The Bill Douglas Centre for the History of Cinema and Popular Culture was designed by Michael J Davies & Associates as both a public museum and an academic research centre  at the University of Exeter. It houses one of Britian’s largest public collections of books, prints, artefacts and ephemera relating to the history and prehistory of cinema.

The museum is located on two floors of the University Library and is grouped under three subject headings: Pre-cinema, Early cinema and Hollywood. Hollywood, however, was presented first to prompt students and visitors to consider critically whether the development of the cinema was, in fact, an inevitable, logical and chronological progression, and to reassess how much our interpretation of the earlier material is coloured by our own experience of Hollywood.


Images of exhibits courtesy of The Bill Douglas Centre