Across Liverpool and Manchester, a dynamic network of film clubs is occupying community spaces and encouraging a DIY approach to film curation.
Upon exiting Manchester’s Oxford Road station, one of the first things you see is a cinema, or rather the remains of one. The Cornerhouse was a squat, concrete, single-screen theatre on the corner of one of the city’s main arterial roads, famous around the region for its eclectic programme of arthouse and independent cinema. In 2015, Cornerhouse merged with the Library Theatre Company to open HOME, a cinema and arts venue based further down the road on First Street, and so the Cornerhouse building now stands derelict and awaiting demolition as part of an upcoming regeneration effort at the station.
Although this isn’t going to be a lament for a lost golden age of independent cinemas, it does illustrate how lovers of repertory and arthouse cinema in the North West of England find themselves in a hostile climate, dominated by multiplex chains. Perhaps that’s the reason why, on a cold winter night, a group of us found ourselves packed into the basement of Manchester’s AD England to watch Tsai Ming-liang’s Goodbye Dragon Inn, courtesy of the DIY film club Speed and Strike. A velvet curtain separated the screening space from the bar’s single bathroom, and pipes rushed waste from the upstairs bar directly over our heads. In spite of this, a tenuous calm descended once the film started rolling, the audience leaning forward in their plastic chairs to better soak in the ambience.
Speed and Strike was established by film programmer Phoebe Hadaway in response to what she saw as an overabundance of risk-averse programming in the larger cinemas of the North West. “Some things are deemed too risky”, she tells me. “If you copy whatever the BFI’s doing, that’s safe. But there is a massive audience for New Queer Cinema and transgressive films and weird oddities of the past. In starting Speed and Strike, I was thinking of how many people hadn’t seen Gregg Araki films like The Doom Generation, who would find films like that extremely meaningful.”
When I catch up with Phoebe, it’s at the afterparty for her largest screening to date: The UK premiere of the second part of Louise Weard’s trans epic Castration Movie at the independent cinema Cultplex. Those who have made it here hum with the thrill and fatigue of a day spent in the cinema. I am even told that someone brought their dad along to the 4-hour DIY film screening – an encouraging sign, perhaps, that these screenings are finding their way out of the underground. Phoebe concurs. “The screenings have been very busy since the start, even when we went out on a limb and screened pink films (a genre of Japanese film encompassing the erotic and taboo). I thought it might be too much, but it was amazing to watch those films with an audience. It’s difficult to get that, even in London.”
Without the glossy production values that come with screening in a multiplex, film clubs like Speed and Strike sell themselves on their ability to curate interesting lineups of films. “I try to bring in a theme”, Phoebe says, “whether that be ideological, like in our first season, ‘Rotten Britain’, or something more formal, like the ‘Time and Meditation’ series that focused on slow cinema. It’s also about pairing films that people might have heard of, like Goodbye Dragon Inn, with lesser known films like Gus Van Sant’s massively undersung Gerry.”
Speed and Strike occasionally exhibit films in collaboration with Paraphysis Cinema, a queer cult cinema project in Liverpool run by Holly Rowley. Holly inspired Phoebe to start her own film club, and has worked tirelessly over the last two years to build a network of independent programmers throughout the region – via an active Discord community, newsletters and a screening calendar. She sees the emergence of film clubs as part of a wider shift in how audiences engage with cinema. “People are starting to realise that you can’t just sit on Netflix and scroll through films, hoping to find something good. You’ve got to put in the effort and go to the cinema, or go to your local film clubs”, she explains.
The screenings are often free of charge to attend, or charge a small fee to cover the cost of hosting the event. This means that “it’s important to find venues who are into supporting local DIY arts and film curation”, Holly says. “Quarry (on Hardman Street in Liverpool) is the big one, for when I have money to put things on. Otherwise, Kitty’s Launderette (a worker’s cooperative in Anfield) is a beautiful community space, and it’s also a working launderette in the day. It’s cozy, you can make tea and coffee and everyone has a chat and sits against big washing machines.”
It’s no secret that independent venues are struggling to keep the lights on, in an era of exorbitant city centre rents and savage cuts to arts funding. In Phoebe’s opinion, those who set up film clubs do so in opposition to an industry that is hostile to affordability. “All the old cinemas are now Wetherspoons, a lot of us aren’t in a position to get professional film jobs, and the long aftermath of Thatcherism has left us without any community centres that we could use. We’ve just got to put these things on and try and build our own network of people who are trying to challenge that model”. Holly is interested in the idea of “a film cooperative specific to Merseyside,” lamenting that some of the only widely available places where screening films could be possible “are churches, which might be difficult if you’re trying to screen pornography.”
The North West’s film clubs are connected through their love of curation, and 18:33 Films follow this model of thematically-linked films with an interesting distinction: the films they screen are their own. Short features directed by Liverpool native artists such as Michael Tasker and Harry J. Wormald are shown at regular cine-clubs, affording opportunities for their work to find an audience that isn’t dictated by algorithms. The ‘Scouse New Wave’, Michael tells me, is a tongue-in-cheek reference to the ethos that guided the French New Wave of the 1960s: “They were disinterested in the cinema of the time, they found it corporate and boring. Like them, we need to make more interesting things again.”
Michael and I stood on a freezing Crosby Beach, the morning tide pushing its way in, and I watched him and his crew work on their next short film. It was the first sunny day of the year, despite the lateness of the winter and the previous night’s snowfall, and the light falling on the beach lent a time-out-of-joint, surreal atmosphere to proceedings, which is ideal for a film that appeared to be a spaghetti western set on the coast of the Irish Sea. Anthony Gormley’s slightly eerie Another Place installation, a series of 100 cast-iron silhouettes spread across the beach, did little to cast away the Lynchian aura. For Michael, this is precisely the sort of filmmaking we need to see more of. “There is a tendency in the more professionalised filmmaking pathways to favour certain visual ideas, certain types of films. There needs to be a change, with support for a wider range of creativity, tailored to the specific interests and tastes of the area that they are coming from.”
Each film club is run by a small team of volunteers: artists who are taking their love of film into their own hands, whether that’s encouraging curiosity with thematically-linked seasons of curated films, or pooling the expertise of friends to make something new. The defining ethos of the scene could be, as Holly puts it, “no money, no major funding, just a love of cinema.”
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