This 4-week course examines the heady, formative decades of Leicester’s cinemas in terms of the films, the neighbourhood and City Centre picturehouses, following the historical links that lead to Phoenix Cinema today.

The first decades of the 20th Century saw a burgeoning popular and alternative cinema and arts scene in Leicester. The Leicester Film Society, inaugurated in 1932, acted as a focus for alternative, international and independent cinema, attracting luminaries such as Roger Manvell, Anthony Asquith, John Grierson and Richard Attenborough.

The first permanent cinemas arrived in Leicester around 1910 and developed apace until the end of the 1930s. Fifteen years after the first public screenings of the Lumiere Brothers’ Cinématographe, cinema transformed from touring fairground attraction into the Electric Palaces of the early 1910s.

This 4-week course will examine these heady and formative decades of Leicester’s cinema and cinema-going in terms of the films screened, the neighbourhood and City Centre cinemas and the personalities who ran them, exploring how ultimately these provide a link to Leicester’s Phoenix Cinema today.

COURSE BREAKDOWN

Week 1: 1900-1920 from fairground novelty to electric palaces - The beginnings of cinema in Leicester

Week 2: The 1920s silent films & orchestras until the arrival of the talkies in 1929.

Week 3: The Leicester Film Society, film criticism and the alternative cinema scene in Leicester 1932-1939

Week 4: The 1930s: the golden age of cinema going and the arrival of the Picture Palaces, looking at early sound films and how the arrival of the talkies disrupted Leicester’s cinemas.

FURTHER INFORMATION

Price: £55 / £50 conc / £45 Members

Tutor: Dr. Laraine Porter

Booking information:

This 4-week course will run at Phoenix on Mondays, 2pm – 4pm, 11 May – 8 June 2026.

PLEASE NOTE: There is no session on 25 May due to the bank holiday.

You must be 18 or over to attend.

Cancellation Policy:

We do not offer refunds for cancellations of bookings, except in exceptional circumstances. In the event that an advertised course is withdrawn, we will endeavour to give 7 days’ notice and a full refund will be made.

View our Learner Agreement.

ABOUT THE TUTOR

Laraine Porter is a film historian and recently retired academic having taught Film Studies at DMU from 2009-2025. Prior to that she was the Director of Broadway Cinema in Nottingham having been a former Cinema Programmer at Phoenix Arts until 1998. She has run major research projects looking at the transition between silent and sound cinema in Britain and the British Silent Film Festival between 1998 and 2019.