Film, In Theory

The BFI Education Department and Film Culture

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by Colm McAuliffe

Type

Didactic

Subject

General

Keywords

Great Britain, theory, interviews, aesthetics

Publishing date

2026 (February 19, 2026)

Publisher

Bloomsbury Academic

Language

English

Relative size

Physical desc.

Paperback • 176 pages
6 x 9 ¼ inches (15.5 x 23.5 cm)

ISBN

978-1-83902-637-9

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Book Presentation:
Film, In Theory offers the first sustained history of the formation of modern film studies in Britain. It balances unpublished archival materials from the BFI archive and interviews with key figures from the era, including Laura Mulvey, Colin MacArthur, Jacqueline Rose, Judith Williamson, and many more, with an approach rooted in cultural and intellectual history to tell the story of the BFI's fresh and invigorating approach to film studies.

The book tells the story of the institute's pioneering education programme, spearheaded by Paddy Whannel. It also details the remarkable work undertaken by Screen journal, including first-hand accounts of the writing and editing of Laura Mulvey's hugely influential essay on visual pleasure and narrative cinema. During this period of cultural and intellectual experimentation, the theoretical borders were open and key figures at the BFI borrowed from a remarkably wide range of sources spanning aesthetics, Marxism, French theory, and the Frankfurt School. Film Studies emerged amidst an artistic and intellectual tide where the films of Jean-Luc Godard, the re-discovery of Hollywood, the structuralism of Claude Lévi-Strauss, the semiology of Roland Barthes, and the politics of the 'New Left' combined and collided to intoxicating effect.

About the Author:
Colm McAuliffe is a writer and curator from Co. Cork. He collaborates with artists and filmmakers, creating films, exhibitions, live performances, as well as writing fiction and non-fiction. He worked on the award winning Make Film History project which opened up the archives from the BBC, BFI, Irish Film Archive, and Northern Ireland Screen for creative reuse by emerging filmmakers and artists, producing over 100 films. He has also produced experimental films with composers Mica Levi and Stephen Mallinder, and lectured at Yale University, Birkbeck Colllege, Goldsmiths, and the Guildhall School of Music.

Press Reviews:
"A revelation! McAuliffe shows how, from the late 1950s to the 1980s, the BFI Education Department was an agent of popular modernism, a para-academic experiment, an engine of critical thinking about the possibilities of cinema. In dusty basements, coffee houses, summer schools: all change." ―Sukhdev Sandhu, Director of the Colloquium for Unpopular Culture, New York University, USA

See the publisher website: Bloomsbury Academic