CHAIR: Llewella Chapman

Zach Karpinellison

Making the New Old: The National Film and Sound Archive of Australia as Filmmaker

In this paper, I use my ongoing doctoral research into the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia (NFSA) to provoke the argument that state film archives, especially those engaged in restoration initiatives, are not dissimilar to filmmaker collectives. My research draws on fifteen hours of interviews with curatorial and technical staff at the NFSA to propose that the archive can be understood as a kind of production culture. To make this argument, I rely on the staff and worker focused methodology of production and media studies scholar John T. Caldwell. Using Caldwell’s categories of worker inside a given production culture, I attempt to locate the creative and technical impulses of those working in the archive. Furthermore, I consider the ways that these staff have self- theorised their labour and their relationship to films in the collection. This, in turn, raises important and compelling questions about archival practice and responsibility. For this paper I offer a precis on workers who are what Caldwell calls “effacing and ecumenical” – these are staff for whom the looming spectre of a filmmaker or rightsholder is the ultimate, albeit often invisible, entity to whom each restoration and preservation decision must be dedicated. To illustrate the complex relationships between staff, industry and artistry that take place inside the archive, I will present my findings on several case studies from the NFSA. These include the 2009 restoration of Wake in Fright as well as the more recent 2015 restoration of Starstruck. I argue that the film archive is more than a simple site for repair, history and memorial. Instead, this paper will show that the NFSA is an example of the film archive as a uniquely generative institution, creating new versions of important national films that often spotlight significant interventions and changes from the original version."

Mhairi Brennan

BBC Scotland’s Indyref

On 18 th September 2014 the Scottish electorate went to the polls to answer the question, ‘should Scotland be an independent country?’ Although the answer was in favour of remaining in the union, with 55% of the electorate voting No, the 2014 Scottish independence referendum changed the political landscape in Scotland. Indeed, the question is currently dominating cultural and political discourse in the UK with a possible Indyref2 hovering on the horizon. At the heart of this discourse sits BBC Scotland, the public service broadcaster which not only told the story of the 2014 referendum campaign – providing the lion’s share of television and radio coverage of the campaign - but was also a major part of the story. This paper will explore BBC Scotland’s coverage of the 2014 Scottish independence referendum (also known as Indyref), focusing on the way this contentious material has travelled from news bulletins to programmes such as Yes/No: Inside Indyref (BBC Scotland, 2019) via BBC Scotland’s archive, embedding a specific (and contested) story about the referendum in the public consciousness. It will also explore the obstacles faced by the BBC’s archivists in archiving and facilitating access to this contentious material. Drawing on interviews with BBC Scotland’s archivists and discussions held by academics, policy makers, and programme-makers at the IAMHIST Challenge one-day symposium on Indyref held in 2021, this paper will consider what lessons might be learned about broadcasting and archiving any future referendums in Scotland. BBC Scotland occupied a contentious position during the campaign, with its news coverage of the event accused of institutional pro-union bias by pro-independence supporters."

Aasiya Lodhi

A Mid-Century War of Position: George Lamming, Stuart Hall and BBC Radio

Considerations of the BBC’s future are entwined at its centenary juncture with heated debates over imperial heritage, cultural politics and the imperative to decolonise. But in thinking ahead to a BBC that might be more diverse or inclusive it is vital to turn back to overlooked moments in its history by working against or around the many erasures and lacunae embedded in its archives. Such moments – even if their traces are faint – reveal key contestations and negotiations that shaped the mediation of coloniality to domestic audiences at home as Britain’s empire came to an official end in the early second half of the twentieth century. Against this background, this talk pays particular attention to the interventions of anti-colonial Caribbean writers aiming to speak back to Britons through the apparatus of post-war BBC Radio. In focus are Bajan novelist George Lamming and Jamaican critic and theorist Stuart Hall, cultural intermediaries involved in a significant attempt in 1958 to move to the ‘first class’ of the Third Programme from the ‘back door’ of the Overseas Service, home to the influential and long-running literary series Caribbean Voices which drew to a close that year. I explore the mechanics of Lamming’s and Hall’s fight for space in the domestic machinery of British radio as a Gramscian war of position, one that was partially successful but also constrained and delimited by a strategic essentialism. In so doing I locate their pushbacks and provocations as important, though not uncomplicated, countercurrents in the post-war circulation of Britain’s self-image as a ‘moral’ empire.