Birmingham Film Society

'It was in the Film Society more than anywhere else that young artists came together. It was through Dodds that I first met them. Very soon after I graduated, he invited me to a dinner he gave in a private room in the Burlington Restaurant to a group of young men whose mentor in some sense he was. Most of them were clerks in local government or industry. There were perhaps ten guests, among them the sculptor Gordon Herickx, who worked as a stonemason, Stanley Hawes, who became a documentary film director and worked first in Canada and then in Australia, the painter John Melville and his brother Robert, who became a distinguished art critic and whom I last saw a glimpse of in a television film about the British Surrealist movement; he was meditatively and seemingly absent-mindedly kicking a violin along a gutter in a street near Waterloo Station.'

Walter Allen, 'As I Walked Down New Grub Street'

The Birmingham Film Society was set up by two clerks from the city in 1931 to show films not scheduled in commercial cinemas. These mainly consisted  of European features, experimental short films and social-realist documentaries. One of the founders was Stanley Hawes who after a few more years working for Birmingham Corporation, moved to London to work under the wing of John Grierson as a director and producer for Strand Pictures Ltd. He returned to the city for the Society's 50th meeting in November 1936 when he introduced 'Chapter and Verse,'a film about the history of writing and books which he had recently completed. 

Stanley Hawes

Although the Society began in a small derelict cinema at the back of Snow Hill station (possibly the Great Hampton Picture Palace), it moved first to the West End cinema at the top of Suffolk Street and then the Scala on Smallbrook as membership increased. The original and luxurious Scala closed in 1960 to make way for the development of Smallbrook Queensway. However a replacement cinema (below) was included, but that too closed in the late 1980s. The offices surrounding it are known as Scala House.

Meetings were generally held on Sunday afternoons, although there were a few extra-ordinary gatherings on a weekday in an attempt to introduce discussion on film. For instance, W.H. Auden was enlisted to talk to the Midland Adult School Union at their hall on Severn Street alongside a showing of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, one of the Society's most popular features.

In the Society Auden was amongst friends. E.R. Dodds was the chairman who was later replaced by that other ringmaster of bohemian Birmingham, Philip Sargant Florence, and among the committee members were Gordon Herickx and Robert Melville whose brother John designed the logo.