To celebrate our ruby anniversary, WFS vice president Johnny Crawford delves into the past.
One of the highlights of our 2026 programme is our celebration of our 80th birthday. It was nearly eight decades ago, on 21 October 1946, that we held our inaugural AGM as the first member of the New Zealand Federation of Film Societies. As impressive as this milestone is, the history of the film society movement in Aotearoa is even longer and broader.
Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin was screened in the Wellington Town Hall for our first AGM in 1946, and again 70 years later at the Paramount.
A history of Aotearoa’s film communities
Since the very beginning of the 20th century, when the first moving pictures in Aotearoa were recorded, cinema has been an artform to be created, viewed and discussed as part of a community.
New Zealand’s first major filmmaker, Rudall Hayward, was famous for traveling around the regions and making two-reel silent comedies on location with local actors. Films like Hamilton’s Hectic Husbands, Tilly of Te Aroha and A Daughter of Invercargill were screened for enthusiastic local audiences, thrilled at seeing their towns on celluloid. Lee Hill and A. L. Lewis, among others, would take this legacy into the sound era with provincial showcases like Phar Lap’s Son.
It was around this time that the precursors to the modern film society movement were founded in Auckland, Wellington Christchurch and Dunedin. In 1933, Wellington ran afoul of the censors (and not for the last time), incurring a fine of 1 pound and 11 shillings for screening Soviet propaganda – an uncensored print of Nikolai Ekk’s Road to Life. Although it wasn’t enough to immediately sink the endeavour, it seemed to have had a cooling effect, leading to the society shutting down in 1936. None of the other societies around the country would survive the decade.
Nikolai Ekk’s Road to Life – clearly worth every penny.
The New Zealand film industry itself experienced a lull towards the middle of the 20th century but the communitarian approach endured, partly through ciné clubs where DIY filmmakers like Hilda Brodie Smith thrived. When people once again started making feature films in Aotearoa, it was often a collective effort. The most famous example might be the peacetime mobilisation of New Zealand’s total civilian population in the service of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. But more historical weight should be given to ‘Fourth Cinema’, an Indigenous filmmaking tradition identified by Barry Barclay and including Māori filmmakers like himself and Merata Mita. According to Barclay, what sets Fourth Cinema apart is that it is situated, not within “the national orthodoxy” but on an “alternative base firmly set in the customs and laws of the community that conceived and manufactured the film.”
Hotere exemplifies the more communitarian approach of Fourth Cinema. According to Brannavan Gnanalingam, Merata Mita “refused to centre her documentaries on individuals, preferring a collective approach… In Hotere, the artist himself is of less importance than his work and what other people say about him.”
The Film Society movement begins in earnest
After the Second World War, that primal collective urge to get together and watch a movie was able to evolve into something more lasting. While film-lovers of the silent era might have met in a town hall or barn to see what kind of pickle Patsy from Palmerston had gotten herself into, they were now gathering in dedicated venues like cinemas to watch a broader range of films.
The Wellington Film Society we know today started meeting in 1945. In its constitution, it laid out its objectives which included:
- To promote and foster interest in the motion picture from the point of view of art, entertainment and education;
- To encourage higher public standards in the motion picture and to protect the interest of the ‘consumer’ (i.e. the average picturegoer);
- To provide screenings of films, especially those not normally available;
- To provide reliable information about current cinema entertainment;
- To promote or undertake public screenings of special films.
The following year, at its first AGM, members voted in favour of pooling resources to create the New Zealand Federation of Film Societies.
Since then, the number of societies has fluctuated. The height came in the early 1960s, when there were over fifty affiliated societies. In 1975, the Otago town of Waitati, an important site of New Zealand’s counter-culture, started its own (sadly no longer-running) ‘Film and Fish Society’ with screenings projected onto a bedsheet. Ronald Hugh Morrieson’s 1950s-set novel The Scarecrow (later adapted into an excellent film) even features a film society. Prudence, the protagonist’s older sister, says “Chester has asked me to go to the Film Society Club evening with him. It’s a Charlie Chaplin and it’s an old beaut, he tells me.” Notably, its fictional small-town setting of Klynham was based on Hawera, which also hosted a film society at the time.
“Get in Uncle Athol, we’re going to Dogtooth!”
Several notable filmmaking figures have been active in Aotearoa’s film society movement. John O’Shea, one of the only people directing feature films in Aotearoa in the 1950s and 1960s, was elected to the Executive in 1946 and edited Wellington’s Monthly Film Bulletin. In 1949, he was appointed Assistant Censor of Cinematograph Films and proved a valuable ally for an organisation that frequently butted heads with New Zealand’s archaic censorship regime. That same year, for instance, the national censors refused to allow a screening of Josef von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel, an omission we are rectifying in our 2026 programme.
Today, there are a number of celebrated filmmakers among the membership and committees of our national film societies. Nelson, for example, celebrated its 70th anniversary in 2017 with a double-feature including a documentary made by one of the first presidents of the Nelson Film Society, W. H.Parr, who was the Nelson Harbour Master in the 1940s. Its final screening for 2024 was A Different Living, a film about long-time member Mike Ward.
People who struggle to find a seat on Monday nights may find it hard to believe, but it hasn’t always been easy keeping members engaged. In 1953, the President of Hamilton Film Society complained in his annual report:
Attempts at organising discussions in the past have failed. The committees have therefore been forced to conclude that there is not a place for the critical approach to films within our society. This is not surprising in a small town such as Hamilton where the number of people likely to be interested in film criticism must be small.
This may be hard to believe for anyone who has seen how well Hamilton is doing in 2026!
Over the years, the New Zealand Federation of Film Societies has played (or at least tried to play) a significant role in the history of cinephilia in Aotearoa. We are proud to have founded the first Wellington Film Festival in 1972 – the precursor to the NZIFF – and still support it to this day.
The Federation at 80
There are currently fifteen centres with film societies in Aotearoa, from Queenstown in the south to Auckland in the north. Each is run by a committee of volunteers who shape the membership experience to best fit their own communities. For example, Carterton sells baking at its screenings, Nelson regularly enlists a local pianist to perform a live score for silent films and Hamilton has hosted a number of filmmaker Q&As.
Through the Federation, representatives from these societies coordinate finances, logistics and screening rights. The Federation is a part of the International Federation of Film Societies, a global community of like-minded cinephiles.
Hamilton has invited filmmakers to a number of its screenings for Q&As, including director Leon Narbey for the beautiful but underseen Illustrious Energy.
Even members of Wellington Film Society can check out some of the other centres; a full membership of any film society that belongs to the NZ Federation of Film Societies will admit you to all fifteen societies’ screenings. If you are travelling, we encourage you to check out their local film society. Alternatively, if you’ve got friends or whānau in any other centre, you may want to let them know and encourage them to join up.
Meanwhile, to celebrate Wellington Film Society’s momentous success, we’re going to do what we’ve always done: gather in a dark room with hundreds of other people and watch some movies.
If you’d like to delve deeper into the history of the Film Society in New Zealand, check out http://nzfilmsociety.pbworks.com