The Cinema Book

Film History itself has a history. In her introduction to The Cinema Book nearly fifteen years ago, Pam Cook explained how the form and content of the first edition reflected the development in Britain of Film Studies as a discipline from the mid¬ sixties to the late seventies, and she explained the key role played in this development by the film extract collection at the BFI. The remarkable development of audiovisual technology in the last two decades explains how one important element in the first edition, with its five main parts reflecting five major directions of research and teaching in eighties’ Britain, based on the BFI extract catalogue as primary source material, has been superseded by the far wider range of accessible primary material now available to teachers, students and the general reader. The reference base provided by the extract cata¬ logue printed as a long appendix to the first edition is replaced by an area of the new BFI website (http://www.bfi.org.uk/cinemabook) launched in conjunction with this new Cinema Book.
It would be foolish to guess, in 1999, just how far accelerating technological change will overtake the traditional printed form of The Cinema Book itself as the BFI’s prime resource for Film Studies, fifteen years hence. But it is safe to insist, with Pam Cook, that each printed edition constitutes ‘a valuable historical document’ charting the field of Film History and Film Studies at a key point in its continuing development, and that, following on from its predecessor, the present edition will provide an essential, balanced yet pluralistic introduction to the discipline as a whole for another generation of readers and viewers.