Living Film Histories: Researching at the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum

The Bill Douglas Cinema Museum at the University of Exeter is both a public museum and a research and teaching resource originally based on the collection put together by film-maker Bill Douglas and his friend Peter Jewell. Augmented constantly with new donations, it now holds over 85,000 items. In this article we will demonstrate how the range and depth of the museum’s collections on moving image history create a ‘people’s history’ of the medium. Despite the variety of the holdings, the museum has a coherence for researchers, allowing scholars to evidence continuities as well as changes across the history which it charts. We will show how this works in three distinct ways. Firstly we will consider how research on the everyday ephemera of cinema, and the optical media that preceded it, which forms much of the collection, such as programmes, publicity material or merchandise, can illuminate our understanding of film history as it is lived: what Raymond Williams saw as ‘the structures of feeling’ underpinning popular culture. Second, we will draw on examples from the stipend scheme that we operate, whereby awards enable researchers from around the world to explore our holdings in order to discover new paths through this history. How has material found within collections complicated research questions or allowed scholars to make connections between the past and the present? Lastly, we will explore how artefacts gain meanings from the processes of their curation. Here we will analyse the curatorial practices of students at the University of Exeter.