Moving Image

Archives and beyond

Empty mobile film shelves, from www.nrfta.org.uk

The British Comparative Literature Association's conference takes place 5-8 July at the University of Kent, Canterbury. The theme of the conference is Archive, and over the three days an extraordinary array of speakers will tackle the theme of archives from every conceivable angle.

It is interesting that if you go to any large bookshop you will find at least a shelf dedicated to museology, but not a volume dedicated to archives. Museums have got their act together, academically and politically speaking. They have a high profile and consequent understanding on a public and intellectual level, so that they are comfortably placed as central to issues of representation, commemoration, nation, and a host of other tions.

Archives, on the other hand, lurk in the background, fretting about what little attention they receive and how much perceptions of them seem to revolve around dust. They get used handsomely by the public and by scholars, but they don't seem to be part of debates in quite the same way - hence their absence on the bookshelves. This has a knock-on effect in terms of profile and funding. There is some literature on archives, as this Amazon listmania list proves (compiled by yours truly), but it remains for the most part marginal - and frequently abstruse - with Derrida's Archive Fever as (arguably) the one canonical text.

Maybe the Archive conference will start to raise the profile, because the variety of topics on offer is considerable, even if some of it ties itself into hopelessly intellectual knots. You can judge from the programme yourselves what might appeal - the purpose of this post is to highlight those papers on a moving image theme, because film archives are seldom considered when it comes to archive policy, nor have they featured much in general debates (film archivists debate heartily among themselves, of course). These are the relevant abstracts:

• Sanja Bahun and Heidi Wilkins, ‘Woolf, Potter, Us: Sparking Knowledge (SP-ARK)’ (on filmmaker Sally Potter's personal archive)
• Amanda Egbe, ‘Approaches to Representing the Unrepresentable in Moving Image Archives’ (on three artist-led moving image archives and their attempts to 'represent the unrepresentable')
• Paul Jackson, ‘“To Begin with, a City ...”: Dylan Thomas and Propaganda Film’ (on the poet's work in documentary film)
• Irene Lottini, ‘Early Italian Cinema across the Ocean: The George Kleine Collection in the ibrary of Congress’ (what it says on the can)
• Irinia Marchesini, ‘A Carnival of Objects: Collections in Konstantin Vaginov, Jan Švankmajer and Sergei Parajanov’ (on the role played by collections and everyday objects in their films)
• Luke McKernan, ‘Moving Images at the British Library: Building the Archive beyond the Archive’
• Claudy Op Den Kamp, 'Digitization, Copyright Legislation and the Audiovisual Archive’(on orphan moving image works and their re-use)

So I'm there too, and here's the full abstract on the paper I'm giving on how we're establishing a moving image presence at the British Library:

The British Library recently decided to extend its representation to the moving image. The British Library Act (1972) stated that it should hold a ‘comprehensive collection of books, manuscripts, periodicals, films and other recorded matter, whether printed or otherwise’, but, despite this, film has never been actively collected. The moving image collection within the Library’s Sound Archive was built up for the sounds that it contains. The Library recognizes that research is becoming increasingly ‘media agnostic’, so that what matters is not the medium but the subject, and that all media that relates to a subject ought to be accessible to the researcher of the future. The solution is not to build a moving image archive per se, but rather to work synergistically with other collections to ensure that as comprehensive a resource as possible can be created, one that is integrated with the other kinds of resource held by the Library. As the British Library’s first moving image curator, I will describe the rationale behind building the archive beyond the archive, arguing that what is being developed for the moving image has implications for all media used in research and for how research institutions work together in the future.

Is the solution for an archive not to be an archive? What lies beyond the archive, and is that what we're building here? Well, I won't know until I've written the paper, so I'd better start doing so.

More on what looks like it is going to be a particular interesting three days at www.kent.ac.uk/secl/archive.

By the way, the key book on the practical and philosophical issues for film archiving today is Paolo Cherchi Usai, David Francis, Alexander Horwath (eds.), Film Curatorship: Archives, Museums and the Digital Marketplace (Austrian Film Museum, 2008), happily now available in the UK from Wallflower Press. Every film archivist should have a copy.

Preserving the world's moving image heritage

Abel Gance's Napoleon (1927), from www.amianet.org

AMIA, or the Association of Moving Image Archivists, has announced a short film and video competition, with the challenge to any budding filmmaker to create a film or video that conveys the importance of preserving the world's moving image heritage. The competition is described as follows:

The Association of Moving Image Archivists' first short film/video competition will highlight the importance of preserving our moving image heritage. Increasingly, our cultures are reflected through moving images - as news, entertainment, and historical artifact. This year, AMIA celebrates its 20th anniversary as an association of people dedicated to preserving those moving images. This competition will provide an opportunity to emphasize the importance of saving our moving images as important educational, historical, and cultural resources. It's about originality, imagination and the ability to engage the audience in 180 seconds or less.

The competition is open to everyone - so share this information with friends, colleagues, students ... anyone you know with an interest in preserving our moving image heritage.

Timing
Submissions will be accepted beginning June 15, 2010 and ending August 30, 2010.

Prizes
One Grand Prize: In addition to receiving $2,500(USD) prize, the winning submission will be announced on October 27 as part of the World Day of Audiovisual Heritage celebration, and will be screened at the AMIA 2010 Archival Screening Night, November 5, 2010 in Philadelphia, PA. It will also be featured on the AMIA website.

Runner-up & Finalists: The runner-up will receive $1,000(USD). The runner up and finalists' productions will be included on the AMIA website.

Submissions will be accepted beginning June 15, 2010 and ending August 30, 2010. The winner and runner-up will be selected by vote of AMIA members from finalist entries posted onthe AMIA Website.

Further information, rules and submission guidelines can be found on the AMIA 2010 conference website at www.AMIA2010.org. AMIA describes itself as "a non-profit professional association established to advance the field of moving image archiving by fostering cooperation among individuals and organizations concerned with the acquisition, description, preservation, exhibition and use of moving image materials."

It has members (individual and institutional) across the world, and it plays a major part in supporting the supporting the preservation of the moving image heritage, though its conference, other events, publications, awards and its various groups and committees. Its Listserv discussion list AMIA-L can be subscribed to by anyone and is an essential source for anyone wishing to keep up with moving image archive developments (as well as being an invaluable source of advice).

The film bookshelf

Sight & Sound has published a poll of the most useful and/or inspirational film books ever written. Not the best books ever, but those which have proven of the greatest value or which are most important to the fifty or so critics invited to take part. I was one of those invited to contribute, though I'm no film critic - but, heck, you don't turn down the chance to contribute to a Sight & Sound poll. It's a badge of honour.

 

The results are fascinating. The full list of titles is published in the June edition of the journal, while editor Nick James has written a thoughtful introduction, available online, alongside information on the top five titles. They turned out to be:

 

• David Thomson, A Biographical Dictionary of Cinema (1975)
• André Bazin, What is Cinema? (1958)
• Robert Bresson, Notes on the Cinematographer (1975)
• Andrew Sarris, The American Cinema (1968)
• Francois Truffaut, Hitchcock (1967)

 

The list is very much a reflection of the background of most of those invited to take part. They are critics of a certain age, whose enthusiasm for cinema was lit in the 60s and 70s by Cahiers du Cinéma and auteurist cinema (Ford, Hitchcock, Hawks etc). As James points out, it was also an age when films were less readily available. Before videotape and DVD, one could go years before catching up on some classic titles, and the descriptions in such key texts told the reader what they really had to see one day, or else served as an aide-memoire for a film experienced once and unlikely to be readily available again. Apart from the above, some of the books cited by a number of the contributors include Robin Wood, Hitchcock's Films (1965), Peter Wollen, Signs and Meaning in the Cinema (1969), Kevin Brownlow, The Parade's Gone By (1968), James Agee, Agee on Film (1948), and Stanley Cavell, A World Viewed (1971).

 

James seems to express some disappointment at the narrowness of some of the choice, bemoaning the neglect of documentary as a subject (represented by just a couple of choices) and wondering where classic titles are such as Halliwell's Film Guide (which must have been useful to so many of those canvassed), John Alton's Painting with Light (technical books are absent apart from Karel Reisz and Gavin Millar's venerable The Technique of Film Editing) and Carol J. Clover's Men, Women and Chainsaws.

 

However, there are some surprises among the parade of greats: Chris Darke wins some sort of prize for selecting Plato's The Republic (for its 'Myth of the Cave' whose tale of shadows on the cave wall fool an audience into thinking that they are reality, a favoured metaphor for cinema - and television); Sukhdev Sandhu picks a Channel 4 Guide to Francois Truffaut from 1984 as an example of a handy little booklet that could inspire someone new to the joys of world cinema. Particularly interesting are the novels that have been chose. David Thomson's Suspects is easily the most popular choice here, but others have gone for Theodor Roszak, Flicker, Christopher Isherwood, Prater Violet, Adolfo Bioy Casares, The Invention of Morel, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Last Tycoon.

 

The rest you will have to discover in the journal yourselves. But there's my choices, over which I agonised for some hours. Here they are:

 

• George C. Pratt, Spellbound in Darkness (1966)
• Denis Gifford, The British Film Catalogue, 1895-1970 (1973)
• Charles Barr, Ealing Studios (1977)
• Graham Greene, The Pleasure Dome (1972)
• Charles Urban, The Cinematograph in Science, Education and Matters of State (1907)

 

The last of those was meant to be a bit of left-field choice, though I'm firmly believe that it is an historically important work that pointed out at the dawn of cinema that film wasn't just there to entertain but was there to instruct, inform and document. The others are an anthology of originals texts on silent cinema, the film reference book that I most admire and have made most use of, a critical analysis of a film studio that is brimful of social and political intelligence, and the most observant of all film review anthologies - to my mind at least.

 

Had I chosen nothing but those books which had been most use to me, then I might have gone from Halliwell's Film Guide (and Filmgoer's Companion), Brian Coe's The History of Movie Photography, Rachael Low's The History of British Film series, or the list to beat all lists, the Library of Congress Catalog: Motion Pictures 1912-1939 - the very last book one would ever choose to read cover to cover, but constantly useful, a monument to thorough cataloguing.

 

But were I to choose only books that inspired, then I could just as easily have gone from Antonia Lant's marvellous anthology on women and early film, Red Velvet Seat; Lisa Cartwright's intellectually exhilarating study of medicine and visual culture, Screening the Body; Douglas Gomery's Shared Pleasures: A History of Movie Presentation in the United States, which has created a new discipline of cinema audience studies; Karl Brown's delightfully evocative account of early Hollywood, Adventures with D.W. Griffith; Raymond Durgnat's A Mirror for England: British Movies from Austerity to Affluence, which conjures up more wit in half a sentence than most film books can find in an entire chapter; Jacques Aumont's The Image, which is one of the few theoretical books that I thoroughly enjoy; or Brian Winston's Technologies of Seeing, which knows equally the how and why of what is offered to us on our screens large and small. Then, mindful of the complaint about documentaries being left out, why didn't I include Dai Vaughan's For Doumentary, as wise and insightful a selection of essays as you will find anywhere? Or Erik Barnouw's Documentary: A History of Non-Fiction Film, for being so consistently handy, or Jay Leyda's Film Begets Film, for covering a subject no-one else has thought to cover, the compilation film?

 

And so on and so on. I did feel, when scanning my bookshelves for this exercise, that the number of great film books was actually rather small. The number of titles ranging from the purely functional to the frankly dreadful (as reading experiences) is dispiritingly high. Finding the words to capture the experience of film is an elusive art. Film books are like poetry in translation - they follow the form but can never absolutely capture the spirit. The best they can do is to lead us back to the screen, or to conjure up a feeling that evokes for us the experience of having once viewed that film. So they have to inform, and inspire - which is precisely what the Sight & Sound poll asked its contributors to identify. Hopefully the list will inform and inspire others to read and explore for themselves.

Well, here we are in front of the elephants

YouTube is five years old. On 23 April 2005, Jawed Karim stood before a video camera wielded by Yakov Lapitsky in front of the elephant enclosure at San Diego Zoo. Karim gave the anxious look at the camera we all give when we sense that filming has started and we ought to have to say something, and then uttered the immortal words, "Well, here we are in front of the elephants". There wasn't much else he could say - there were the elephants, it was a self-evidently true statement. Nevertheless he added that "these guys have really, really, really long trunks", a statement that could be challenged both for its irrelevance and for the fact that very few animals other than elephants have trunks, so theirs are not so much long as just about the right size. "And that's pretty much all there is to say" were his concluding words, and the video was over - all nineteen seconds of it.

 

And that was the first video to be uploaded onto YouTube, entitled Me at the Zoo. It is not, on first sight, the most notable of starts  for a revolution in how we communicate, but Jawed Karim and his colleagues were not then aware of what they were going to unleash upon the world. But Me at the Zoo is a revolutionary film in its way. It is a film without purpose, a passing statement, a shrug of the shoulders expressed in video. It does not entertain, instruct, make a point, debate or have any kind of structure to it. Because of the platform, the cheapness of the camera equipment, the ease of uploading, and the bandwidth, here is something which we had not seen in moving images beforehand - video as non-event. This I think is part of what makes YouTube so special. It is a home to much creativity, as well as much illegality, but although that is marvellous in itself, it is not fundamentally new. But film made simply for the purpose of filling space, film that shows us off-guard, not performing - that is something that commercial film and television has seldom allowed space for, if ever. The home movie has to a degree performed this function historically, but home movies are - as a rule - purposeful. Economics has also decided their content, since film and processing cost money and what you shot on your cinefilm has to represent best value. The avant garde has tried to do away with film's habitual structures, and plays with time and space in a way that seems close to what YouTube encourages, but ultimately the avant garde is every bit as studied in form and technique as conventional film.

 

Me at the Zoo, and the countless of videos that have followed it, have been created because there was a space to be filled. People have filled that space with all manner of videos, many of which have a clear purpose (to entertain, to instruct, to insult, to argue, to show off, and so on), but just as many no more purpose than to say, here I am, or I've nothing much to say today, or I've just seen this so I videoed it. And then even those videos which do have some sort of purpose - often those of people saying hello to friends, sharing information, or responding to someone else's personal video - often these are most fascinating for the moments beyond the main action. We see people preparing to film, or thinking what to say next, just being themselves. Film traditionally has never found space for such moments. It has always been so studied, so concerned to be an art form, worried about cutting out waste. YouTube reveals us at points when we are arguably at our most interesting, when we're still thinking, when we're not yet sure what we want to say. It has put the private into a public space, and changed our ideas of both utterly.

Posted via email from Luke McKernan

Adam Curtis: the medium and the message

Frame still from 1935 home movie footage by Group Captain Lister showing the bombing of Warziristan villages in Afghanistan in 1935, from a 1980 BBC documentary

Television is changing. This change is not simply in the modes of delivery (essentially the broadband and broadcast trend demonstrated by iPlayer, Hulu, SeeSaw, Project Canvas and such like) but in forms of television productions themselves. We are familiar with television programmes having offshoots such as books, DVD releases, websites, forums, and so on. Now we are starting to see programmes which have an organic life across several platforms, and whose development we can track, comment upon, and maybe influence.

The BBC's 'open source' series on the history of the Internet, Virtual Revolution, though a relatively conventional set of programmes once it made it to air, went to town with the idea of sharing its ideas with a knowledgeable audience. The programme blog brought us into the decisioning-making process, arguing ideas, explaining trains of thought, testing hypotheses, exchanging information.

However, the truly ground-breaking work is being done by Adam Curtis. The director of the uber-cultish The Trap, Power of Nightmares and Century of the Self has established a blog, Adam Curtis - The Medium and the Message, to show projects in embryos and the fruits of his research, which may end up as programmes, events, installations, or maybe nowhere at all. He has used it to preview It Felt Like a Kiss, a programme (yet to be broadcast on TV) which was also part of a shock art event at the Manchester International Festival in 2009, and to cover subjects ranging from the British art of heckling to the strange relationship between anthropological filmmakers and Brazilian tribes.

However, the major use of The Medium and the Message has been the series Kabul: City Number One. Curtis outlined his ideas at the start of the series in September 2009:

"I am researching the extraordinary history of the West's relationship to Afghanistan over the past 200 years. It is a very complex, and sometimes weird, story. These are notes on some of the characters and episodes involved."

What he writes are notes, though rather more artfully composed than the random jottings this might suggest. Curtis's trademark is unearthing hidden histories in which remarkable and seemingly disparate elements come together to relate a history of our times that is unknown to most, yet which Curtis persuasively argues has come to shape the way our perception of the world is managed. It is borderline conspiracy theory, but it also makes us rethink our assumptions. Curtis also makes bravura use of archive footage, both for its mocking commentary on the times and for the special evidence it provides on the past.

Kabul: City Number One is now eight blog posts old, and weaves an extraordinary tale of past and present British and American involvement in Afghanistan, of opposing the opposing forces of modernism and traditionalism, of conflicting ideologies and the triumphs, trasgedies and idiosyncracies of some remarkable (and often little-known) individuals who have played their part on a history that becomes ever more fascinating complex the more Curtis delves into motives and connections.  

Especially engrossing is the use of archive film. Curtis is making available clips from the BBC archive (to UK users only, owing to copyright restrictions) which illustrate his theme, but which go far beyond the conventional use of clips in a programme, both because he is able to show more and because they allow him to explore tagents to his theme, encouraging us to explore the subject(s) further for ourselves. For example, in episode no. 1 he included clips from a 1972 BBC series British Empire: Echoes of Britainnia's Rule including an horrific recreation of the execution by British soldiers of Indians during the Mutiny who were strapped to cannons. Curtis tells us that the sequence was edited out after broadcast, and that special permission is required to show it. He has evidently obtained such permission.

Other clips have included such disparate material as spirited Afghan pop music, a haunting memoir by mountaineer Peter Boardman from the 1978 BBC series The Light of Experience, quirky clips from children's programme Blue Peter, Soviet propaganda films, BBC news reports, and - in the most recent episode The Weird World of Warizistan - astonishing home movie footage of the British aerial bombing of Afghanistan in 1935 (made all the more extraordinary by the cool tone of the pilot/cameraman being interviewed in 1980).

All of this makes for great television. It's not conventional television, of course, since it is presented in the form of a blog with video clips, but Curtis has broken down the barrier between production process and exhibition to create something that is television in a new form. The commentary is there; the thesis is established; there are images, video clips and audio files, but these illustrations - like the argument in general - show far greater licence than television allows. Curtis rambles wherever his mind leads him, and the clips are far longer than television would ever allow as illustration. We see the archive video in its fuller extent, and we can choose whether to see some, all or none of it (it needs to be noted that Curtis is rather poor when it comes to the provenance and dating of his discoveries in the archives). We would never see any of these clips on the usual TV archive sites or catch-up services. It takes a television producer with an oblique eye to unearth such material and to see how it contributes to the thesis. It requires a belief in the documentary value of video - not as decoration, but as a medium that records life in a profoundly illuminating way. Curtis praises the filmmakers whose work he has unearthed again and again, with evident respect for their skills and what the medium can reveal.

How this is all paid for is not made clear. Curtis can find the clips and broadcast them, but is he working to a standard TV production budget? Is this material going to end up as the next Curtis TV series, or has it moved from work-in-progress to the work itself? Whatever the method, and whatever the result, do watch/read The Medium and the Message, and think not just about Curtis's agenda but about what extraordinary material lies in our broadcast archives, how many are the different ways in which such material can be used to inform, educate and entertain, and how important it is that we keep on demanding for ever greater access to those archives. And this is not just access to the programme as broadcast, but equally to its composite parts, which have lives of their own. There are many millions of different histories there, still waiting to be told.

Posted via email from Luke McKernan

Recommended reading no. 3 - Kafka Goes to the Movies

Here's number 3 in an occasional series that reviews unfamiliar or neglected books on film (which of course you can find here at the British Library). Today's choice is Hanns Zischler, Kafka Goes to the Movies (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 2003)

"Was at the movies. Wept. Lolotte. The good pastor. The little bicycle. The reconcilitation of the parents. Boundless entertainment. Before that a sad film, Catastrophe at the Dock, after the amusing Alone at Last. Am completely empty and meaningless, the electric tram passing by has more living meaning." (Kafka's diary, September 1913)

This unique book has received ample praise, so it is hardly obscure, but it remains little known among the general film readership. Though not a casual read, it is mysterious, learned, engrossing, and beautiful to behold.

Its author is a German film actor with a taste for literary history. Its subject is Franz Kafka, author of Metamorphosis, The Trial, The Castle and inveterate moviegoer in his younger days. In 1907 the first permanent cinema was built in Prague, and soon among the enthusiastic cinemagoers of the city were Kafka (born 1883) and his friend Max Brod. From the diaries, letters and other writings of Kafka and Brod, Zischler traces the films that they saw, sometimes from just the vaguest hint of a title or plot, identifies the originals, finds reviews, stills, posters, and on occasion tracks down the films themselves.

But this is no mere exercise in producing an anecdotal filmography. Zischler is interested in what is revealed of Kafka in his impressions of cinema, how the cinema reflected his psyche, and the interelationship between the fevered world of early cinema and Kafka's own emerging artistic vision. In the background there is the home of the cinema, the modern city, endlessly stimulating, bombarding its inhabitants with images.

From fragmentary evidence Zischler leads us to detailed descriptions and analyses of such titles as The White Slave Girl, Nick Winter and the Theft of the Mona Lisa, Theodor Korner, Danzig, The Other, Hamlet (with Albert Bassermann), The Heartbreaker, Little Lolotte, Catastrophe at the Dock, Return to Zion, The Kid and several others, seen by Kafka between 1908 and 1921. He provides a filmography (noting which titles survive), and places the experience of each film within a particular point in Kafka's personal and artistic life.

On one level it is trainspotting with a heavy dash of cultural theory. On another, its bringing together of the everyday with the imaginary (much like the experience of cinema-going itself) makes for a thrilling read, particularly as one gets carried along by the detective work, as a fleeting mention of a film subject in a letter leads to an advertisement in the contemporary press, then to the film title, then to the film itself and back to Kafka's personal history.

Kafka Goes to the Movies is a pleasure to look at, and has particularly attractively arranged notes pages (which include illustrations). Zischler has gone on to repeat the trick with James Joyce, documenting not so much Joyce's renowned though brief period as a cinema manager in Dublin in December 1909, but rather his first documented experience of filmgoing in Pola (then part of the Autro-Hungarian Empire, now Pula in Croatia) in 1904. Unfortunately (for monolingual me at any rate) the book, Nase für Neuigkeiten, published in 2008, is only available in German (and is not held by the British Library).

Posted via email from Luke McKernan

Leadbelly sings for his freedom

Available from the Time website

This is so wonderful to see (unfortunately I can't emebed so click on the link above). It's Leadbelly from The March of Time in 1935, a famous sequence from the classic American news cinemagazine in which the American folksinger gains his freedom from prison by his singing ability, recorded by folklorist John A. Lomax. It ends up with Leadbelly's music being recorded for the Library of Congress and becoming part of the US national record alongside the Declaration of Independence. OK, so it's heavily staged for the cameras in the manner typical of The March of Time, but you have to see through the stilted delivery to what is such a precious record of a great singer, a great archivist, and incidentally a special early example of a film record showing the process of archiving - and audio-visual archiving at that. Leadbelly did sing for Governor Oscar K. Adle at Angola Prison Farm, Lousiana, in 1934, but history records that he was due for early release anyway and his song has nothing to do with his gaining his freedom - though Lomax always believed that the recording had helped his cause. In the clip Leadbelly says that he was freed from prison at an earlier time after singing to the governor, and this is apparently correct - in 1925, when he was held in Huntsville, Texas.

The March of Time was produced as an adjunct to Time magazine and shown in cinemas between 1935 and 1951 (though it had existed as a radio series since 1931 and continued as a television series after 1951). It was screened in Britain, with small variations in content, including some fresh stories filmed by its British unit. Acclaimed at the time for its dynamic style and its willingness to take on challenging subjects, it is probably best known today for the parody of its hectoring style in the 'News on the March' sequence from Orson Welles' Citizen Kane. The March of Time film library is now managed by HBO Archives. The essential history of the reel is Raymond Fielding's The March of Time, 1935-1951.

You can find plenty of information on Leadbelly (real name Huddie Ledbetter), with biography, photos, sound clips and much more, on the Lead Belly Foundation site.

Heads up to the Sound Archive Twitter feed for altering me to the clip.

Posted via email from Luke McKernan

BFI and UK Film Council to merge

The much-discussed possible merger between the British Film Institute and the UK Film Council is to become a reality. As part of today's Budget announcements, the Department of Culture Media and Sport (DCMS) said that one element of its package of efficiency savings would be the merger of the two institutions, which was first flagged as something the DCMS wanted to see happen in August 2009, and was strongly hinted at in December's pre-Budget report.

The BFI is an independent body with charitable status and Royal Charter, and has been in existence since 1933. Its activities include the BFI National Archive; BFI Southbank and BFI Imax; BFI Education; Sight & Sound magazine; and the BFI London Film Festival.

The UK Film Council was established by the Government in 2000 as the strategic agency for developing the film industry and film culture in the UK. Its activities include backing British-made films (shorts and features); a network of regional screen agencies, the Digital Screen Network; Skillset, the UK skills and training industry body for the creative industries; First Light Movies, which gives children and young people the chance to get involved in filmmaking; and funding the BFI.

The news also comes after the BFI was promised £45m in funding by the Government to help realise its ambition for a National Film Centre on London's South Bank.

The exact nature of the merger has yet to be announced, but there has been much discussion in the intervening period about governance and function. The DCMS originally announced in August of last year that the move was "designed to protect the key existing functions of both the BFI and UKFC while reducing gaps and overlaps", adding that:

The overall remit of the BFI and UKFC will not be reduced. The proposal is for a streamlined organisation, which can spend more of its money on film and services and less on infrastructure, and in turn offer better support for Britain's film culture and promotion of its film industry. Its remit would span securing investment across the sector, steering the industry through the transition to digital, championing the cultural importance of the UK's film heritage and guaranteeing that the full diversity of film culture is available to all.

The UK film world will await what emerges with the greatest of interest now that we will have the one flagship instead of two,  with the hope that it brings a new focus and prominence to film culture in the UK.

Posted via email from Luke McKernan

The Yanomamo play tricks on us

Fierce People, BBC Horizon tx. 1 November 1971

Superb stuff from Adam Curtis - The Medium and the Message, not just one of the best blogs out there but a pioneering and innovative combination of documentary, archive and web publishing that is showing one way television could change in a multimedia world:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/2010/03/guinea_pigs_up_the_creek.html

Here he looks at the different ways in which BBC documentaries have portrayed the Yanomamo people of Brazil and Venezuela (supposedly models for Avatar's Na'vi) according to the temper of the times.

In 1968 they are drug experimenters seen as both corrupted by the world and incorruptible

In 1971 they are shrewd, cunning and highly political

In 1972 they just lie around all day in an idyllic state

In 1977 they are in a continuous state of tension, driven by their genes

In 1983 schoolchildren sing about how they worship animals and trees

In 1989 they are the perfect subject for rock musicians singing about the rainforest (Donna Summer, Iggy Pop, Ringo Starr...)

In 1997 they are the remnants of a shaman civilisation

"In all these examples we in the West - both scientists and TV producers - are projecting our ideas and our dreams and our fears onto the Yanomamo. But the Yanomamo are not just passive in this. Each time they seem to work out what the westerners want and then give it back to them perfectly. Or, as in the case of [anthropologist Napoleon] Chagnon they play with him and trick him in funny ways.

Which makes you wonder. Maybe they are just as sophisticated as us in the west? Or maybe even more so?"

All with the usual telling clips.

More on what Curtis is doing with The Medium and the Message in a future post.

Posted via email from Luke McKernan

Media History Digital Library

A huge step forward has been made for online research in film studies with the launch of the Media History Digital Library project. This is a major conservation and access project for histoical printed materials related to cinema, broadcasting and recorded sound, concentrating on American media industry journals and financed by private funds. The project has been established by film archivist and historian David Pierce, and has ambitious plans to digitise an make freely available online a wide range of American media journals, of which these are the target titles:

Industry Magazines – Billboard, Box Office, Cine-Mundial, Daily Variety, Exhibitor's Herald, Exhibitor's Trade Review, The Film Daily, The Film Index, The Hollywood Reporter, Motion Picture Daily, Motion Picture Herald, Motion Picture News, Motography, The Moving Picture World, Radio Broadcast, Radio Daily, Talking Machine World, Variety

Company Magazines – The Lion's Roar, Publix Opinion, RCA News, Radio Flash, Reel Life, Universal Weekly

Fan Magazines – Motion Picture Classic, Motion Picture Magazine, Motion Picture Digest, Radio Mirror, Screenland, Shadowplay

Technical Journals – American Cinematographer, American Projectionist, The International Photographer, International Projectionist, Motion Picture Projectionist, Projection Engineering, Radio Engineering, Sound Waves, Transactions of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers

A pilot project has a target of 300,000 journal pages, and already eight volumes (covering four years, 1925-1930) of the fan magazine Photoplay, and one volume each of the trade journals Motion Picture Classic (1920) and Moving Picture World (April-June 1913), have been made available through the Internet Archive, taken from the collection of the Pacific Film Archive.

There's an enthusiastic review of the project by Leonard Maltin on his Movie Crazy blog, and I review the project in greater detail on my silent cinema blog, The Bioscope.

The British Library hasn't digitised any film journals (though the stage journal The Era, available for the years 1838-1900 on our Newspapers site, has much information on the early film industry). However we do have a list of all the British and Irish cinema and film periodicals that we hold in our newspaper collection, which includes many rare titles and useful information on date ranges and changes of title.

Posted via email from Luke McKernan