Bill Douglas Cinema Museum

Bill Douglas Cinema Museum

The museum entrance in 2023
Former name	The Bill Douglas Centre for the History of Cinema and Popular Culture
Established	1994
Location	The Old Library, University of Exeter, Prince of Wales Road, Exeter
Type	Public museum, Research centre
Accreditation	Arts Council England accredited museum
Key holdings	Bill Douglas and Peter Jewell‘s collection
Collection size	Over 93,000 items
Visitors	~8000 (2022/23)
Academic Director	Professor Helen M Hanson
Chairperson	Patrick Swaffer
Owner	The Exeter University Foundation
Public transit access	Exeter St David’s, Exeter Central
Website	www.bdcmuseum.org.uk

The Bill Douglas Cinema Museum (formerly the Bill Douglas Centre for the History of Cinema and Popular Culture) is a public museum and an academic research facility on the Streatham Campus of the University of Exeter in England.^[1] Founded in 1994 and opened to the public in 1997, the museum houses one of Britain's largest public collections of books, prints, artefacts and ephemera relating to the history and prehistory of cinema.

The museum has two galleries of exhibits which are open to the public. There is a reading room for researchers to access and consult materials from the collection by appointment.

The museum is named after the filmmaker Bill Douglas. The collection that Douglas put together with his friend Peter Jewell founded the museum; many other donors have added to the holdings since. The museum now holds over 80,000 artefacts from the seventeenth century to the present day. There is a large collection of material on optical media prior to the invention of cinema including holdings on magic lanterns, shadow puppets, panoramas and dioramas, optical illusions and peep shows. There are also significant holdings on cinema pioneers, early and silent cinema, film stars, such as Charlie Chaplin and Marilyn Monroe, and film publicity material and merchandising up to the present day.^[2]

There are also a number of filmmakers' production archives, including Bill Douglas's working papers, the Townley Cooke collection,^[3] and the archives of producer/director Don Boyd, and producers Gavrik Losey and James Mackay.

• Bill Douglas Cinema Museum - official site

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