BU Research Blog

CEMP’s Professor Julian McDougall has been awarded the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum Research Stipend.

The Bill Douglas Cinema Museum at the University Exeter, UK is both a public museum and a rich research resource for scholars of moving image history. The museum is named after the renowned filmmaker Bill Douglas and was founded on the extraordinary collection of material he put together with his friend Peter Jewell. In the twenty years since its opening, the museum has received donations from many sources and now has over 75,000 artefacts on the long history of the moving image from the seventeenth century to the present day.

The stipend enables the recipient to access collections at the museum to undertake significant research that will generate publication or other demonstrable outcomes and a blog post for the museum¹s website about the research.

Julian’s project is ‘Comrades and Curators’: this research seeks to trace the importance of multiple third spaces constructed in and around Comrades, hitherto not conceptualized as such by either Douglas, film commentators or academics. Related directly to the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum’s stated areas of significance, the research will explore the relationship between Comrades as a film text, the curation of the director’s collection of magic lanterns and other optical artifacts, the situating of lanternist as pivotal to the representation of social history in the film and the curation of this social history in museums in Tolpuddle and Dorchester.

The research will be conducted between March and December 2017.