RESEARCH ACTIVITIES
The BFI supports and conducts original research into contemporary and historical UK film industry, production and audiences as well as archival research into our film, television and other collections. BFI curators and industry specialists are also involved in co-supervising a wide range of PhD projects with UK HEIs, as detailed on ‘PhD Collaborations’ page.
We are both a funder of research and a recipient of research grants. In the former role, we commission specialist studies into contemporary film, TV and digital content production sectors. We operate through the Research and Statistics Fund, whose aim is to provide independent, rigorous and publicly available evidence for use by the screen sectors. Some of the most important reports we have published in the recent years are:
UK screen sector economy | BFI
Economic Review of UK Independent Film | BFI
Screen New Deal: Transformation Plan for Wales | BFI
Measuring the economic value of cinema venues | BFI
Thanks to our IRO status, we are also a recipient of UK Research Councils’ grants. Identifying funding opportunities to conduct new research with the collections and consolidate our reputation for partnership and innovation in digital preservation is one of the goals included in our current ten-year strategy, Screen Culture 2033.
We have been successful in securing funding both for traditional research projects, in collaboration with UK Universities, and for large infrastructure grants, helping make our film conservation and preservation laboratories world class.
Recent AHRC-funded research projects involving BFI curators include:
Film Costumes in Action: Design, Production and Performance Cultures in British Film, 1965-2015 with University of Leeds
Museum of Dreams: silent antiquity films in the British National Film Archive with University College London
Women's Screen Work in the Archives Made Visible with University of Exeter
The Congruence Engine: one of five ‘Discovery Projects’ funded by AHRC under the ‘Towards a National Collection’ funding stream and led by The Science Museum
Some of the large AHRC infrastructure grants we were awarded include:
Research Infrastructure for Conservation and Heritage Science (RICHeS): we will develop the UK’s first conservation research laboratory for the moving image (2024)
Creative Research Capability (CresCa): we upgraded our library storage facilities, including redesign & refurbishment at the BFI National Archive Conservation Centre (2022)
Capabilities of Collections (CapCo): we upgraded our film conservation facilities at the BFI National Archive and refreshed and upgraded the BFI Reuben Library & BFI Mediatheque’s research spaces (2020).
We also co-lead the Insight and Foresight Unit (IFU) for the AHRC’s Convergent Screen Technologies And performance in Realtime (CoSTAR) programme, an £80M investment to create national research and development (R&D) facilities to drive innovation and creativity in the UK’s screen and performance industries. In 2023 we also secured investment from the UK Government’s Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) as part of their Research and Innovation Organisation Infrastructure fund, enabling significant upgrading of our compute and film conservation capacities.