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.<\/p>\n
That leads him to track down films like Mary, Hitchcock\u2019s German-language version of Murder!, often left out of official filmographies.<\/p>\n
\u201cFrankly, they aren\u2019t very good … but still matter,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cHistorically, they\u2019re important.\u201d<\/p>\n
Director Ernst Ingmar Bergman’s full film collection. Photo \/ Tom Eley<\/p>\n
More than a store<\/p>\n
Swainson sees Auteur House as something bigger than a shop.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re the last DVD rental store in Hamilton,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI consider it a bit of a cultural repository.\u201d<\/p>\n
He is blunt about what is at stake: \u201cIt would be a crying shame for Hamilton if we were to lose it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Cities like Auckland, Tauranga and Dunedin no longer have anything comparable, he said, and nationally, only a couple of similar stores remain.<\/p>\n
One visitor once told him the Blu-ray collection might be the best in the country.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt might be,\u201d he said. \u201cI haven\u2019t got the perspective to know how accurate that is.\u201d<\/p>\n
What he does know is the economics \u2013 the pricing structure is unchanged since 2007.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur prices haven\u2019t gone up in 20 years,\u201d he said. \u201cWhat business can say that?\u201d<\/p>\n
He said the shop has never turned a profit, but has managed to stay afloat.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve never made any money,\u201d he said. \u201cBut we don\u2019t owe any money either, so we walk that fine line.\u201d<\/p>\n
There are challenges that come with that model. Swainson said there had been a single incident involving a knife, which a volunteer helped defuse.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m always a bit mindful of safety,\u201d he said, particularly for volunteers working shifts.<\/p>\n
Still, he believes the community support around the store is what has kept it going.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a bit of an indulgent lifestyle,\u201d he said. \u201cAlso a bit of a prison.\u201d<\/p>\n
Auteur House, Victoria Street, Hamilton. Photo \/ Tom Eley<\/p>\n
A childhood built on black-and-white worlds<\/p>\n
Swainson did not grow up on streaming algorithms or multiplex blockbusters.<\/p>\n
He grew up on family television, guided by his English-born mother, who had easy access to cinemas through relatives who owned theatres.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe loved Errol Flynn,\u201d he said. \u201cSo I loved Errol Flynn.\u201d<\/p>\n
By the time Star Wars arrived, Swainson was already connecting the dots.<\/p>\n
\u201cEven as an 11-year-old, you could tell George Lucas was mashing up genres,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m pretty sure he had seen The Dam Busters.\u201d<\/p>\n
That instinct still shapes how he watches and curates.<\/p>\n
A place for the curious<\/p>\n
Despite its analogue nature, Auteur House is drawing younger film fans.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s a certain personality type,\u201d Swainson said. <\/p>\n
\u201cPeople whose imagination is engaged by cinema beyond the blockbuster of the moment.\u201d<\/p>\n
Some are aspiring creatives in their 20s. Others are teenagers drawn to the full sweep of film history.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey\u2019re living in a happy time,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey can watch the earliest surviving films from the 1880s instantly online. They can upskill very quickly.\u201d<\/p>\n
Auteur House offers something different: curation, conversation and continuity.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe can trace cinema right back to its origins,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd we\u2019ve got it all in one place.\u201d<\/p>\n
A collector\u2019s treasure and a historian\u2019s find<\/p>\n
Swainson\u2019s world is not just about watching films. It is about the artefacts and stories that come with them. A recent moment still stands out.<\/p>\n
A friend handed him a book, an old first edition by Jean Cocteau, written during the making of Beauty and the Beast.<\/p>\n
Inside was an inscription.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd we realised it was a Christmas gift from Ramai Hayward to Rudall Hayward in 1950.\u201d<\/p>\n
For Swainson, it was more than a collector\u2019s item. It connected directly to a figure he had already been researching and writing about, one of New Zealand\u2019s pioneering filmmakers.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s an astonishing artefact,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
A slightly chaotic museum<\/p>\n
The space reflects that philosophy. It is part library, part archive, part accidental gallery.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s purposely a bit higgledy-piggledy,\u201d Swainson said.<\/p>\n
Among the items is an autographed print from silent-era superstar Mary Pickford, picked up for $40.<\/p>\n
\u201cPossibly the most famous woman in the world at one point,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n
\u201cNow mostly forgotten.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"At Auteur House, Swainson organises the collection with a simple, obsessive principle: follow the filmmaker to the edges…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":401442,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[50327,207101,6144,131198,95544,593,6288,1861,10053,68636,2944,685,117,111,43,139,69,1118,5270,22429,66146,653,8238,2821,2963],"class_list":{"0":"post-401441","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-zealand","8":"tag-attempting","9":"tag-auteur","10":"tag-collecting","11":"tag-dvd","12":"tag-entirety","13":"tag-film","14":"tag-hamilton","15":"tag-history","16":"tag-house","17":"tag-impossible","18":"tag-inside","19":"tag-last","20":"tag-new","21":"tag-new-zealand","22":"tag-news","23":"tag-newzealand","24":"tag-nz","25":"tag-of","26":"tag-one","27":"tag-rental","28":"tag-roof","29":"tag-stores","30":"tag-under","31":"tag-victoria","32":"tag-zealands"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/401441","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=401441"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/401441\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/401442"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=401441"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=401441"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=401441"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}