CREATe Deputy Director Philip Schlesinger gave a closing plenary lecture at the international Screen Studies Conference 2013, held at the University of Glasgow, 28-30 June. In a critical angle on the conference theme of ‘Cosmopolitan Screens’, he reflected on his current AHRC-funded research into the rise and fall of the UK Film Council. The emerging evidence on the creation of a national agency requires us to think both through and beyond the national level. Elite decision-making and policy networks produced a specific articulation of the national with the transnational in the formation of the new body, in line with currently fashionable logics of modernization.