Author: Jon Brookes
‘’There is something quietly magical about a night at the (now infamous) Magic Lantern Film Club. The basic premise of the club is that a classic or non-mainstream film is shown in a secret location somewhere in Bristol, UK…those who buy tickets are oblivious to both the identity of the film and the location prior to the evening of the showing. The club is very typically Bristolian: alternative, independent, relaxed and an obvious counter-point to the sensory overload of the industrial complex of popular cinema-going.
The club’s particular approach to recapturing the nostalgia of the ‘magic lantern’ (an antediluvian term for moving pictures at the dawn of film-making), is to match a film thematically with a location. Sort of.
This particular edition was my first. Having recently moved to Bristol I was excited to engage with some of its famous arts scene…I never considered myself much of a film buff, but the prospect of matching an ‘indie’ film with a hidden location provided the impetus I needed to commit my Thursday night to this novel adventure.
Participants in the club are only given a nominal ‘meeting point’, to enhance the surprise of the location, so when I arrived in front of the local council building (also my place of work), my interest was piqued. Attending alone, I cast around for signs of my fellow audience. Sure enough, after around 10 minutes I found myself in the company of approximately fifty people equally as bemused as myself: people who I would loosely describe as the sort of folk who I would either like to have a drink with or try to chat up…or both. My sense of intrigue grew.
The short wait until the event organiser arrived was a mixture of emotions. The only thing I can compare it to is that sense of anticipation you get when you’re at a bonfire when you’re five years old…your sparkler has died and there’s a reverent hush before someone finally lights the Catherine wheel.
The organiser (who also happens to be a close friend) arrived on the scene in costume to guide the group. Apparelled in an outfit combining latex, military boots and some kind of helmet, I’m sure the outfit revealed the film we were about to watch but I was none the wiser.
The bemused collective followed our leader biddably around the corner to finally arrive at our hidden destination for the evening…Bristol’s central library! For those unfamiliar with Bristol, the library sits proudly next to the cathedral and is one of the city’s oldest buildings. Its neogothic facade makes you feel more like you are entering a church than a municipal bilbliotech.
Ushered into a central area which contained a sort-of fishing net full of books, a biohazard dumb-waiter (yes really) and soft mood-lighting, we dutifully sat down to be told that we were about to witness a screening of Fahrenheit 451, directed by François Truffaut and adapted from the novel by Raymond Bradbury.
From the moment I arrived, I felt an indescribable warmth (ironic) and a sense of being slightly out-of-control but in the presence of friends. There was a short speech by a librarian who explains that the film imagines a future where books are outlawed and “firemen” burn any that are found. The burning temperature of paper is 451 degrees Fahrenheit (!)
The penny dropped: here we were, a room full of people, gathering to watch a film about the destruction of literature…surrounded by books. The contrast felt powerful. The staging was amazing and the attention to detail was incredible…someone had even written ‘363.31’ on the biohazard cabinet, the dewi decimal code in the library for ‘controversial books’.
As the screen flickered to life, the room fell into an attentive hush. One thing that struck me most was how communal the viewing felt. Every silence felt shared. When a woman chose to burn with her books rather than live without them, the collective stillness in the room was palpable.
And then there were the conversations afterwards — perhaps the true hallmark of a Magic Lanterns evening. We spoke about censorship, about the fragility of knowledge, about how eerily relevant Bradbury’s vision remains in an age of algorithm-driven content and shrinking attention spans. Someone observed that the film feels less about fire and more about numbness — about the quiet surrender of curiosity. Heads nodded.
The ‘coup de grace’ of the evening came when each participant was asked to choose a book to condemn to the biohazard fires… I don’t quite remember what I chose (hopefully it was Dan Brown) but the symbolic act gave the event an oddly lovely kind of closure … a gift-wrapping of experience you don’t get when you exit blindly into the light of an Odeon corridor.
Walking home, I felt that particular glow that only thoughtful cinema can provide — not the explosive thrill of spectacle, but the slow burn of reflection. The film had done more than screen a film. They had created a space to engage with it deeply, collectively, and meaningfully.
In a story about the destruction of books, it was heartening to sit in a room full of people who still care so passionately about stories. And that, perhaps, is the quiet triumph of an evening at Bristol’s Magic Lantern Film Club.’’
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