Glasgow Film Festival pays tribute to Hollywood's best year

The history books agree that 1939 was unique in Hollywood, possibly the single best year in a cluttered existence that stretches over a century. The films nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars testify to that: Gone With The Wind, The Wizard Of Oz, Of Mice And Men, Stagecoach, Mr Smith Goes To Washington, Ninotchka and, beyond those referenced above, Dark Victory, Love Affair, Goodbye Mr Chips and Wuthering Heights.

But 1939 was also the year of Renoir's La Regle Du Jeu, Carne's Le Jour Se Leve and Mizoguchi's The Story Of The Last Chrysanthemums. Across the Atlantic from Hollywood, a new cinema in Glasgow was created to reflect this wider range of quality films. And so the Cosmo in Rose Street, the first purpose-built art-house cinema outside London, opened its doors in May 1939.

Fast forward to 2014, past the Cosmo's major reconstruction in 1974 to become the Glasgow Film Theatre, to this year's Glasgow Film Festival (GFF). As part of its ever-expanding line-up, there is a fond nod to 1939, with the screening of nine of those Oscar-nominated Best Pictures (because of its running time, the 10th, Gone With The Wind, screened in December as part of GFT's regular programme). It's the kind of audience-friendly but critically sound curatorial flourish that marks Glasgow out from its film festival peers.

"Although it's much derided for tying people up to long-term contracts, the studio system did in 1939 reach its peak of great writers and great directors and great actors all working on amazing projects," says GFF co-director Allan Hunter. "John Ford's Stagecoach is there in our programme, but he made three films that year and three films the year before. It's Drums Along The Mohawk, it's Young Mr Lincoln, it's Stagecoach, it's The Grapes Of Wrath - a masterpiece every three or four months. These days if a director makes a film every three or four years it's unusual."

"Part of the heritage of the festival is to encourage people that cinema-going is still what it used to be," adds the GFF's other co-director, Allison Gardner. "Maybe not in the great numbers that there were in 1939, but the festival is a real communal shared experience, and that's what people love about it."

Audiences, not industry, are the key to what makes this festival tick. It is, the directors say, what defines the GFF, what has shaped its identity, what has honed or expanded the various strands within its programme to make it the event it is today, celebrating its 10th anniversary. Glasgow Film Festival was born in 2005 and showed 68 films. In 2013, it had 39,000 admissions to 368 events, 57 of which were UK premieres, seven of which were world premieres. It is now the third-biggest film festival in the UK.

"You have to be able to find your feet and your audience," says Gardner, agreeing that the 2014 festival would be unrecognisable to those who put the 2005 model together. "You couldn't have done this in the first year, throw this breadth of programming at somebody. All film festivals need to grow."

There was a huge growth spurt when Gardner and Hunter came on board in 2007, and ticket sales almost doubled from the previous year. There was also a sense that the festival was maturing in industry eyes when, in 2009, it had sufficient kudos to open with the European premiere of In The Loop, immediately following the film's first-ever screening at Sundance.

Glasgow's position on the calendar also helps - not necessarily in industry terms of grabbing titles as soon as they're done at Sundance or Berlin, but again because of the audience factor.

"It's good in terms of the whole cultural spectrum in the city," Hunter insists. "You can go from Celtic Connections to us to the Comedy Festival to Aye Write! It's also had some positive effect for GFT all year round. Our audience carries its enthusiasm for the other 11 months of the year. Would the GFT's third screen [which opened to the public on November 29] have happened without the film festival?"

"I think it helped in a tiny way," admits Gardner who, outwith the festival, is GFT's head of cinemas. "We always did need it in a city of our size, because of the fact that Glaswegians go to the cinema more often than any other city in the UK, apparently."

So, 10 years on, the Glasgow Film Festival is very much a product of the city it calls home. How exactly does that manifest itself in the programme? Given that Glasgow has produced more than a few Turner Prize winners and nominees in the past couple of decades, it shouldn't come as a surprise that an arty, experimental strand has developed. Known as Crossing The Line, this year it features A Whole New World, the film that artist Rachel Maclean created as winner of the annual Margaret Tait Award and in which she examines British imperial history and, in this of all years, national identity.

"The Margaret Tait Award is an interesting one," says Gardner. "We felt that we weren't giving [more experimental visual art] any space or treating it well, so we thought, 'Why don't we have a prize?' We get £10,000 from Creative Scotland, but all of that money goes to the artist and our 'in kind' is the management of it, the time, the panel, the watching, the sorting of the submissions. It's quite an important art award now, and considered quite prestigious."

"And it's not just a prize," says Hunter. "It's a commission that results in something the world can share."

In a similar way, a strong Glasgow Music and Film Festival has emerged within the GFF, as befits a city of Glasgow's musical stature. Co-directors Gardner and Hunter were the first to admit several years ago that they didn't have the required knowledge to pull such programming together.

"Our skills in programming the festival lie with watching films," Gardner confesses. "We'd never put on live music events, although we'd occasionally organised live accompaniment to things, mostly silents. We asked, 'Who could we work with that does music really well?' So we went to the Arches and asked them to pitch ideas to us. We'd do the visual part, they'd do the music part, we'd make it all work together. It's all about the way we're harnessing their energy, their expertise, to the benefit of our festival and our audiences."

And so the festival now has other curatorial partnerships in place to strengthen the furthest reaches of its programme. Nine years ago, Film4 Frightfest began adding films to the GFF line-up; this year, 12 screenings and events are crammed back-to-back between February 27 and March 1. Robert Florence returns with the videogame focus of Game Cats Go Miaow!, while Kapow!@GFF filters in the world of comic art; both draw in a young audience that's more common to the multiplex than the art-house.

On top of all this, there's the Glasgow Youth Film Festival (now in its sixth year and programmed entirely by a youth team) and Glasgow Short Film Festival, both run prior to the main festival, and both of which are complete entities in themselves.

"The Short Film Festival has grown hugely in its 10 years as well," says Hunter. "It's much better funded now, but it is a short film festival of international stature. And the Youth Film Festival, which is unique in its programming, has become an inspiration to other festivals latching on to the 'let's get young people to programme bits of our festival' idea."

"Film festivals can be intimidating for people," Gardner continues. "We have to give people routes in, so that they feel comfortable, and then they'll take chances on other things."

"The all-embracing thing is good," agrees Hunter, "because it works across the audiences. So you maybe have an older audience that goes to the retrospective in the mornings and a younger audience that's at Game Cats Go Miaow! But they're all in some way part of the same festival - so it's not that this is just a festival for old people or young people or just a festival for people who like obscure art-house movies or whatever.

"All those little parts fit together. You've got a whole city that can participate in this festival, with all of them thinking there's something in this festival for them."

A decade on, then, the Glasgow Film Festival is as close as many film festivals get to being all things for all people. As the city has embraced the festival, it has embraced the city, with screenings this year away from its GFT and Cineworld hubs at Kelvingrove (Young Frankenstein) and the Tall Ship (Pete's Dragon, The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou and, very atmospherically, The Fog). There's even a potholing expedition beneath Central Station, gear provided, that will culminate in a screening of… ah, well, that would be telling. But it's one of the quirky ideas that will be a 2014 talking point and ensure the GFF returns for an eleventh year.

"You can go to festivals across the world, and you're in the taxi on the way in, and the driver will say, 'Oh, can people get into that? Can they buy tickets for that?'" notes Hunter from personal experience. "I don't think anybody would ask that of the Glasgow Film Festival. They know you can just dive in."