Welcome to the smallest show in town

It’s the tiniest cinema in Bristol. Conveniently located in the centre of town, the cosy Flicks Kino seats just eleven. It can be yours to watch a movie of your choice with your pals for just £50 per two-hour slot. There’s popcorn and chocolate on sale, and you can even send out for pizza if you like. The splendid Bristol Cider Shop is just a stone’s throw away too.

Where is it? In the back of a DVD rental store, that’s where. A brief note for younger readers: if you wanted to watch a film at home in the olden days before people never left the sofa, getting fat, streaming movies and continually updating their Facebook status, it was actually necessary to schlep all the way to a local emporium and rent it on a shiny disc. If you go back even further than that, films came on big, clunky black boxes called videocassettes.

Not so long ago, there were rental stores all over Bristol. Today, there’s just one left and it’s deploying increasingly imaginative strategies to stay in business, sustained by a loyal customer base. The bijou screening palace is its most successful recent innovation.

For generations of Bristol students, Twentieth Century Flicks on Richmond Terrace in Clifton, was a regular place of pilgrimage. It’s also had its fair share of celebrity punters, including Simon Pegg, Ken Russell and Withnail and I star Paul McGann. The store opened in 1983, just in time to take advantage of the video boom. (Further note for younger readers: if you wanted to watch a film at home prior to the early 1980s, you had to wait for it to turn up on one of the three national TV networks.) Over the ensuing three-and-a-bit decades, it amassed more than 93,000 members.

Rather like joining the Mafia or the Hell’s Angels, you’re in it for life once you sign up. The current one-off fee is just £3. But the advent of LoveFilm (now Amazon Prime) and Netflix ate away at the high street rental trade. Even giant chains like Blockbuster eventually went to the wall. Twentieth Century Flicks survived through a combination of cost-cutting and radical reinvention. Its recent move to a new home on Christmas Steps has saved a handy £10,000 a year in rent.

There are other advantages to the cosy new premises, whose refit was partially financed by a successful crowd-funding venture that raised nearly £12,000 from 416 supporters. “The shop itself is really lovely,” explains Tara Judah, one of the business’s four co-directors, from the comfort of a chaise longue in front of a newly installed woodburner. “It gave us the opportunity to create a little cinema space and better display much of our collection.”

Quite a collection it is too, running to 18,000 titles – the biggest of its kind in the UK, apparently. Shelves cover each wall and occupy much of the floor space. Even so, there’s still plenty of overflow. Rental patterns are shifting. In the boom years, new releases dominated the Twentieth Century Flicks chart. Nowadays, it’s the depth of the catalogue that proves most attractive to customers, who are more likely to use the place as library. Academics and BBC researchers regularly browse the shelves. Suddenly that long-established policy of never chucking anything out once the rentals tail off seems less anally retentive and more like a prescient business plan.

There’s more variety here than any streaming service can offer. Rummage around and you’ll find everything from (legal) softcore porn to the most obscure arthouse titles. Any collection that brings together under one roof the diverse oeuvres of Ben Dover and Bela Tarr and their niche enthusiasts is surely something to cherish. “Fellini’s 8½ was in the top ten recently,” says Tara. “[Polish war drama] Ashes and Diamonds is popular at the moment. It’s often to do with things that are on elsewhere. People see a film they like and want to explore the director’s other work. There’s still a demand for new titles, just not as much as there used to be.”

For those with even more obscure tastes, 20th Century Flicks still keeps a large collection of films on VHS that were never released on DVD. No longer own a VCR? They’ll loan you one of those too. And there are plans to digitise and stream the VHS library once the rights issue minefield has been negotiated. Other initiatives include regular monthly film screenings at the Cube, a pub film quiz night, the introduction of a loyalty scheme, and an overhaul of the rental structure so that people who take out back catalogue titles can keep them for longer.

But Tara is in no doubt as to the real reason why 20th Century Flicks is the last video rental store standing. “I think there’s a great deal of trust between the customers and ourselves. They like to come in and have things recommended to them. They also like to pick the brains of the staff here, who all have very expensive film knowledge. There’s a sense of belonging. I think people search more and more for that today, particularly the more estranged we get with things like social media – as much as it is incredibly useful, it’s also an alienating tool in some ways.

“People want authentic experiences and human interaction. Our survival is also partially because of Bristol.  There’s a large sense of community in this city – one that I certainly haven’t experienced in the same way in other places.”

The Twentieth Century Flicks Top Ten

1. Casablanca
2. Sunset Blvd.
3. Blue Velvet
4. Don’t Look Now
5. Do The Right Thing
6. They Live
7. Shortbus
8. The Beaches of Agnes
9. Far From Heaven
10. Twelve Angry Men

Romance (Casablanca), classic horror (They Live, Don’t Look Now), art-porn (Shortbus), retro-camp (Far From Heaven), tough urban drama (Do the Right Thing)… Such an eclectic list could only be a Twentieth Century Flicks top ten, compiled from the diverse tastes of its staff.

Photos by Doug Jewell