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Silver Screen 03/02/2010
 
Always, always I have loved film, but I may have under-contemplated the singularly nurturing environment St Andrews affords this infatuation. Film has continually been a benevolent and dependable (re)treat throughout my life: and never more so than here – where it can temporarily mute the ancient, formidable roar sounded by ever-surging waves of papery academia, and claim some small freedom from an interminable succession of lectures, deadlines and socialising. This sentiment resonates throughout our peculiar sometime-town, and is thankfully well-accommodated. We have a charming cinema, sufficiently quaint to flawlessly qualify the phrase ‘picture house’, with its late night Wednesday screenings, so immaculately geared towards student tastes (and thankfully without the standard array of ASBOs and odd aromas symptomatic of the more unreserved multiplex). We have the tiny pillar box red (and geek-friendly) Alphabet video store, with its auteur-arranged classification, amusing themed recommendations at the pay desk and hit-or-miss window displays. We even have coffee shops open late enough for post movie debates over an espresso. We have the beach from Chariots of Fire. Furthermore, the university’s Department for the Study of film, though a relatively recent addition, develops with formidable momentum, attaining such high accolade for its research it’s now third in the UK.

If possible, more persuasive still is the enthusiasm for the process of film here, and an eagerness on the part of the students of St Andrews to output their own creations - we have our own production group, Rogue, Pixar came to visit, and last-year’s Half-cut film festival could only hint at greater things to come.

The Tribe film section hopes to collaborate with this passion for the silver screen, bring bang up to date reviews, recommend more obscure gems, draw attention to world cinema and classics, and detach our perspective from the here and now, to seek out that dusky asylum that is cinema, a most necessary window out of our insular bubble of student life