Interview with Dr Matthew Rule-Jones

Cinema For All recently sat down with Dr Matt Rule-Jones to discuss his work in the Cinema For All archives, how the history of community cinema is the history of the UK, and why we shouldn't throw out our old boxes!

Could you tell us a little bit about the archival project and how you got involved?

This goes back to 2017 when I found myself at a workshop in Oxford Brookes University organised by a wonderful colleague, and she'd invited a number of people together to talk about community cinema; its history, its current practice. It's an area that’s actually really quite under-researched in academia. There's a lot of work on contemporary film exhibition in commercial settings, lots of work on film production of course, on film distribution, on audiences… But I suppose community cinema is a bit of a gap that we just we don't have a lot of writing about. So, I went along because I'm interested in audiences and the history of film audiences and I found myself in the same room as the wonderful and fabulous Jaq Chell, who is now the CEO of Cinema For All, and at the time was Head of Business and Programme Development. They were so passionate and dedicated and keen, and I was running a very small scale kind of community cinema in an area of Leicester where I was based, and so I had this kind of interest and passion all ready for it and Jaq said “well ,you know you're a historian at heart, we've got some papers. Would you mind coming to Sheffield at some point and having a look at a couple of boxes for me”. I thought OK, a couple of boxes? No problem at all. Then I went to Sheffield and got taken into this amazing kind of storage unit and there was box after box after box. Jaq had lied to me! I think Jaq had thought that a lot of this wouldn’t be of interest, so we opened a couple of boxes, and my little eyes were bigger than saucers. I thought 'that is the history of 100 years of community cinema'. From 1925 to 2025 we've all this but we don't have a physical trace of it. There's no place to go where you can examine the history of community cinema and that because it's all in this this storage unit in Sheffield. So Jaq and I applied for some funding that was very generously granted by the British Academy and the Leverhulme Trust, which meant I could spend a couple of years cataloguing it. So now there is formally just over 80 boxes of materials which are now all now catalogued and are explorable online as a catalogue and we are going to be doing all sorts of exciting bells and whistles in the years ahead to try and get word out about this amazing resource. I don't want to call this a shadow history of film exhibition, because people are so passionate and engaged and are very aware of their own histories, but there is a collective history of the community cinema movement since 1925 that is a story that we haven't told yet. I really want to get people excited about their own histories, about the histories of their groups, but also their place within this big national story.

That’s really interesting. The individual histories, as rich and interesting as they are, are part of this wider narrative of the movement. There’s different levels to it.

It breaks down even further, because of course the individual groups are made-up of individual people, and they have their own histories and reasons for being involved.

What advice would you give to a group out there who've got a garage or an attic full of boxes and don't really know where to get start?

I would say e-mail me! If you'll forgive me, my e-mail address is m.w.jones@exeter.ac.uk. I’m based at the University of Exeter, and we can offer advice. Down in Exeter we've got the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum, which is the UK's largest collection of film materials. It kind of rivals the BFI in that regard. I don't know if it’s as well known about by the public as it should be given the sheer quality of it, but it's kind of a people's history of film, that looks at cinema as we see it rather than how the studios see it. We’ve got experts down there who can assess materials, but also the archive itself in Sheffield is available for donations. We're taking donations into the archive, so if there’s material people want out of their hair, please don't bin it. Get in touch and we'll have a chat about what its future can be, where it can go, what the options are. I'm very happy to support people through that. If people want to keep hold of the material themselves, rather than pass it onto the central archive of the Cinema For All archive, that's entirely OK too, but what I would say is take care of it. That means looking at the conditions you're housing it in, if there’s risk of water damage, it if it's mouldy that mould will spread quickly. If it's not been taken care of in a while, then the chances are there might be some something in there that needs looking at by a conservationist and I can help with that. I think sometimes people think of it as just boxes in the attic, I'm just guilty of that as anyone, but that's history and it is delicate. It's a vital and important history of British culture that community cinema is so central to, and the reason that we sometimes don't think of it as being central to UK film culture, is because we've not collected all this stuff together before, so we have nowhere to point to, to say look this is how big and important this.

Have you got any personal highlights from things that you’ve dug up in the archive so far?

There’s so many highlights that I will be here for a year telling you about them. There's really lovely stuff in there. I stumbled on the certificate of incorporation of the British Federation of Film Societies, which is what then became Cinema For All. The original founding documents of the organisation are in there now fully catalogued. Individual societies have sent their materials to Cinema For All since 1946, when it was founded, so there's materials in there from then. One in particular that I just adore is a letter from a community cinema asking what to do after the war now that the menfolk of the town haven't returned in the same numbers that they were before, and the men who used to organise the community cinema, so do they have any advice for the women of the town on how to take this forward now peacetime had arrived. That is just amazing and it's part of our social history. It's more than just community history or cinema history, this is this is what this country did after the war. These things had to continue. There is some lovely stuff about old film societies, unusual film societies, so I'm actually writing a journal article the moment based on some of this stuff. There was a film society that ran out of the basement of the American embassy in London at the height of the Cold War in the 1960s. Goodness knows what they were showing! So there's that hyper local small scale community, beating heart of the movement stuff, and it goes all the way up through to official organisations; communications with the BFI, with the UK Film Council as it was, with government departments periodically, right the way up to embassies and the Cold War… It runs the full gamut. So your question is “do I have any favourites?”, I've got plenty of them. There's some magic stuff in there. It’s magical stuff from all sorts of different areas. It's such a rich lovely archive.

I’m fascinated by this idea of it being a history on so many different levels, the history of a region or a town, all the way up to the history of government.

That focus on locality and on regionality is just so important to this movement. Film societies don't crop up by accident; they begin because there's a group of people who are interested in something together. It might be that they're interested in particular type of film, or way back it was because people wanted to watch Soviet cinema and it was censored so they couldn't see it in cinemas. That kind of history of local people coming together and saying “right, what do we want to watch?”. That's what we all do every evening in our own homes. That's what community is - shared activity. It's that really rich stream of people enjoying each other’s company, having something in common, and sharing enough of a sense of a belonging in a place that they decide well let's let's make this regular. That's the nuts and bolts of what community cinema is and that's so lovely right?

It feels like this archive could tell us more about film going and the public than the history of commercial cinema, because it’s a movement created by the people.

Absolutely. I think too often we think of history as the history of institutions whereas, for me at least, history is the history of the people. I tend to think that people are more interesting than institutions and organisations. That's where the real stuff happens. I think that there's something really quite marvellous in making those connections between our small individual lived experiences and the way that the country operates. That stuff is always fascinating, and what's important, I think, is that Cinema For All acts as a conduit between the two. Part of the job of Cinema For All is to represent the community cinema movement to studios and governments, and all of these kind of big national and international bodies, but then also to represent those people to community cinemas themselves so we've got some direct linkage. That's rare, because so often in more commercial spaces you end up with a focus on the institution of the cinema and its relationship upwards, but you never really have any data about its relationship with the people that go to the cinema. So for us to have that, Cinema For All having collected that for 70 odd years now, is to my knowledge really kind of unrivalled in in cultural history. I don't know of another space where such a rich wonderful resources of that type available.