Salient

The Film Society: The Beauty of Pretension

By Haimona Peretini Gray | 17 Mar, 2008

The Wellington Film Society is an impressive beast. It’s high on pretension, as you would expect from a group almost entirely made up of middle aged, middle class white people, but they do a fine service bringing forgotten and undistributed classics to the Paramount screen. Membership is $80 for students, and for that you get to surround yourself with the local film literati. Membership is down, however (as has been the trend for some time) and this may be due to the often unpredictable quality of the films shown.

Films like Sweet Smell of Success and Pierrot Le Fou have been unjustifiably forgotten, but then they play impenetrable shit like The State I Am In. At their last AGM a member congratulated the board (which includes a treasurer, chairman, five vice chairs and what seemed like an endless amount of volunteers, *cough* pretentious *cough*) for not being afraid to show films they knew would be unpopular.

This is both charming and repulsive but the charm wins out for me. I’ve learnt a great deal at the film society and any given Monday you might get your film preconceptions blown.