Behind the scenes at the Edinburgh Film Guild
As it prepares to enter its 81st season on 3 October 2010, the Edinburgh Film Guild's Head Programmer, Keith Brown, explains how they decide upon their eclectic mini-seasons and previews what's coming up this year.
There are two key principles behind the scheduling of films for the Edinburgh Film Guild (EFG), starting with our educational remit. We exist, in part, to promote an understanding of the film, or film aesthetics as I would prefer, to be simultaneously more and less elitist.
Secondly, we are a non-profit organisation, that we exist for the benefit of our members and the people of Edinburgh and its surrounds (as potential members).
Beyond this there is also the practical change in the Guild's circumstances over the past decade or so.
When I first joined the Guild, 15 or so years ago, the programmers were responsible for choosing three films a week over the course of the season. Two of these films were screened on a Sunday at 6pm and one on a Wednesday at 7pm. The two Sunday screenings were in Filmhouse One and the Guild Cinema, the latter cinema having about one-tenth the capacity of the former. The Filmhouse One screening was the relatively popular or mainstream film.
Some measure of what popular meant in this context might be gleaned from the fact that the likes of Tarkovsky's Stalker and Antonioni's The Red Desert were screened in Filmhouse One: The EFG was, and hopefully still is, pretty hardcore as far as its principles are concerned.
More recently, it became impossible for the Guild to have access to a prime slot in the Filmhouse and, rather than Cinema One being reserved for our screening, our members now had the choice of any of the three Filmhouse screenings screening around 6pm.
This was obviously good in terms of choice for our members, but not so good for the Guild in that some perhaps came to join more as a means to getting cheap Filmhouse access than because they were actually interested in what we were doing.
Then, as a consequence of the Filmhouse launching its own membership/loyalty scheme, our relationship came to an end. We no longer had access to Filmhouse screenings on a Sunday at 6pm and, as such, had to try to programme accordingly.
Our response was twofold. We increased the sheer number of screenings and mini-seasons “ sixteen mini seasons of six screenings, of six plus films each, or over 100 different films “ alongside attempting to offer the kinds of films within them that not even the Filmhouse would generally screen.
This led to our Lost Classics of Irish Cinema season last year, with the likes of the banned silent-era Irish Destiny, a Battleship Potemkin that was perhaps too close to home for those of the time.
Then there was our Extreme Cinema season, which took advantage of the fact that, by virtue of being a members-only film society, we are allowed to show films never certificated by the BBFC, like the incendiary Fight For Your Life.
The results were positive, with our membership in excess of what we had hoped for and more than sufficient to place us on a solid basis for next year.
And so, now, finally, I come to how we decided upon the forthcoming year's programme, although it was also somewhat like the present/last year's. Programming starts nearly a year before screenings do. In November 2009 we had the first of our programming committee meetings.
The idea of a planning committee is probably too formal, insofar as what typically happens is that anyone who is interested “ usually a half a dozen or so of us “ meet and bounce some ideas around, with lots of exclamation marks: I'll see your Raoul Walsh and raise with a Sam Fuller! African-American Cinema! Yiddish cinema! Nikkatsu Noir! Africa in documentary! Rare Jean Renoir!
We then go away with possible mini-season ideas to research what is available and then reconvene a month or so later. Some ideas will have fallen by the wayside, perhaps to be resurrected in the future, while others are introduced.
This year, for instance, Spanish Cinema under Franco didn't work out, because many of the films we would like to have shown were not available with English subtitles, whilst Contemporary Eastern European Cinema came in late on.
We do this two or three times more, with the result hopefully being a programme of over 100 films you wouldn't otherwise have much opportunity to see (alongside a number of possible ideas for the future, to make our job easier next time...).
Following this, we start thinking about the balance of the programme, of how to make things flow and to best ensure contrasts and connections between seasons.
Then we have to source the films, secure the rights, do write-ups that will hopefully attract an audience and so on...
At the same time the crucial difference between the Edinburgh Film Guild and a regular cinema comes back again: We don't have to make money and can show the kind of films that a commercial cinema can't or won't.
An overview of the EFG 2010-11 season programme
Our programme for the 2010-11 season is split into sixteen mini seasons, each comprising six screenings, plus our traditional Halloween and Christmas screenings.
The sixteen mini-seasons divide into two groups. The twelve which screen on Sundays and Wednesdays represent our main programme and feature more traditional Film Guild films. The four which screen on Fridays represent our alternative programme and feature the sort of films which the Guild historically didn't show.
Our twelve main programme mini seasons are...deep breath:
Jean Renoir
Popular Cinema of the Third Reich
Women in the Western
Contemporary Eastern European Cinema
Josef von Sternberg and Marlene Dietrich at Paramount
Masterworks of Cuban Cinema
Nikkatsu Noir
The US Race Film
Val Lewton
Africa in Documentary
The French Resistance in Film
Trains in Cinema.
Our four Friday programme mini seasons are The Werewolf, The Giallo, Teen Movies and US Cult Cinema of the 1970s.
While some of these are hopefully self-explanatory others need a bit more by way of introduction:
Our Renoir mini-season could perhaps be subtitled Rare Renoir insofar as we're consciously avoiding better known films like The Rules of the Game and La Grande Illusion in favour of lesser known films drawn from across his career, including the proto neo-realist Toni, the US-made Swamp Water and his idiosyncratic interpretation of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, The Testament of Dr Cordelier.
The Popular Cinema of the Third Reich mini-season sees us getting away from the familiar propaganda images to showcase something of the range of popular entertainment cinema produced during the 1933-45 period. Or, to put it another way, the kind of films that people went to see because they wanted to rather than because they had to.
Besides versions of Titanic and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, this mini-season also includes the playful fact meets fiction blend of The Man Who Was Sherlock Holmes and, as a kind of follow-on from our Irish season last year, the pro-Irish, anti-British propaganda film My Life for Ireland.
Nikkatsu Noir refers to a distinctive style of noir-inspired Japanese crime cinema made by the studio Nikkatsu between 1957 and 1967, exemplified by the likes of Seijun Suzuki “ whose iconoclasm proved too much for Nikkatsu “ and beloved by many of today's big names including Jim Jarmusch and Quentin Tarantino.
The US race film mini-season showcases the little-known world of the African-American cinema from the late 1910s to the end of the 1940s. Operating parallel to Hollywood's circuits of production, distribution and exhibition, race films were made by and for African-American audiences and featured all-black casts.
Sadly, only a small proportion of the hundreds made survive today, but amongst them are gems like Oscar Micheaux's Body and Soul, featuring Paul Robeson's debut film performance, and the western Harlem Rides the Range, with singing cowboy sensation Herb Jefferies.
The giallo is a kind of Italian horror-thriller that was first introduced to the screen by Mario Bava (the subject of one of our Friday mini seasons last year) in the early 1960s and was then popularised by Dario Argento in the early 1970s. Here, however, we're consciously avoiding these two men's work, as it's relatively accessible and well known.
Instead, we're concentrating upon a selection of the best gialli made by other directors, including Lucio Fulci's Lizard in a Woman's Skin and Sergio Martino's All the Colours of the Dark.
Visit the Guild's website for full details on all 2010-11 screenings.