this film I like on the big screen – it’s the social angle that keeps people coming back for more.
“I’ve made some lifelong friends,” Moores says. “One’s in Australia, one’s in America, some around Manchester…”
“You wouldn’t chat to anyone at an Odeon,” Joban adds. “But having an event feels more open to welcoming new people, meeting new people. A lot of people come who’ve never seen any of the films before, but have enjoyed ones that we’ve screened in the past, and they just want to have discussion. So we always have a space after the film ends for people to hang about, have a drink and chat about the film, which I think really helps.”
As a new generation of film societies start up, too, the stereotypical view of them as spaces for older people is starting to fade away.
“I’d say the majority are 18–25-year-olds,” Joban says of her own attendees. “Which was quite surprising… I think a lot of film societies are in more established, older, rural communities, but we’re mostly younger people, mostly queer people. It feels like a very inclusive space.”
For many location-specific clubs, however, getting young people involved in screenings is more of a challenge.
“We’ve not given up!”, Moores laughs when I ask about the society’s demographic. “I would say we tend towards the fifty-plus end. But some students from Salford on the postgrad course did a film about us just over a year ago, and they were so keen on the society, they formed their own little film club. So, well, you know – we must be doing something right.”
Reel change
The ever-oncoming death of physical media, unsurprisingly, isn’t much of a help to a tradition that needs discs more than most.
“Our groups love to screen on physical media,” Chell says. “Blu-ray, ideally, is great, because you get to have it in advance. They can go to the shop and buy a copy, as long as they get the license. [They] get to test it. It’s in their hands. A lot of our groups that are in the countryside might not even have great broadband if they were to stream things.”
As discs disappear from supermarket shelves, however, Chell is upbeat about the future.
“I think we’re holding on to our discs more than anybody, but it is something that I think is hard to replace, even with digital media. Having a really great copy of a Blu Ray, a 4k restoration or whatever to screen from is very satisfying, and you know it’s good quality.”
But if there’s one thing that unites the film society community almost as much as the films themselves, its their optimism for the future – their ability to see the silver lining in the silver nitrate.
“Every 10-15, years or so, there’s a physical media change,” Chell says. “It’s 16mm, it’s 35mm… Video caused people a lot of anxiety. People were really anxious about films being screened on TV. So there’s always a challenge. There’s always something that comes up that people are worried about.”
“It’s a responsibility, because you don’t want it [to end] on your watch,” Moores says of chairing Manchester and Salford. “But I mean, at any stage, if you had a look at the minutes of various committee meetings, there would be terrible things happening. We were having to move premises, or there’d been a fire, or maybe people were complaining because there was no proper heating at the venue. But we just managed to keep going.”
