Moving History: Promoting Moving Image Archive Collections in an Emerging Digital Age

This article has emerged out of recent work mounted by the South East Film and Video Archive (SEFVA), an English regional archive, and our understanding of the United Kingdom's public sector moving image archives. It has two functions. The first is to describe and reflect on the process of designing and launching Moving History, an on-line guide to these archives. The second is more discursive as it is an attempt to explain and explore some of the "drivers" that led to the creation of this Web site and continue to shape our archival activities.

Before Moving History is introduced, it is necessary to set the context in which it was created. There are twelve recognized public sector moving image archives across the United Kingdom that offer either regional or national moving image archive collection, preservation, and access services for both educational and public use on a not-for-profit basis. These twelve archives are the national collections of the British Film Institute's National Film and Television Archive, the Imperial War Museum Film and Video Archive, the National Screen and Sound Archive of Wales, the Scottish Screen Archive, and the eight regional film archives of England—East Anglian Film Archive, Media Archive for Central England, North West Film Archive, Northern Region Film and Television Archive, SEFVA, South West Film and Television Archive, Wessex Film and Sound Archive, and the Yorkshire Film Archive. All of these archives are represented by the UK Film Archive Forum.¹

This network of archives provides access to moving image material (film, video, and "born digital") that represent the widest possible understanding of these visual media and their histories from the 1890s to the present day. These diverse collections offer an intensely rich and varied reflection of the landscapes, lives, work, leisure, culture, history, and identities of the United Kingdom. They encompass a range of production types such as commercial feature films, amateur fiction films, artists' films, animation, corporate and promotional films, documentaries, educational films, family home movies, government films, newsreels, and regional and national television broadcasts. Themes strongly represented include family and community life; rural landscapes and traditional working practices; industry and the urban environment; maritime and coastal activities; the histories of the health, welfare, and educational systems; and acts of local, regional, and national commemoration and celebration.

Our collections represent our great strength. From their use in our archives by the public, scholars, and broadcasters, to their screening in cinemas, classrooms, community centers, and libraries, to their incorporation into displays in museum and other public spaces, to their reconfiguration into either streamable or downloadable files on the Internet, and to their integration into television programs for terrestrial, cable, and satellite viewers, our films are everywhere and are enjoyed literally by millions. In spite of this success, the majority of these archive collections are largely untapped as academic resources. As a result, they continue to remain "outside of history," outside of scholarship. Why is this?

Figure 1.

Local News 1951, Albany Film Unit Collection. Courtesy SEFVA.

The Canon and the Collections

Clearly the existence of a canon within film education, publishing, and exhibition is a major factor. In Britain as elsewhere, university teaching and research in film and television studies tend to focus on established, familiar texts. These works become exemplars of particular cinema and television cultures and are valued for their relevance to either genre or auteur or cultural studies. These same texts acquire cultural capital through their presentation and analysis within academic publications, and, as a result, they have a profound impact on the production of new essays and theses. The easy availability of these core texts on videotape and DVD and their iterative use contributes to the formation of the canon and its corollary, the establishment of dominant and popular perspectives on a distinct history of moving images. However, this canon, which consists largely of feature films from the sound period, television dramas, and a rarefied selection of documentaries, represents only a very small part of the holdings of the national...