Introduction

In a 1992 volume on The Big Heat (Fritz Lang, 1953), as well as including sections on the film's origins as a Saturday Evening Post serial, the production milieu of Columbia Pictures, changing critical discourses surrounding the film and an analysis of the film itself, I included a section on the internal politics of the British Film Institute (BFI), primarily in the decade and a half from 1968. Among other reasons, I did so in order to illustrate the extent to which, as Stuart Hall (1932–2014) has argued in another context:

The version of Hall's argument made in my book about The Big Heat – that the inclusion of a section on the BFI's internal politics was relevant since critical disagreement about the film reflected, in microcosm, the kind of issues which underlay cultural policy debate in and around the BFI – was well received by film academics and by those sections of the press (particularly Time Out magazine) which engaged regularly with the politics of the BFI, but it provoked bafflement among those journalists whose conception of film culture begins and ends with the latest popular releases. That the section could be included at all within the book was due to the presence in key posts within the BFI of figures who were themselves no strangers to the concept of cultural struggle, and who appreciated the overriding importance of institutions therein. The BFI was central during the period covered by this essay, since Film and Media Studies had not yet become institutionalised within the educational system and publishing in these areas was merely a trickle compared with the torrent it is today. The BFI was almost the sole source of materials, information, critical discussion and support for those British teachers at all levels who were trying to introduce Film and Media Studies to the curriculum.