Town’s home movies take top billing

We’re at the Selby Globe Community Cinema, an award-winning project that has brought films by Hitchcock and Spielberg, films from White Christmas to the latest Harry Potter, to Selby: big-screen movies to a small Yorkshire town.

This, though, has been a triumphantly grassroots morning, stoking up nostalgia with three archive films made by Selby Cine and Video Club. One of them has taken us back to the spring morning in 1969 when the Queen distributed the Royal Maundy money at Selby Abbey as part of its 900th anniversary celebrations.

“I was there and I was introduced to the Queen,” says Mary Farman, a retired head teacher. “And she said: ‘Oh, Mrs Farman, I understand you’re a working mother... like myself.”

There’s a festive atmosphere here at Selby Town Hall, regular venue for the Globe, which recently won a Duke of York Award for “the development of community spirit, individual leadership and recognition of excellence”.

There’s no doubting the individual leadership: Eva Lambert, the project manager, sparkling with energy and enthusiasm, booking films, serving lunch, organising and then organising a bit more. A North Yorkshire force of nature.

“Without Eva, this would never have happened,” says Nan Woods, “She is one fantastic golden girl.” Nan and her friend Ann Tyreman are the “box office” staff (tickets £3 including coffee and lunch). “We’ve got a lovely little thing going here,” says Ann. “Everyone looks forward to it,” adds Nan. “It’s good fellowship. You make friends.”

Since it started two years ago, the Selby Globe, run completely by volunteers, has shown films old and new – as radical as Fritz Lang’s 1927 classic Metropolis and as disturbing as Hitchcock’s Vertigo – to more than 6,000 people. This morning is a “Silver Screen” matinee, for older cinema-goers, but there are also Film Society Mondays and family films in school holidays.

And there’s “rural outreach” to church and village halls, bringing flicks to the sticks: The King’s Speech at Monk Fryston Junior School, a Sing-a-long Grease at Sherburn-in-Elmet Scout Hut (“Coming soon: Osgodby, Carlton and Riccall”).

“It’s a cinema run by the community for the community,” says Eva Lambert, who left work in retailing and lecturing to look after her children and soon realised “I’m not made to sit in a house.” Cinema had always been important to her and here was a project waiting to happen.

“We haven’t had a cinema in Selby for 30 years so I knew there was a future for it here,” she says, laying out lunchtime place settings in the Town Hall “dining room”.

The nearest cinemas are in Castleford, York and Doncaster, all a dozen miles away, so the screenings at the Town Hall, a former Methodist hall with a curving balcony above its raked seating, have found a ready audience. “This project is all about people...” says Eva and hurries into the kitchen to stir the soup (a choice of minestrone or thick veg, followed by apple or rhubarb pie and custard: patrons are urged to bring a cushion and a dessert spoon).

Next to the kitchen hatch, there’s a display of archive photographs. “I think I’m on this photograph, look here on the left,” says Peter Sharp pointing to a picture of Selby Abbey Choir in 1938. The choirboys are lined up in their white surplices and Peter can name most of them: “That’s Albert Cryer, that’s John Silk, Greener they called him, the big lad behind me, Curtis, Sid Whisker, if you know him..”

Through in the main hall, with its dazzlingly bright green pillars, the 80-strong audience is ready for the films, a glimpse of Selby before its high street included Specsavers, the Cafe Chique and Blockbuster Video Express.

Our Town, a compilation of Sixties street scenes and local life, shows a world of men in synthetic-fur-collared car coats driving Ford Anglias, Vauxhall Crestas and Humber Super Snipes. The camera settles on a rail on a market stall labelled “Dresses – 29/11 all sizes”. There’s a low ripple of amusement.

People recognise old friends on screen. A saddler cuts leather, demonstrating his skill with a half-moon knife; people cluster round an auctioneer; the Urban District Council convenes, like a scene from South Riding, no councillor under 60, the men in waistcoats, the women in sturdy hats, all projecting municipal probity.

Can this really be only 40 or 50 years ago? It looks not so much a different decade as a different geological period. I’m lulled into nostalgia for a long-gone Selby – and this is only my second-ever visit to the town, so it’s not even my nostalgia.

Selby Cine and Video Club originally shot their films on Standard 8 film, but, for these screenings, they’ve been projected onto a screen and copied with a video camera. The club has a substantial archive, lovingly described by treasurer Bob Crossland: “Oh, we did galas in the town, and a film when they put the telephone cables on the bed of the River Ouse, and when the Ideal Flour Mill burned down, and the history of the railway bridge. And I did one about the demolition of the old Ritz Cinema.”

That demolition, of course, is partly why we’re sitting here in the Town Hall at this heartwarming celebration of localism, watching the Queen’s Maundy visit: a day of plumes and processions, wartime medals and chains of office, the Yeomen of the Guard and a thousand urgently waved Union Jacks. And there’s a shot of a dog peering down at the crowds from an open upstairs window. “That shot always gets a laugh,” says Bob Crossland. “It was one of mine.”

Seven years later, the Queen Mother visited Selby, graciously waving, a poem in powder blue, with people applauding her simply for existing. The Cine Club members were again out in force and they weren’t shy. There are some startling close-ups of the Queen Mother signing the abbey’s visitors book. “When the Duchess of York came,” a society member tells me, “our cameras were practically up her nostrils.”

Mary Farman – the “working mother” and a Selby Globe regular – spots herself on the Queen Mother film coming out of the official reception at the Londesborough Hotel next to the Abbey. “I’ve never seen that film before,” she says. “It feels very strange to see myself 40 years ago, quite surreal. But why did I buy that hat?”

As for the Queen’s visit, she remembers one of the Chapel Royal choristers staying with her and her husband Bill, a director of the abbey’s 900th anniversary festival who’s sitting across the lunch table from us. Clearly worried about the climate Up North, the chorister “came armed with thermals and two hot water bottles”.

Today’s Globe session is all but over. Mrs Peggy Morrill stops me on her way out. “That was really excellent, wasn’t it?” she says and adds that she recognised “Mr Simpson the hand bell ringer”.

Eva Lambert is stacking chairs. Which films, I wonder, have proved most popular? “The King’s Speech, Made in Dagenham... and the Silver Screen audience like films like Casablanca and Some Like It Hot. And we’re in love with the Ealing comedies. People go home happy.”

www.selbyglobe.co.uk

Taking film to the people can bring rural communities together

The Selby Globe Silver Screen session begins with a three-minute advert for Yorkshire as “a place from which no traveller wishes to return”.

And who would after seeing this idyllic footage of 1940s charabancs pootling along lanes in the Dales, Fifties families running gleefully along the sands at Filey, steam trains trundling across Knaresborough viaduct, and sheepdogs, haymakers and morris dancers at every turn?

The footage was compiled by the Yorkshire Film Archive as a trailer for last autumn’s Contrast/brilliance* festival of archive films in North Yorkshire. The festival was organised by Cine Yorkshire, part of a national initiative to bring high-quality digital screenings to areas where cinemas are few and far between.

Backed by £400,000 of Lottery funding and supported by the British Film Institute, Cine Yorkshire, a three-year project, takes films to rural and community venues across North Yorkshire.

Since it was launched in October 2010, it has screened more than 500 films to 16,000 people at 50 venues including pubs, care homes, railway stations and stately homes.

Thanks to satellite technology, it also relays live opera, ballet and plays, potentially bringing the Bolshoi to Burnsall Village Hall with just a bit of knob-twiddling.

Cine Yorkshire, managed by Bradford’s National Media Museum and the media agency Screen Yorkshire, has also supported the Selby Globe by upgrading equipment and advising on marketing.

“People are coming together not just because they want to see a film,” says Emily Penn, Cine Yorkshire’s rural cinema project manager.

“It’s a way of getting people together in the community. You can come along to a film on your own and people say it gets them out of the house. This is about local people in a local community getting together and doing things.”