A Home from Home: Filmhouse at 40

Great cinemas are more than just buildings in which we watch movies. They’re meeting places, where we go on dates or to catch up with friends; they’re sanctuaries, decompression chambers, places to escape your own head for a few hours; they’re places of learning, of inspiration, places to feed your soul; they’re where we go when we need a laugh or maybe just a good cry; they’re places where you can switch off but they’re also places that get you thinking.

Every city needs at least one great cinema. Glasgow has the GFT, Manchester has HOME, Bristol has The Watershed and for 40 years, the people of Edinburgh have had Filmhouse. In 1978, work began on transforming this old Presbyterian Church on Lothian Road into a different kind of place of worship. But Filmhouse didn’t become the beloved cinema it is today overnight. As you can probably guess from wandering it’s slightly awkward corridors, the Filmhouse we know and love was put together piece-meal. Its delivering into the world was a breached birth; it opened initially from its backend, as Jim Hickey, Head of Filmhouse from its inception until 1992, explains:

“There wasn’t a glamorous opening or anything. Basically, we were just operating in Chuckie Pend, the back lane behind Filmhouse. Our first cinema, which we now call Cinema Two, was basically built out of what was effectively just an outhouse, a sort of old stone shed at the back of the building.”

One person who recalls these early years is Edinburgh author and Filmhouse regular Ian Rankin.

“It’s terrifying to me that the Filmhouse is 40 – I’ve been coming here all those years! I arrived in Edinburgh as a student in 1978, and I was living round the corner in Morrison Street: Filmhouse was basically a home from home. It was accessed by going down a tiny scary alley that was right next to our flat, and you go in to see films like Eraserhead – imagine that as a date film? Well, I took a girl there to see that! It didn’t work out…”

Filmhouse’s Head of Technical, David Boyd remembers his first visit to his future place of work when he was a schoolboy.

“If you read the blurb about the early days, it says you had to come in through Chuckie Pend, the lane down the back, but as I recall it had a more prosaic name back then: it was simply called Morrison Street Lane. You came in through the back door, and you went into what's now Cinema Two and the rest of the building was just abandoned. We came in with our history class; our history teacher was into his movies and he brought us to see Spartacus. I remember we were given a very stern lecture about not dropping one single sweety on the ground.”

Filmhouse opened at a time when cinema attendances were plummeting, thanks in part to the growing popularity of newfangled technology like VHS and Betamax.

Hickey: "The late 70s was a disastrous time, audiences were dropping and there were some people actually saying, 'Why are you doing this Filmhouse thing because surely demand is dropping, why would people want this kind of thing?' And we said, well, this is a different kind of concept of cinema, which involves more screens, a lot more programs, as we would describe it today, curated by somebody, and it was also going to have a cafe and bar, so it became a meeting place and the kind of social centre that people would come to.

"Our job was to let people see – as people still talk about now – that the communal experience of sitting in a cinema with lots of people watching films is a lot better than solitary viewing. So our aim was the best possible projection, comfortable seating, reasonable prices; there was no popcorn, no adverts, all those sorts of things differentiated us from the other cinemas. It wasn't until 1982 when Cinema One opened that people could fully appreciate what we were trying to do, but we soldiered on for the first few years."

80s crowd at Filmhouse

The first film to play in the mint fresh Cinema One might be a surprise to most of you.

Hickey: "That’s one thing that is probably not publicly very well known. It wasn't a public screening, but a Saturday night screening for the architects and all the people who worked on building Cinema One: we showed them Flash Gordon. We wanted to show them the biggest and loudest picture could get our hand on in 1982. It was a great experience and technically it was just brilliant – after all those years to suddenly see the whole thing light up and hear that incredible sound. And the curtains we put up that night are still the same curtains; we've lasted."

The Filmhouse had its official opening in 1985, and that was similarly memorable.

Hickey: We did have an odd night when the Duke of Edinburgh came to officially open the place a few years later. We showed The Emerald Forest and people near him reported that he was quite animated throughout. He was saying things like ‘What's he doing now?’ ‘What a bloody idiot, what's he doing?’ He was kind of muttering to himself as if he was watching it at home in Buckingham Palace.

As a student in the mid-80s, Rod White, the current Head of Filmhouse, was a regular.

“I think the first film I saw there when I moved to Edinburgh was One from the Heart, the Coppola film, that must have been around 1983. As far as I was concerned, Filmhouse had been here forever. Little did I know it couldn’t have been much more than three years old then. And I used to come to the Wednesday matinees. They were only 50p, so it sold out every week and, you know, if you arrived too late, the queue would be out the door and down the street. So, as impoverished students, me and my friends learned to get here early.

Jenny Leask, former EIFF programmer and legendary former host of Filmhouse’s fiendishly difficult quiz, reckons her first visit to Filmhouse was to see The Man With Two Brains during a Steve Martin season, but her favourite memory is more recent.

“About eight years ago I went to a screening of The Wizard of Oz with some friends and their kids. It was in Cinema One and was sold out, with lots of young children in the audience. When Dorothy’s house landed in Oz and she stepped out from black and white into the most glorious Technicolor, the cinema was absolutely silent. I glanced to my right and left and saw a dozen young faces, completely enthralled by a film made more than 70 years previously. Pure movie magic.”

Leask’s quiz host successor was Filmhouse Programme Coordinator Raymah Tariq, who reckons the cinema have rejuvenative powers.

“One evening a friend had asked me if I wanted to go and see Bringing Up Baby. I had a terrible cold and was feeling dreadful but I dragged myself out and ventured into the cold and the rain to get here. I think it is still probably the film I’ve laughed the most at out-loud, pretty sure it cured me!"

1996 EIFF Team

A regular at Filmhouse and its quiz is film critic Ross Maclean, who has a less wholesome memory.

“I remember sitting down to see Irreversible in Screen One during Edinburgh Film Festival in 2002. I was with school pal and not-yet Telegraph film critic Robbie Collin. Before the film started we both noted that sat in front of us was Mark Kermode – from the radio and the telly! A few minutes into the film a gentleman a few rows in front fainted at the first shocking acts of violence and a gallant Mark Kermode rushed to his aid. Robbie and I possibly could have also rushed to his aid but we were transfixed and it looked like it was in-hand.”

The list of filmmakers who’ve visited Filmhouse over the years is staggering – Martin Scorsese, Andrei Tarkovsky, Dennis Hopper, Terry Gilliam, John Boorman, Paul Schrader, George Miller and Nic Roeg are some of the names that Hickey cites as memorable guests during his tenure. David Boyd recalls one particularly exacting filmmaker who visited.

“Béla Tarr, the Hungarian director, managed to get into the projection booth through a locked door during a screening of The Man from London. We swear that he must have turned into a mist and come underneath the door as vapor. His films, they're all in monochrome and very dark, so he doesn't want any stray light coming from the projection room. But, of course, the projection room is obviously a working space, so you need to have light to see what you're doing. He came to tell is he didn't want any stray light coming from the projection booth, so we were left to basically work completely in the dark. That was a bit challenging but the man was thoroughly charming. He's one of these people who can be a pain in the neck, but you'll do anything for him."

As well as the movies and the illustrious guests, Filmhouse's Front of House Supervisor Andrew Naylor says the biggest perk of working at Filmhouse is its patrons.

“I’ve loved working here for the people I’ve met – from the regulars who think of it as their second home to people like Mark Cousins and I, Daniel Blake writer Paul Laverty. A woman was in recently who I hadn’t seen for six months – she’d had a hip replacement, and Filmhouse, the place she missed most, was the first stop after getting out of hospital.”

Long before Secret Cinema was entertaining London hipsters, Filmhouse's had its own version: "I have really fond memories of Filmhouse’s short-lived, Mark Cousins-orchestrated Secret Cinema events – before any other film events started using that name!" recalls Ross Maclean. "There was such a frisson to turning up to the cinema late at night, pushing through Friday night revellers to enter via the insalubrious Chuckie Pend, totally unaware of what you were about to see, and being shown some real cult oddities in Screen 3. I remember seeing The Candy Snatchers and The Trip, and the atmosphere in the guild room afterwards, discussing Dennis Hopper and Todd Haynes’ Superstar with Mark; these discussions made it feel like being part of something interesting, something furtive, something personal. It was a real pleasure to know for the first time that film events like this were not only possible, but existed."

Speaking of filmmaker and former EIFF Artistic Director Mark Cousins, he can still regularly be seen down front at Filmhouse screenings. He recalls a formative screening in there in the late 80s:

“I saw Japanese documentary The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On there. It completely changed my filmmaking and led directly to my doc about neo-Nazis. It set me on a new course as a director. Thank you, Filmhouse.”

Curiously, Christmas films featured heavily in people’s memories of Filmhouse.

Christine Mackay (Filmhouse Regular): “My favourite memory is going to see It’s a Wonderful Life every Christmas. I always ask my (now adult) children to come with me and think I've only managed to persuade them to come about three times. Such is the power of the film though they think they've been every single year! One year we tried White Christmas but it didn't hit the spot. So for us Christmas isn't Christmas without George Bailey and Clarence at Filmhouse!”

Ian Rankin: “My favourite memory has to be Muppet Christmas Carol – it’s become something of an institution in our family! We know the film as well as the makers know it now! But those experiences are what’s great about cinema – it’s communal. You’re all singing and dancing in the right places.”

We'll leave the last word to Filmhouse regular and producer at Skyline Productions Leslie Hills, who has enough memories of the cinema for a tell-all novel. 

“Filmhouse has been part of my life since the Film Guild screened films on Sundays in Randolph Crescent where Forsyth Hardy, Jack Firth and Rae Milne talked of creating it," she tells us. "I remember smuggling in a (sleeping) baby to an X-rated film; sharing a gin with Liv Ullman; sending Thelma Shoonmaker off to The Dogs for fish and chips; pointing Scandinavian directors at the Port O’ Leith when the bar closed at 2am; blinking hard at Mark Cousins’ brilliant re-imagining of the café; picnicking with my youngest through a day of Alien films; squinting at a bizarrely erotic French film with my friend, the explorer, Malcolm Slessor, days before his heart failed him half way up a wee cliff on an inaccessible island; spying on former director Penny Thomson and Alan Ross dancing alone in a tent on the pend; tearing the wings off bad ideas over drip-feed coffee with Barbara Grigor; setting up the ‘87 Tory Free Zone campaign at the bar with the publisher John Calder; celebrating Engender’s first AGM with the writer Sue Innes and Cathie Thomson, James Kelman’s Booker-era agent; lending my Steenbeck edit-desk to Antonia Bird to sort out a wee 16mm problem for her EIFF screening... The building is full of friendly ghosts and good memories. I’m looking forward to what it does next!”

If it’s not clear, Filmhouse is many things to many people. Long may it reign.

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Filmhouse have been marking its first 40 years with a programme of films, one plucked from the programmes of each of the year since 1978. The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant (5 Oct), Cría cuervos (8 Oct), Gertrud (7 & 9 Oct) screen in Oct

In addition, Filmhouse Members can attend The Apartment (9 Oct) or recent Palme d'Or winner Shoplifting (30 Oct) as part of the cinema 40-year celebrations