The Bill Douglas Cinema Museum and its Collections

Introduction

The Bill Douglas Cinema Museum is both a public museum and a research resource on the history of the moving image. It contains around 75,000 artefacts related to this history and has two galleries of displays from the collection, which are accessible to the public.

The Bill Douglas Cinema Museum is based around a unique collection – there is nothing else quite like it in the UK. We hold every kind of artefact you can imagine related to cinema and the moving image, except for the film itself (for sources on archive film material in the UK consult the BFI). This includes publicity information such as programmes and press books, merchandise, fan magazines, postcards, and posters; all of which are heavily represented in our holdings. However, moving image culture long predates cinema, which was a culmination of at least two centuries of experiment, innovation and entertainment. These optical entertainments are sometimes known as pre-cinema or alternatively proto-cinema, as many argue that they have value as spectacle in themselves and not just for their contribution to cinema’s story. Our museum has one of the biggest and wide ranging publicly accessible collections in the UK on these forerunners of film. We also have very significant holdings on early film and the pioneers that established the technologies and the possibilities of the medium, including some of the key objects from the birth of cinema. This essay outlines the background to the collection and some of the most important objects within this pre and early cinema story, dating up to the mid-1920s, when cinema became established as the pre-eminent mass medium and entertainment across the world.