At Auteur House, Swainson organises the collection with a simple, obsessive principle: follow the filmmaker to the edges of their career, into the obscure, the flawed and the nearly forgotten.
That leads him to track down films like Mary, Hitchcock’s German-language version of Murder!, often left out of official filmographies.
“Frankly, they aren’t very good … but still matter,” he said.
“Historically, they’re important.”
Director Ernst Ingmar Bergman’s full film collection. Photo / Tom Eley
More than a store
Swainson sees Auteur House as something bigger than a shop.
“We’re the last DVD rental store in Hamilton,” he said.
“I consider it a bit of a cultural repository.”
He is blunt about what is at stake: “It would be a crying shame for Hamilton if we were to lose it.”
Cities like Auckland, Tauranga and Dunedin no longer have anything comparable, he said, and nationally, only a couple of similar stores remain.
One visitor once told him the Blu-ray collection might be the best in the country.
“It might be,” he said. “I haven’t got the perspective to know how accurate that is.”
What he does know is the economics – the pricing structure is unchanged since 2007.
“Our prices haven’t gone up in 20 years,” he said. “What business can say that?”
He said the shop has never turned a profit, but has managed to stay afloat.
“We’ve never made any money,” he said. “But we don’t owe any money either, so we walk that fine line.”
There are challenges that come with that model. Swainson said there had been a single incident involving a knife, which a volunteer helped defuse.
“I’m always a bit mindful of safety,” he said, particularly for volunteers working shifts.
Still, he believes the community support around the store is what has kept it going.
“It’s a bit of an indulgent lifestyle,” he said. “Also a bit of a prison.”
Auteur House, Victoria Street, Hamilton. Photo / Tom Eley
A childhood built on black-and-white worlds
Swainson did not grow up on streaming algorithms or multiplex blockbusters.
He grew up on family television, guided by his English-born mother, who had easy access to cinemas through relatives who owned theatres.
“She loved Errol Flynn,” he said. “So I loved Errol Flynn.”
By the time Star Wars arrived, Swainson was already connecting the dots.
“Even as an 11-year-old, you could tell George Lucas was mashing up genres,” he said.
“I’m pretty sure he had seen The Dam Busters.”
That instinct still shapes how he watches and curates.
A place for the curious
Despite its analogue nature, Auteur House is drawing younger film fans.
“There’s a certain personality type,” Swainson said.
“People whose imagination is engaged by cinema beyond the blockbuster of the moment.”
Some are aspiring creatives in their 20s. Others are teenagers drawn to the full sweep of film history.
“They’re living in a happy time,” he said.
“They can watch the earliest surviving films from the 1880s instantly online. They can upskill very quickly.”
Auteur House offers something different: curation, conversation and continuity.
“We can trace cinema right back to its origins,” he said. “And we’ve got it all in one place.”
A collector’s treasure and a historian’s find
Swainson’s world is not just about watching films. It is about the artefacts and stories that come with them. A recent moment still stands out.
A friend handed him a book, an old first edition by Jean Cocteau, written during the making of Beauty and the Beast.
Inside was an inscription.
“And we realised it was a Christmas gift from Ramai Hayward to Rudall Hayward in 1950.”
For Swainson, it was more than a collector’s item. It connected directly to a figure he had already been researching and writing about, one of New Zealand’s pioneering filmmakers.
“That’s an astonishing artefact,” he said.
A slightly chaotic museum
The space reflects that philosophy. It is part library, part archive, part accidental gallery.
“It’s purposely a bit higgledy-piggledy,” Swainson said.
Among the items is an autographed print from silent-era superstar Mary Pickford, picked up for $40.
“Possibly the most famous woman in the world at one point,” he said.
“Now mostly forgotten.”
Tom Eley is a multimedia journalist at the Waikato Herald. Before he joined the Hamilton-based team, he worked for the Weekend Sun and Sunlive. He previously worked as a journalist at Black Press Media in Canada and won a fellowship with the Vancouver Sun.