CHAIR: Dominique Trudel

Takao Terui

Re-examining archival resources to identify overlooked stakeholders in British film policy: The University of Warwick Modern Records Centre and Children’s Film Foundation

This paper aims to spotlight the archival materials in the University of Warwick, Modern Records Centre (MRC) and discuss how its recourses enrich our understanding of film history and media policy in Britain. The MRC, established in 1973, contains various archival materials, primarily focusing on trade unions and trade organisations. This paper argues that the MRC materials offer a variety of historical materials tracing the activities and roles of under-examined stakeholders such as educationalists and social workers, as well as trade unions in the film industry. These archival recourses significantly broaden our understanding of media ecosystems involving the public, business and civic sector actors. Drawing on the case study of the Children's Film Foundation in the 1950s, this paper contends that the MRC materials evidence overlooked yet constructive interactions between the social workers and film industry organisations in developing children's film production in Britain. The Advisory Council provides a detailed process of building new audience research and promotional events to empirically study the children's responses and new educational films for children. Such constructive partnership is elucidated by exploring MRC materials focusing on trade organisations and business sectors, which tend to be overshadowed in the preceding film history literature. This finding is an essential addition to the previous historiography of Britain's cultural economy and media culture because it showcases the active involvements and interactions of civic- and business-sector actors, overlooked in the preceding literature based on commerce-culture dichotomy. 

Charles Acland

From Access to Prompts in Media Archive - The Canadian Educational, Sponsored, and Industrial Film Project

"The Canadian Education, Sponsored, and Industrial Film Project (CESIF, www.screenculture.org/cesif), which I launched with Louis Pelletier in 2008, was designed to respond to a major gap in media historical and archival practice in Canada, namely, a lack of interest and concern for the massive amount of privately-produced moving images material. Those works were only haphazardly archived, if at all, and historians have generally ignored them, opting instead for films from the more availability and relatively better resourced public outfits, most prominently the National Film Board of Canada. Yet, industrial, educational, and sponsored film was by far the most active area of filmmaking from the early years of the industry in Canada and it was a thriving cultural sector for private film concerns. The number of films produced is in the tens of thousands, and the number of production companies is in the multiple hundreds. Many of these films circulated to lucrative international markets, and the audiences, though difficult to measure, often matched or surpassed those for theatrical film. CESIF has been an effort to put these films into the historical record. Needless to say, this is significant not only for Canadian cultural history as a documentation of the visual culture of the country; it is also essential to historians working on industrial, educational, and scientific institutions. The project initially coordinated and elevated awareness about the films and production entities through the construction of an on-line database. Using available on-line catalogues, the CESIF research team scoured film libraries and archives across the country, identifying titles produced by, or co-produced with, private Canadian film companies, producing searchable entries of detailed film information. Though an open-access website, the design has been decidedly “low-tech,” deliberately minimizing the graphic and algorithmic components. In this paper presentation, using CESIF as a case, I will explore the archival and historical implications of this form of research resource, one that complicates priorities about “access” with concepts of “research prompts.” As Lisa Gitelman wrote, drawing inspiration from Foucault, “an archive is less a collection of texts than a system governing statements” (2014, 74). Accordingly, the architecture of CESIF proposed ways to reinscribe that system and governing statements, and in this way, help open up previously neglected and marginalized materials and narratives to media historians."

Ciara Chambers

Make Film History: Opening up the Archives to Emerging Filmmakers

As cultural heritage organisations digitise their collections and increase public access, moving image portals like the IFI Player, RTÉ Archives, BFI Player and BBC iPlayer provide audiences with virtual screening rooms to view their shared audiovisual history on demand. But the creative reuse of moving image archive material remains problematic, beset by questions of copyright law, rights clearance and “fair dealing” exceptions, and an audiovisual archives sector without a standardised framework to open up access to this material for creative reuse by filmmakers in education and the community who cannot afford commercial license fees.  Make Film History addresses this problem by developing a new, sustainable model for the creative reuse of archive material for non-commercial use by emerging filmmakers, supported by project partners, the British Film Institute (BFI), BBC Archive, the Irish Film Institute and Northern Ireland Screen. Winner of the FIAT/IFTA Excellence in Unlocking the Potential of Archives Award in 2021, the project has also established a model of best practice in supporting students and community filmmakers to engage with creative reuse and exhibit their work at festivals and public screening events. This session will explore the initiative’s development, showcase some of the resulting work and companion resources, and will consider whether the model could be extended to wider international collaboration.