Roland Barthes (1915–80) asserted that no text is a closed, stand-alone structure but rather a ‘tissue of quotations’ endlessly open to connections with other texts. Put another way, every text is overdetermined, made as it is by other texts as much as (and perhaps even more than) by the conscious effort of its author. Barthes might have added that this multiply diverse parenthood extends also to institutions. Looking back over the essays in this book, I am struck by how heavily overdetermined many of them are. Within the period 1968–84, when I worked for the British Film Institute, the three institutional sites I concentrated on were the BFI itself (both in terms of policy and administration), the Council for National Academic Awards (1965–93), which, through its diverse subject boards, validated degree proposals from (mainly) the British polytechnics that would go on to join the new universities from 1992, and the socialist newspaper Tribune, on which I was film critic from 1972 to 1978. The ideas and interventions underpinning these essays were rehearsed across the terrain of those institutions.

This book's first piece, on Ashes and Diamonds (Andrzej Wajda, 1958), was written somewhat earlier, in 1966. While I was a student I had seen Andrzej Wajda (1926–2016)'s graduation film from the Łodz Film School, A Generation (1955), and been overwhelmed by it. This response was replicated by Lindsay Anderson (1923–94): British culture's taking-up of Wajda's work, and Polish cinema more generally, was greatly enhanced by Anderson's celebration of it, most notably in the New Statesman. When I joined the Education Department of the BFI in 1968 there was already a strong commitment to Polish cinema in that milieu, especially from Paddy Whannel (1922–80) and Bołeslaw Sulik (1929–2012), who, himself Polish, was not a member of the department but very closely involved with it. That commitment would result in a publication I edited for the department in 1970, Andrzej Wajda: Polish Cinema. As to the actual critical method deployed in the Ashes and Diamonds essay, as a student I had been very much influenced by American New Criticism and its formalist attention to literary effects.