Councillor Gillian Gloyer drew the Edinburgh Film Guild to the council’s attention yesterday. She explained its importance to Edinburgh and asked the Lord Provost to hold a civic reception at the City Chambers to mark its 90th consecutive season.
The Edinburgh Film Guild is, as she explains below, the oldest continually running film society in the world.
“Even people who go to the cinema a lot, even people who go to Filmhouse a lot, often have no idea that Edinburgh is home to the oldest continually running film society in the world – the Edinburgh Film Guild.
“It was established in 1929 by luminaries of Scottish film and film studies – Forsyth Hardy and Norman Wilson among others. They were inspired by the Film Society, set up in London in 1925. And yet as John Grierson wrote two decades later, “The old London Film Society was the first to break from somewhat exclusive attention to the avant-garde and take the longer and harder way of the Russians and more purposive users of the cinema. But it was the Edinburgh Film Guild which completed the movement – as the London Film Society did not – and saw the infinite variety of a Film Society’s obligations to all categories of the medium”.
From the start, the Guild screened a wide variety of films. There were classics from the silent era, then just drawing to its end; documentaries such as Grierson’s ‘Drifters’, which had been premiered in 1929 by the London Film Society and reviewed for the Scotsman by Forsyth Hardy; and international films, including the first screenings in the U.K. of Ingmar Bergman’s earliest works. We continue this tradition to this day. We screen over sixty films a year for our members. In this 90th year, our programme includes Chinese, Hungarian, Japanese and Mexican films; British crime thrillers and films noirs; sci-fi, giallo and westerns. It also includes a mini-season of films from the first years of the Guild, by directors such as Pabst and Sternberg.
The London Film Society closed in 1939, but the Edinburgh Film Guild kept going. In 1947, Hardy, Wilson and other stalwarts of the Guild were dismayed to realise that the new Edinburgh International Festival would not include any films. They decided the solution was for the Guild to organise its own International Festival, of Documentary Films. This first film festival was opened by John Grierson, who had recently returned to the UK after setting up and serving on the National Film Board of Canada, and ran alongside the official international Festival. Over the years, it expanded to include feature films and experimental films as well as documentaries – still three of the main strands of the Edinburgh International Film Festival.
The Guild not only screens films for its members, it is also an educational charity. We run film and media courses, often in conjunction with Lifelong Learning at the University of Edinburgh. We have sponsored lectures as part of the Film Festival. All our activities are run by volunteer members of the Guild. We have our own 31-seat cinema within Filmhouse, and a club-room where members can relax before or after our screenings and chat to each other about the films they have seen. We welcome new members and you can become one for as little as £25!
The Edinburgh Film Guild has been contributing to the city’s cultural life and educating our citizens about cinema for nine decades.
The Lord Provost and all other councillors agreed that a reception would be arranged.
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Founding Editor of The Edinburgh Reporter.
Edinburgh-born multimedia journalist and iPhoneographer.
