The Bill Douglas Cinema Museum supports teaching and research in a number of courses across the University of Exeter, in particular courses run by the College of Humanities.
Disciplines which use the collections held by The Bill Douglas Cinema Museum in their teaching include:
- English
- Film Studies
- Drama
- Theology
- History
- Art History and Visual Culture
- Sociology
- We have also worked in the past with a number of science disciplines including physics.
These films, which we have called Object Stories were filmed by student Mini Warren to showcase the research based in the museum by three members of film studies staff: Helen Hanson, Joe Kember and Lisa Stead.
A number of English undergraduate and postgraduate courses have traditionally used the collections to enhance the teaching and learning in courses such as Adaptation: Text, Image, Culture run by Dr Helen Hanson, Senior Lecturer in Film, which directly focuses on the adaptation of texts into film and media. The museum is used in this module to compliment and facilitate learning about a text’s transformation to the screen, shedding light on the social, historical and economic influences involved in the adaptation process.
Dr James Lyons, Senior Lecturer in Film, runs the module Shots in the Dark which explores the development of Hollywood cinema from the late 19th to the 21st century. The module focuses on the economic, social and technological changes that have affected Hollywood cinema and how we respond to it. The museum’s collections are used to compliment the study of themes such as the rise of the Hollywood star and fandom, the development of wide-screen cinema and the impact of film merchandise.
The museum has also developed links with the History, Drama and Classics departments, with students from these subjects using resources from the collections within seminar work and also curating exhibitions at the museum.
Further information on these and other modules within the Humanities department, is available here.
Exeter University's thriving film department is also home to The Centre for Interdisciplinary Film Research (CIFR) which encompasses Film Studies research, teaching and activities across the University. This interdisciplinary research environment has proven remarkably productive, with many successful MA and PhD candidates now working full time in academic and research posts.
For many of the academic courses at the University of Exeter, the museum has become an invaluable resource for analysing the relationship between the moving image and academic disciplines.
