Hail the village cinema revival! Print E-mail
Written by Andrew McCloy, 2005   
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Whether you're a vicar, a farmer, a teenager or a retired postmistress, there's a welcome for you at your local film club and a chance to socialise with your friends and neighbours. Andrew McCloy explains. 

In this age of ever-more sophisticated home entertainment it's perhaps surprising to learn that national cinema audiences are actually growing, with out-of-town multi-screen cinemas springing up around the country. But the celluloid revolution is not just confined to urban areas: in the rural Peak District enterprising film-lovers are determined to bring the big screen back to the little village.

In the early 1990s the Peak District lost the last of its 'proper', purpose-built cinemas when The Ritz closed at Matlock.

Since then, filmgoers across this part of rural Derbyshire have had to make a long journey to places as far afield as Chesterfield, Derby or Sheffield - over 20 miles away in some cases. The Ritz was the last in a long line of small town and village cinemas to close, ending a social tradition that in the days before TV and videos made them a focal point of news and entertainment.

People flocked to the small picture houses and village auditoriums across the Peak District to watch the latest films, interspersed with newsreels. Matlock and Ashbourne once had two cinemas apiece, and there were well-attended venues at Wirksworth and Bakewell. Village cinemas were just as popular, with hundreds of people cramming into the likes of the Mechanics Institute at Eyam and the Crich Picture House on a Saturday night.

However, as the 20th century wore on TV asserted itself in peoples' homes. Wirksworth Cinema closed in 1967, Buxton Opera House ceased showing films in the mid-1970s, and with the demise of The Ritz you might be forgiven for thinking that the appetite for big screen films in the Peak District was negligible. But not so! Over the last five years a growing number of community-led film clubs have begun appearing all over the region, and local take-up has been swift and enthusiastic.

One of the most successful clubs has been Bonsall and District Film Society, near Matlock, whose 70 members are now enjoying their third season of films in the intimate surroundings of a small, converted ballroom. The club is run entirely by volunteers and relies on subscription and fundraising: so successful have they been that in 2002 they were awarded Best New Film Society by the British Federation of Film Societies.

A few miles away, Ashford and Bakewell Film Society is also going strong, showing monthly films at Bakewell Town Hall. Like Bonsall, they have dispensed with unwieldy projectors with 16mm film reels and instead use a modern digital projector purchased with the help of an Awards For All grant. The club's projectionist is the Rev Clive Thrower, Vicar of Ashford and a film enthusiast since his days with Sheffield University's film society.

The club is in its fifth season, and Chairman Linda Pelc explains that members vote for which films they want to see. "We try to present a balanced programme, including two classics, two foreign language movies and two non-mainstream or arthouse films. We also aim to make it a social occasion with the chance to discuss the film and meet other people."

Although day-to-day overheads are mostly met by membership charges, the costs of purchasing the projection equipment and setting up a club are often considerable, so that rural film societies and cinemas have looked to various sources of external funding - as demonstrated by the success of another, neighbouring film club. In between Bakewell and Bonsall is the small village of Youlgrave, and earlier this year residents got together to reopen the historic village cinema 60 years after the original reels stopped running.

Youlgrave Cinema's inaugural season of six films was an immediate sell-out, with over 120 people packed into the village hall to enjoy the surround-sound experience of a state-of-the-art digital projection system. (Although, it must be said, they nodded to British film-making tradition on their inaugural night by showing the all-time classic The Third Man!) As at Bonsall, Youlgrave's equipment was partly paid for with a grant from the Countryside Agency's 'Vital Villages' initiative, which aims to support and encourage community projects in rural areas.

Enthusiastic support

To help get the club started, Derbyshire Rural Community Council also provided a small one-off cash grant. This went towards two preview evenings and the distribution of a local questionnaire, in order to gauge local interest and determine just how many film-goers there were in a small rural village.

"We were taken aback at the high level of enthusiasm for our project," says Committee member Saffron Johnston. "We discovered that there are two distinct age groups - the early to mid-teens and the elderly - that find it almost impossible to get to a nearest cinema. In our case that's at Chesterfield, 15 miles away, which if you haven't got your own car requires two buses and a long walk to the out-of-town multiplex." They found that many of the older villagers, in particular, had not been to the pictures for years - decades in some cases - even though quite a few spoke fondly of going to the original Youlgrave Cinema before it closed in the 1950s.


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