In the late 1960s the English film scholar Alan Lovell presented a paper on British cinema to the British Film Institute. His paper’s title, ‘The British Cinema: An Unknown Cinema’, seemed a reasonable assessment of the situation at that time. Film studies was establishing itself as a legitimate area of intellectual and academic research in Britain; film courses were being set up in universities, with some lecturing positions funded by the British Film Institute; and academic and trade presses had embarked on a vigorous programme devoted to books on cinema. Even so, the initial flurry of film books favoured American genres (the western, the gangster film) and American and European directors.
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