Britain’s first film club was a bit of a rarefied affair. Founded in 1925 at the New Gallery Kinema on Regent Street in central London, The Film Society counted John Maynard Keynes, George Bernard Shaw and HG Wells among its members, as well as British film and TV pioneers like the director Anthony Asquith and Granada founder, Sidney Bernstein. The Film Society’s mission was to screen “really artistic films” from Europe that had either fallen foul of the UK’s stringent 1909 Cinematograph Act, or were just simply considered too noncommercial for mainstream exhibitors.
Such lofty ideals were supported by the Guardian, whose film correspondent, ahead of the society’s first screening, argued that it and other societies had a vital role to play “if there is to be any stemming of the flood of dramatic treacle that pours into our picture-houses week by week”.
