The Film Society announced itself to the world on the front page of the Daily
Express in May 1925, promising to encourage "the production of really artistic
films" by showing those which the trade deemed uncommercial or which the censor
refused. Luminaries like H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw were named as
supporters, suggesting the degree of cultural recognition the cinema had already
won, but the driving force came from a heterogeneous group of younger cinéastes,
straddling the film business, Fleet Street and the intelligentsia.
The case for a venue that might show or revive otherwise neglected films was
a journalistic commonplace of the early 1920s, put with particular urgency by
the Evening Standard's critic Walter Mycroft, and notably by the actor Hugh
Miller, in a January 1925 article in the same paper. Miller joined forces with
recent Cambridge graduate Ivor Montagu to assemble what became the Film
Society's governing council, including Mycroft, Spectator critic Iris Barry,
director Adrian Brunel and exhibitor Sidney Bernstein.
Most of the legwork was done by Barry, Bernstein and administrator J. M.
(Josephine) Harvey, and the Film Society was launched in October 1925 at the New
Gallery cinema in Regent Street, with a bill topped by Paul Leni's Waxworks (Das
Wachsfigurenkabinett, Germany, 1924). For most of its 14 seasons it staged eight
monthly programmes on Sunday afternoons from autumn to spring, for an audience
wanting to see unusual or esteemed films, as Barry put it, "without being forced
to seek them out by great pains in odd picture houses". Its bohemian tendencies
and social pedigree - it wasn't cheap - made the Society a fixture of the gossip
columns.
Its leading lights scoured Europe for films, but the Society's bumpy early
seasons were increasingly overshadowed by the failure to obtain the film the
membership most wanted to see: Battleship Potemkin (d. Sergei Eisenstein, 1925).
Finally, in 1928, largely as a result of Montagu's efforts, the Soviet films
began to be shown. In 1929 the Society paid host first to Vsevolod Pudovkin,
then in November to Sergei Eisenstein, who came to lecture as well as show the
by then venerable Potemkin in a famous double-bill with John Grierson's Drifters
(1929). Three weeks later came the debut of an experimental film the Society had
helped fund, Len Lye's Tusalava.
The Society underwent a sea change at the turn of the decade. Barry and
Montagu departed for the US, while Brunel, whose post-production company had
prepared the Society's programmes in the silent era, handed over to Thorold
Dickinson, who set out to convert the "conservative sophisticates" in the stalls
to the sound film. Dickinson, alongside Grierson and Jacob Isaacs, a lecturer at
King's College London, became a mainstay of the Society in the 1930s, with
Bernstein and Harvey continuing to handle the practicalities.
The new decade saw the rise of the London art cinemas, threatening to make
the Film Society irrelevant, and at the same time the first provincial film
societies, a token of its influence. All three were bound in a somewhat
fractious relationship, in which the Film Society was prevailed upon to assist
in various failed attempts to form a federation of local branches, while
competing with Elsie Cohen's Academy cinema for the most promising imports. Much
of the Society's strength had always resided down the bill, in shorts rather
than features; but enthusiasm had already dwindled by the time war brought it to
an end.
The Film Society's role in introducing continental cinema to Britain has been
overstated, but its importance within film culture is considerable. Apart from
those mentioned, filmmakers with a direct involvement in its affairs included
Anthony Asquith and Basil Wright, while Mycroft named Carol Reed and Michael
Powell as members. Another director of "really artistic films" who is thought to
have attended is Alfred Hitchcock.
Henry K. Miller
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