Occasionally, vital pieces of the cultural jigsaw disappear without anyone really noticing. This, sadly, was the fate of Contemporary Films, the British film distributor that popularised sophisticated, grownup international cinema – foreign language mostly – in the UK, and heralded the arrival of the auteur generation with directors such as Ingmar Bergman, Satyajit Ray, Andrzej Wajda and Yasujiro Ozu.
Contemporary, and its founder Charles Cooper, weren’t the only game in town – Kenneth Rive’s Gala was a fellow traveller – but Contemporary got there first, setting up shop in 1951, first with short films for the then popular film society sector, and moving into features with the 1952 Japanese film Children of Hiroshima. Its marketplace clout faded rapidly in the early 1990s, when it was a victim of changing industry practices. But amazingly, the company is still with us – and is planning a 75th anniversary series of screenings to showcase its history.
Such is Contemporary’s lustre that, along with screenings of films such as Miloš Forman’s A Blonde in Love, Bergman’s Wild Strawberries and Jack Hazan’s David Hockney documentary A Bigger Splash, the great and good are turning out in support, led by Mike Leigh, whose feature film directing debut, Bleak Moments, was picked up by Contemporary in 1971. “It was a great honour,” Leigh says. “One was used to seeing ‘Contemporary Films’ on all the movies one saw that weren’t just Hollywood crap.”
Bleak Moments, a studiedly funny and weird film based on Leigh’s own stage play, is about a woman living an isolated life with a sister with a learning disability and a boring job. It was financed by Albert Finney, still riding high on his 1960s acting successes. As a homegrown, off-kilter feature, it was a slightly unusual item for Contemporary to pick up. “We were fresh on the block and innocent,” says Leigh, “and you take everything for granted in some way. But actually, when you think about it, they were pretty remarkable and they embraced this thing.”
Now a Palme d’Or and Golden Lion winner, Leigh undoubtedly understands the impact the company had on his own development. But it is its effect on the wider culture, the openness and cosmopolitanism that Contemporary helped to foster, that is arguably its most important contribution. “I grew up in Manchester,” says Leigh, “and I saw movies all the time, but I never saw a film that wasn’t in English. I saw only Hollywood and British movies. So when I came to London, world cinema suddenly presented itself. I have recollections of seeing Russian films, Italian neorealism, you name it. It was all going on, and Contemporary was very much at the centre of that.”
Cooper, the driving force behind it all, was an East End Jew – the son of a butcher from Ukraine – and a committed communist who saw cinema as a way to build awareness. Before the second world war, he brought Soviet films to the UK via Kino, the film section of the Workers’ Theatre Movement, then spent the war in New York running a film section for the International Workers Order.
Deported from the US in 1950, Cooper set about supplying films to hungry fans in film societies, of which there were an estimated 200 across Britain. The increasing interest in foreign “art” films meant Cooper was in tune with the intellectual times, with his special interest in eastern European and underclass-oriented films.
Part of Cooper’s strength, it seems, was his devotion to family life and willingness to involve his children in his day-to-day. His daughters from his first marriage agree. Adi Cooper, now a board member of Social Work England, says: “Charles was in the right place at the right time in terms of capturing a market for the sort of films he was interested in, which branched out from political ones into what you would now call, I guess, arthouse cinema. He was prepared to take a risk on people who were unheard of here at the time, some of whom went on to have a much wider appeal.”
Her twin, Sue Cooper, a founder member of 1970s punk act Poison Girls, says: “There wasn’t much separation between work and home with Charles. He really was passionate about film and politics, and he was very motivated to expose people’s thinking to different cultures. He was basically an internationalist and a humanist.” They regale me with anecdotes about screenings in the basement of their Wembley home (“The room is crammed full of people! I’m two feet from the back wall gazing up at this film called Alexander Nevsky”) to messing about in the school holidays at the company’s Frith Street office (“pasting press cuttings into scrapbooks and getting seven and sixpence for three hours’ work”).
Also key to Contemporary’s success was the relationship Cooper nurtured with George Hoellering, the Hungarian émigré who ran the celebrated Academy cinema on London’s Oxford Street which, throughout the 1950s and 60s, was the flagship venue for these kind of films. “They were joined at the hip,” says Pete Lawley, Contemporary’s current managing director. “They were the gold standard of the time.”
Hoellering died in 1984, by which time Cooper had his own cinemas: the Paris Pullman and Phoenix cinema in London and another Phoenix in Oxford. Lawley, who came on board in 2023, outlines Contemporary’s decline: as Cooper’s health began to fail in the late 1980s, he passed control to his second wife, Kitty Furstenberg, who in turn sold it on to their friend Eric Liknaitzky, who died in 2023. Although Contemporary did acquire some of the key indies of the late 80s and early 1990s, including Patricia Rozema’s I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing, Jane Campion’s Sweetie and Hal Hartley’s The Unbelievable Truth, it seems the shift to home entertainment formats in the 90s passed Contemporary by. Instead it stuck to occasional re-releases of tried and tested classics from their archive.
Lawley says Contemporary has kept going by licensing clips from their catalogue; he has been sorting through the copious company documentation and says he is now working on plans for the future. “It’s very important to me,” he says. “I really want to keep it going. It can’t be about the money, let’s put it that way. It may be small, but there’s something worthwhile to build upon.”
