‘Doing the Work of the NFT in Nottingham’ – or How to Use the BFI to Beat the Communist Threat in Your Local Film Society

Abstract

On 22 September 1966 the Nottingham Film Theatre opened its doors to the public. This was the first in a wave of Regional Film Theatres (RFTs) to be established around the UK in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Modelled after the programming policy of the British Film Institute’s (BFI) flagship London venue, the National Film Theatre (NFT), the RFTs have been generally, if uncritically, regarded as the rolling-out of cinematic enlightenment from the metropolis towards the regions – not least because the most freely available sources on the subject are BFI sanctioned ones such as Butler (1971) or the Institute’s own magazine Sight and Sound. The RFT programme, as executed, was not without controversy. It drew criticism from different directions, and was charged variously with displaying both too much and too little central control. For the new staff within the BFI’s Education Department the roll-out seemed ad hoc, unplanned and at odds with the politically informed, structured film education they were trying to foster. Colin McArthur, who joined the department in 1968, describes the expansion as ‘driven more by money than by cultural policy’ and recounts a departmental joke of the era – that ‘anyone ringing up for a catalogue of BFI Distribution Library holdings would be asked if they would like a regional film theatre at the same time’ (2001: 114): a flippant jibe which tellingly offers no suggestion of what regional demand there might have been for the scheme. A comprehensive history of the RFT programme has yet to be written, but when it is, it will reveal a much more complex picture. RFTs were developed in partnership with a variety of local bodies and in each area those mixtures of governmental, commercial and voluntary interests also need be taken into account. What I want to explore in this article