Archives for Education: The Creative Reuse of Moving Images in the United Kingdom

In a recent report on film education in Europe, the British Film Institute (BFI) defines film literacy as "the level of understanding of a film, the ability to be conscious and curious in the choice of films; the competence to critically watch a film and to analyse its content, cinematography and technical aspects; and the ability to manipulate its language and technical resources in creative moving image production."¹ This article explores the liberalization of moving image archive materials for educational use in higher education and the pedagogic use of archive content in video essays—a new form of film scholarship made possible by digital technology that hones film literacy and bridges the theory–practice divide between film studies and film practice for both students and academics. By remixing and recontextualizing found image and sound, how can "video writing" enhance students' critical engagement with film studies, develop a more sophisticated use of film language in their practice, and make scholarly research in film more accessible to the YouTube generation?

The article expands on an interview with BFI director of education Paul Gerhardt and his pioneering work on film literacy and educational access to archives—from his BBC Creative Archive pilot to a new initiative using BFI archive material to make student video essays at Kingston University, where I teach filmmaking. The BFI report recognizes that negotiating access to archive content for educational use is a core element of its education strategy. Gerhardt argues that our ease of access to the printed word should also be applied to the moving image: "If we start off with the premise that we live in the age of the word and the picture, and that both are indispensable for our roles as citizens and our experience as learners and our careers … how do we apply the same access to both?"²

In the United Kingdom, we take it for granted that, no matter who owns the rights, we can access and read in a public library almost any book that's ever been published, because of the "public lending right" model, which remunerates authors and publishers for books borrowed. Gerhardt proposes a similar "public lending right" for the moving image—"in the new digital landscape, the moving image should be acknowledged as having the same educational value as the printed text."³

With a new model of access to this underused audiovisual source of public knowledge, Gerhardt could then ask, "What kind of tools, what kind of skills and what kind of assets do we [the BFI] need to make available for people to be active participants in [education and society]?"⁴

THE BBC CREATIVE ARCHIVE

At the Edinburgh International Television Festival in 2003, BBC director general Greg Dyke placed public access to the corporation's rich archive at the heart of his argument for the renewal of its charter. Digital technology and broadband delivery have made it possible for the BBC, as a publicly owned broadcaster, to share its "treasure trove" of content with the British people—"[they] have paid for it and our role should be to help them use it."

Dyke imagined a child downloading free BBC clips to use in a homework presentation "on lions, or dinosaurs, or Argentina or the industrial revolution … a dream which we will soon be able to turn into reality": "We intend to allow parts of our programmes, where we own the rights, to be available to anyone in the UK to download so long as they don't use them for commercial purposes. Under a simple licensing system, we will allow users to adapt BBC content for their own use. We are calling this the BBC Creative Archive."⁵ The subsequent Building Public Value charter renewal document set out the plan for the Creative Archive, promising "free access to BBC content for learning, for creativity, for pleasure": "The BBC's programme archive is owned by the British people. Until now it has remained largely inaccessible as there has been no cost-effective mechanism for distribution. Digital technology removes...