Keith M. Johnston

I am a Film and Media historian, interested in creative and technological histories of UK and US filmmaking, both amateur and professional. That work covers many different research interests: from film trailers and media promotion (I wrote one of the first books on film trailer history) through specific media technologies (1950s stereoscopic 3D in Britain; the introduction of Eastmancolor to Britain) to the use of technology in film genres like science fiction.

My current work is on women amateur filmmakers in Britain and Ireland, part of the AHRC-IRC-funded project ‘Women in Focus: Developing a Feminist Approach to Film Archive Metadata and Cataloguing’, and the AHRC-funded 'Empowering Archivists:

My publications include:
- Women in Focus: A Toolkit for Archiving Women's Amateur Film (2023, with Sarah Arnold, Paul Frith, Carolann Madden and Zoe Viney Burgess)
- Colour Films in Britain: The Eastmancolor Revolution (2021, with Sarah Street, Paul Frith and Carolyn Rickards)
- Invisible Innovators: Making Women Filmmakers Visible Across the UK Film Archives (2020, with Stephanie Clayton and Melanie Williams)
- Ealing Revisited (2012, co-editor with Mark Duguid, Lee Freeman and Melanie Williams)
- Science Fiction Film: A Critical Introduction (2011)
- Coming Soon: Film Trailers and the Selling of Hollywood Technology (2009)

My work on trailers has been used in popular sites such as Wired, The Atlantic, The Verge, The Wrap, BBC Newsnight, BBC R4 Today Programme, Den of Geek and many others. I also appeared in the 2021 film Movie Trailers: A Love Story.