Vintage Viewing Salon
The festival also included our bespoke Vintage Viewing Salon, set within in the huge Fashion & Craft tent, where styles, skills, and culture from the last eight decades were on the big screen all day. Manchester’s Kinofilm provided three spectacular programmes of vintage film & TV treats, on the themes of ‘Kids’, ‘Sports’ and ‘Entertainment’, while the North West Film Archive (NWFA) guest-presented a Preston Guild Film and archive clips from BBC Northwest, showing culture, fashions and fads from around the region in years gone by.
Our own ‘Made in Lancashire’ programme showcased the incredible array of budding filmmaking talent at work today in Lancashire, with a host of short films made in, or by people living in, the region. There was also a fashion show featuring award-winning local talent and design classics like Horrockses’ off-the-peg delights, footage from around the site, photos taken in a Vintage PhotoBooth and ‘Best in Show’ featured the best-dressed folks from round the Vintage Weekend site, where festival-goers could also find themselves stars of the silver screen.
Outdoor Screenings on the Steps
Adventurous revellers were encouraged to dress up in their finest vintage gear to take part in our outdoor night pop-up cinema screenings on the steps, happening over both nights of the weekend. Friday night saw a screening much-loved child cast gangster musical Bugsy Malone, with a few thirties gangsters and their molls in attendance, followed by showreel of short films made by Lancastrians or in Lancashire.
Sunday brought ‘Lancashire’s Finest – the People’s Choice’, where members of the public were invited to vote via Facebook, Twitter and email to decide on the film shown. The eventual winner was classic textile-themed Ealing comedy The Man in the White Suit. Later that night, Guild revellers were treated to a ‘Midnight Screaming’of The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue, a seventies cult classic with an opening sequence shot on Deansgate and hospital exteriors filmed in Cheadle. An eager crowd dressed up in their zombie best, and had to dodge of stray hungry flesh-eaters on the way in…
A Brief Encounter at Preston Train Station
Meanwhile, in Preston Train Station’s waiting room, David Lean’s romantic 1945 classic Brief Encounter was screened as a unique, and free to enjoy, installation. All day travellers put on headphones as that iconic final farewell as it was projected onto a wall, and ‘encountered’ a few characters from the film wandering around the station. The screenings also included a selection of short films made in Lancashire or by Lancastrians.
Vintage Guild took place in Sept 2012.
Read about TEC’s Film Club of fortnightly screenings and the Cinema Around the Corner project