HISTORY CHANNEL

By D+CFilm, on Friday, July 18, 2008

Bill
D+Cineastes who haven’t already visited the Bill Douglas Centre at Exeter University will no doubt be inspired to after watching a new box set of the revolutionary director’s work.

Douglas grew up in poverty in a mining village near Edinburgh and his childhood experiences were made into the award-winning trilogy of films My Childhood (1972), My Ain Folk (1973) and My Way Home (1978).

The three flicks have just been released on DVD for the first time so they can be discovered by a new generation of young filmmakers.

As The Observer’s Philip French observed, Bill Douglas’ Trilogy ‘will come to be regarded not just as a milestone, but as one of the heroic achievements of the British Cinema’.

But Douglas wasn’t just a groundbreaking director – he was also one of the country’s foremost collectors of cinema memorabilia.

Indeed, he left some 50,000 items to Exeter University when he died in 1991.

The museum named after him was founded in 1994 and has an enormous collection relating to the history of film.

Visitors can see one of just 130 Lumiere cameras ever made, a mutoscope, a peep show machine, and hundreds of posters and books.

But that’s not all. To celebrate the DVD release, there are some new displays in the centre, with original costumes, scripts and storyboards from the films too.
All very interesting and all completely free, so there’s no excuse not to have a squizz.

The Bill Douglas Centre for the History of Cinema and Popular Culture is at Exeter Uni’s Streatham campus. The Bill Douglas Trilogy is out on DVD now, priced £22.99. The DVD is available to buy from the BFI’s online filmstore and all good retailers. Copies are also available to buy at The Bill Douglas Centre.
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