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| Thursday February 09, 2012 | Bill Douglas Centre > Teaching and Learning |
Teaching and Learning - Online ArticlesA REPORT FOR SCREENDuncan PetrieReproduced by kind permission of Screen and Oxford University PressThe turn towards historical research in the field of cinema and television studies is now well established, generating a wealth of new scholarship which has revised and considerably broadened our understandings of the complex and multi-stranded histories of film and television. Such work has in turn placed a new emphasis on the importance of data sources from the holdings of archives, libraries and public record offices to personal and company papers, oral history recordings and transcripts. These sources provide a richness of material necessary for the construction and analysis of new histories of the industrial and technological development of cinema, television and related media; of the contexts and experience of production and reception; of the role of criticism in the construction and reconstruction of canons; of the impact of archiving and preservation on the constitution of a filmic or televisual past. The most important single source of such primary material in Britain is, of course, the British Film Institute. But since October 1997 an important new resource has become available for historical research on the moving image. The Bill Douglas Centre for the History of Cinema and Popular Culture at the University of Exeter houses a unique and extensive collection of more than 50,000 books and artefacts relating to the history and prehistory of the cinema. The Centre, which was established with the help of a grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund, houses a public museum and a research and study centre which is open to professional researchers and the general public alike. The extensiveness of its holdings means that the Bill Douglas Centre constitutes the second largest subject library in Britain after the BFI, and one of the largest accessible collections of cinema artefacts and ephemera after the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television in Bradford. In the case of the Bill Douglas Centre, the museum and study facilities are inter-linked, giving researchers access to the entire collection including display items. The collection was amassed over a thirty-year period by the late Bill Douglas and Peter Jewell. Douglas was one of the most original and gifted film-makers in British cinema history - his autobiographical trilogy:My Childhood (1972), My Ain Folk (1973) and My Way Home (1978) remains a testimony to the poetic and revelatory power of the cinematic image - and the Centre was founded by Peter Jewell as a memorial to Bill Douglas's life and his passion for cinema, and as a means of using that passion to inspire and educate others. Bill Douglas and Peter Jewell adopted a broad conceptual view of the cinema and its antecedents and this is reflected in the scope of the collection which encompasses the development of popular entertainment and industrialised forms of visual reproduction from the Georgian and Victorian eras to classical Hollywood, European national cinemas and beyond. The collection of artefacts includes several rare and valuable items relating to the 'birth' and early development of the medium including an original Cinématographe Lumière (one of around 40 still in existence), a silk programme of a private display of the cinématographe to Queen Victoria at Windsor Castle in 1897, a unique menu card from the first London trade show of the Edison Kinetoscope in 1894, and a copy of W.K.L. Dickson's 1895 book, A History of the Kinetoscope, Kinetograph and Kinetophonograph (1), which contains his own annotations. The pre- or proto-cinema materials include numerous moving image devices such as thaumatropes, praxinoscopes, phenakistiscopes, zoetropes and kinoras; original artefacts, souvenirs and programmes relating to popular public forms of image-based media such as the magic lantern, panorama, the diorama, the peep show and the shadow show; and examples of early photographic processes and an extensive collection of stereocards and viewers. The cinema proper is represented by literally thousands of film posters, programmes, postcards, cigarette cards, prints, sheet music, gramophone records, toys, games and jigsaw puzzles. The book collection is similarly impressive, numbering almost 18,000 volumes. The major areas covered include history, theory and criticism - combining a good cover of major works in the field with a particular strength in early works and first editions including Cecil Hepworth's 1897 volume Animated Photography: The ABC of the Cinematograph (2), and Henry Hopwood's Living Pictures: Their History, Photo-Production and Practical Working (3), published in 1899. Biography and autobiography are particularly well represented with almost 4,000 volumes. There are novelisations of original screenplays and special editions of adapted works, novels written by film personalities and several roman a clefs, fictionalised accounts based closely on real people and events and often dealing with some of the more lurid aspects of the film world. There are also substantial collections of reference works, screenplays, children's books, picture books and works relating to proto cinema, including a 1658 English translation of Natural Magic (4) written a century previously by the Neopolitan scholar Giovanni Battista della Porta which includes one of the first descriptions of the camera obscura; and a 1671 edition of Anthanasius Kircher's Ars Magna Lucis et Ombrae (5), the first book illustrating the magic lantern. In addition to the book collection the Centre houses some 4,000 periodicals covering a wide range of publications and special editions, but with few complete runs. The constitution and size of the collection suggests an immense research potential, contributing enormously to the study and understanding of the historical development of the cinema and of the inter-relation of social, technological, economic and aesthetic factors which have contributed to that process. But the collection also necessarily poses questions beyond the boundaries of the cinema as a specific medium to embrace the inter-related histories of visual representation, image-based technologies, formations of popular culture and entertainment, and the industrial and economic exploitation of moving images. These are all central to the intellectual project suggested by the Bill Douglas Centre. But it is worth taking a moment to define one or two areas of potential research in more detail, one relating broadly to the history of the cinema, the other extending to focus beyond that history to embrace earlier developments in the field of visual media and popular entertainment. The Centre's collection of materials which relate specifically to the cinema suggest the possibility of a major examination of the broad economic and social impact of the medium over the last 100 years via a concentration on the production of related commodities which have specifically enhanced the cinema's popular appeal. This includes a wide range of items including souvenir programmes, posters, cigarette cards, postcards, toys, games, soundtrack albums and various ephemeral forms of merchandising. In intellectual terms this poses a whole series of questions relating to the emergence and development of forms of cinema marketing: from the initial concentration on the novelty value of the technology, to the emergence of the feature film as a particular entity, to the branding of particular studios in relation to their product. It also embraces the cultivation and refinement of the star system via the construction and subsequent exploitation of star image and iconography (the Centre has over 500 items relating to Chaplin for example) and the more diffuse development of movie merchandising as a means of reinforcing the commercial exploitation of what is an essentially ephemeral experience. Seen from one perspective these elements constitute an analysis of the ways in which cinema has been embedded in the development of an increasingly consumption-oriented process of global capitalism. But at the same time this process of commodification has meant that the cinema has infiltrated and permeated almost every aspect of modern life far beyond the actual experience of going to the cinema. The social significance of this aspect of the commercial exploitation and consumption of cinema images is only beginning to be recognised. The second major area of research potential suggested by the collection is clearly in the field of proto-cinema and its relationship to the emergence of the cinematic medium in the 1890s - posing the question of whether or not the cinema represents a break or a continuity in the history of image-based media. While early cinema has become an increasingly popular area of study in recent years, very little academic research has been conducted into the realm of proto-cinema. There are signs however that this may be changing. A more concerted commitment to scholarship has emerged within the Magic Lantern Society, and the recent publication of Herman Hecht's invaluable reference work Pre-Cinema History: An Encyclopaedia and Annotated Bibliography of the Moving Image Before 1896 (6) and the French scholar Laurent Mannoni's Le grand art de la lumière et de l'ombre (7) (currently being translated for publication by Exeter University Press) have been invaluable contributions to the serious study of pre-cinematic optical media. The existence of the Bill Douglas Centre can provide further impetus for the development of this kind of scholarly inquiry. The relationship between the various antecedent forms of visual media and the cinema is complex and multi-faceted but collectively they introduce or develop principles which are subsequently central to the cinematic apparatus: the relationship of the image to the real, depth, movement, narrative, spectacle and the organisation of production and consumption - the later posing questions concerning both the public and domestic spheres. The collection also suggests certain other ways of examining the relationship via a shared concern with the construction of British national identity. If we take the myth and iconography of the Western as occupying a central position in the American popular imagination, then the equivalent in Britain is that of the Empire. The imperial theme - reflected via a plethora of images of royal pageantry, overseas exploration and military conquest - is common subject matter for all the proto-cinema media and is particularly prevalent in forms of public spectacle during the 19th century such as the panorama and the diorama. The Empire also has a significant place in the history of British cinema - from early actualities and travelogues via imperial epics from The Four Feathers (1939) to Lawrence of Arabia (1962) to the postcolonial legacy of black British cinema addressing questions of cultural difference and hybridity in contemporary Britain. The examination of this history of imperial representation and ways in which imperialist discourses were propagated is a major area of potential research which necessarily goes beyond the usual boundaries of cinema studies. The Bill Douglas Centre is still very much in its infancy. Firm foundations have been laid for this exciting new resource for film scholarship, including the setting up of a graduate programme with doctoral and masters students beginning to work with the Centre's resources. However for the kind of potential described above to be realised it is important that the Centre be accessible to as broad a group of researchers as possible. The Centre is a national and an international resource and it is important to stress this, particularly at a time when the BFI is yet again undergoing major reorganisation (which may very well lead to its eventual disappearance as an independent organisation if the plans recently circulated by the Department of Media, Culture and Sport to create a single integrated 'film council' bringing together functions currently performed by the BFI, British Screen, the British Film Commission and the Arts Council of England are carried out). Central to the current rethink is the stated desire by John Woodward, the new director, to 'open up our collections and provide access to the public of our film heritage in all its forms.' (8) While this will be welcome news to film and television historians, the overall thrust of the BFI reforms is informed by populism rather than the pursuit of knowledge. Indeed the increase in access relates to what is termed 'the wider world and not just the buffs and experts.' (9) Scholarship, it would seem, is not a top priority. Such a scenario makes the existence of alternative resources such as the Bill Douglas Centre all the more important.
[View The History of Cinema Exhibition in Exeter 1895 - 1918 by Alex Rankin]
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