In Cult Cinema: An Introduction, Ernest Mathijs and Jamie Sexton consider the contemporary processes through which films are being framed as cult. As they note, “‘cult’ is now being used by the industry as a term by which to promote and/or to categorize films,” including by DVD and home media companies (Mathijs and Sexton 238-239). One of the key examples they provide of the latter is the Flipside series of DVDs and Blu-rays produced by the British Film Institute. Over the last ten years, Flipside has released thirty-seven titles, all British and all produced between the late 1950s and the late 1970s, stretching from Richard Lester’s 1969 satire The Bed Sitting Room to their latest title, Pierre Rouve’s Stranger in the House (1967), starring James Mason. In line with Mathijs and Sexton’s arguments, the existence and longevity of the Flipside series illustrates the broad usefulness of ‘cult’ in order to categorise a group of (in this case) quite obscure films and foreground their potential commercial appeal to a range of niche audiences. However, there are also other factors at play here, which relate to the label’s link to the British Film Institute, a body which (among its many functions) oversees the BFI National Archive, whose central remit is to preserve and restore British films in order to ‘ensure’ Britain’s “film heritage is widely accessible in cinemas and in the home” (BFI National Archive).
In a 2017 piece on British cult cinema, published in The Routledge Companion to British Cinema History, I related Flipside’s activities to a broader project within British film culture - a new focus, by DVD companies and British writers and academics, on expanding the canon of British cult cinema beyond long-established titles such as Performance (1970), The Wicker Man (1973), Quadrophenia (1979) and Withnail and I (1987)to encompass forgotten titles within British cinema. In turn, I argued that this process extends conceptions of what constitutes British cinema and British film heritage more broadly, in what I. Q. Hunter has called “a new wave of revisionism” in British film studies and film culture (10).