Scala!!! (or, to give it its full title: Scala!!! Or, the Incredibly Strange Rise and Fall of the World’s Wildest Cinema and How It Influenced a Mixed-up Generation of Weirdos and Misfits) presents itself as a new, joyous kind of heritage documentary. After premiering at Bologna’s Il Cinema Ritrovato earlier this year, the British film fitted in well in the BFI London Film Festival’s Cult strand. In a collage of archival footage and talking-head interviews, Scala!!! attempts to enliven a past that is already very much alive thanks to generations of cinephiles and cineastes educated in the dim auditoria of the London repertory cinema.

Directors Ali Catterall and Jane Giles are both multi-hyphenate film people: they are critics, writers and filmmakers, with Giles being an ex-Scala programmer on top of that. A genuine passion for re-animating the past shines through their combined effort in bringing this project to fruition. As a testament to London film history, this film takes its rightful place in an imagined movie archive representing the spirit conjured by the legendary Scala cinema from 1978-1993. But neither Catterall nor Giles appear in front of the camera, and nor are they decisively present behind it. Their quest for objectivity is evident in the use of subtitles and interview voiceover instead of an omniscient narrator. Even more than this, they know how to pick their guests: musicians, programmers and filmmakers take the mic to share their own reminiscence of a time past. Here’s your chance to hear John Waters recounting how he took Divine to see a Bergman film there one time, on acid; in his typically jocular fashion, he describes the Scala as a “country club for criminals and lunatics and people that were high”.

Split between interviews, archive footage and film clips, the visuals highlight the lack of material representation of the place itself. Today, the Scala is a music venue, and perhaps this is the reason why the documentary shows only walls, corridors, stairs and the occasional neon bar sign: all liminal spaces, but not actual interiors that one can imagine as a cinema today. There’s a certain sadness that creeps in when watching this: if the viewer wasn’t lucky enough to see the cinema at first hand or in its heyday, they won’t have this opportunity on screen. However, this potential for second-hand mourning is not addressed at all, while the focus remains on the hype.

Amongst the in-depth recollections of the Scala’s all-nighters and gigs, there are the facts of a lawsuit for showing a banned film you probably know all too well, and even the tragic story of a suicide, and the feeling of a close-knit community where outsiders came together in the post-punk and Thatcher years is palpable. Scala!!!’s most prominent feature is its attempt to reconstruct the value of its subject matter; to uncover why the picture palace was so inspiring to generations of artists. The most exciting part, though, has to do with materiality and memorabilia: in the hands of the interviewees, membership cards and fold-out posters are not museum artefacts; they are pieces of personal history. In recontextualising these objects, Scala!!! succeeds in making the past and present come into contact. But ultimately, the film’s premise is too bound up in people’s own memories. The way it celebrates the history of the Scala cinema is so heavily steeped in nostalgia that, at times, it becomes completely inaccessible to people who were not a part of it. The sense of removal is often too great, and a new viewer would, for most of the film, be a witness to people waxing lyrical about their own youth by way of remembering a place they shared with many others.

Scala!!! is a UK production by Channel X and Anti Worlds.