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' Cin matographe, 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.