James Quinn

The head of the BFI, with a vital role in the preservation of film culture in the UK

James Quinn, who has died aged 88, was best known for his tenure as director of the British Film Institute (BFI) from 1955 to 1964. This period gave cinema its high profile: the London film festival was established in 1957; the National Film Theatre was built on the South Bank; a lectureship in film studies was established at the Slade School of Fine Art; television was added to the BFI's remit and its first festival of world television was held in 1963, although this was probably ahead of its time.

At the BFl, Quinn supported the National Film Archive and argued the case for short, documentary and experimental films; from 1974 to 1983 he was chairman of the national panel for film festivals, which promoted British shorts and documentaries at international festivals. He was a member of the Cannes and Venice festival juries in 1956, and in 1961 chaired the Berlin festival jury.

Quinn, born in Northern Ireland, was educated at Shrewsbury school and read classics at Trinity College, Dublin. He served in the second world war with the Irish Guards in north Africa, Italy and north-west Europe; after the liberation of Paris in 1944 he acted as town-major. After demobilisation, he studied modern languages at Christ Church, Oxford, took an economics and political science diploma, played tennis for the college and was awarded a blue in Eton fives.

He joined the textile company Courtaulds in 1949, and was there until he departed to the BFI, to succeed Denis Forman, who had joined Granada Television. Quinn travelled extensively; in the early 1960s, he went to the Soviet Union, Pakistan and India, where he gave the prime minister, Pandit Nehru, film, shot in Calcutta in 1898, for the nascent Indian film archive. On his return home, he urged the BFI board to help set up film societies in India.

Quinn resigned from the BFI in 1964 in order, as he wrote in Screen International, "to gain a broader perspective of the cinema in Britain ... and get closer to film-making of the kind in which I was interested". After his departure, he prepared a report for the BFI on the establishment of regional film theatres.

He then co-produced, with the director Dan Levy, the BFI-funded experimental feature Herostratus (1966), which fails to convince today, although it was praised at the time. In 1975, in collaboration with the Imperial War Museum, he produced Overlord, which followed a conscript through training to the D-day landings of 1944. Shot by John Alcott in black-and-white that melds with the documentary footage making up 25% of the film, it won a Silver Bear in Berlin. But it failed commercially, possibly because it deals with a quiet, middle-class man who knows he is likely to die. When the US Telluride festival presented a restored print of it in 2004, the critical response was uniformly positive and, on its US re-release in 2006, AO Scott wrote in the New York Times that it "deserves to join the pantheon of essential WWII combat movies". It had a limited UK release.

Quinn joined forces with Charles Cooper, of Contemporary Films, to open the Paris Pullman in South Kensington, London, in 1966, a first-run cinema for arthouse movies, but he withdrew from the partnership in 1979, and it closed in 1983. He then got involved with London's Minema cinema.

Quinn was a member of many committees, including the BBC general advisory council and the British Council film, television and video advisory committee, and was a trustee of the Imperial War Museum. Among other awards, he received the Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres from France in 1979.

At the BFI, he supported his staff, especially when NFT programming upset the government during the cold war. His dedication to the BFI was unarguable - because of his work, and others like him, we still have a UK film culture that goes beyond the US mainstream.

His wife, Hannah, died in 2002. He is survived by a son and daughter.

· James Charles Frederick Quinn, film producer and exhibitor, born August 23 1919; died February 11 2008

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