Teaching at the 9th Film Preservation & Restoration Workshop India 2024
The BFI National Archive is delighted to have participated in the Film Preservation & Restoration Workshop India 2024 (FPRWI 2024).
Hosted in Trivandrum, Kerala, the event is an initiative of the Film Heritage Foundation (FHF), in partnership with the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF), and in collaboration with archives from around the world.
This year’s workshop was supported by the brand-new multi-year project France-India-Sri Lanka Cine Heritage (FISCH) – Saving Film Across Borders. Dedicated to safeguarding the legacy of cinema in India and Sri Lanka, FISCH will span over two years with a focus on training, film restoration, preservation and outreach. The project is led by FHF and supported by the French Embassy and the French Institute in India, alongside the French Embassy in Sri Lanka and the Maldives.
FISCH has three primary goals – to train Indian and Sri Lankan professionals and students in film restoration techniques; to engage the public through screenings of restored films; and to restore a significant Sri Lankan film.
To this end, FPRWI 2024 welcomed 11 Sri Lankan participants and initiated the restoration of the classic Sinhala film Gehenu Lamai (1978) by Sumitra Peries (in association with the Lester James Peries and Sumitra Peries Foundation). Students from India, Europe and Saudi Arabia were also in attendance.
More long-term, FISCH will also support the creation of a permanent training centre in Mumbai, designed to cultivate future generations of film preservationists.
The workshop’s opening ceremony on 7 November combined many of the ingredients that made the event such an amazing experience. Many Indian and Keralan politicians joined the FHF and FIAF in welcoming the students and faculty in the garden of the Sai Trivandrum Golf Club, together with legendary filmmakers who gave their salutations in person and with video messages. The whole ceremony was accompanied by fantastic traditional Indian dances and delicious Indian food. The birds flying around the garden in the sunset really made the event very joyful and poetic.
The venue where the classes were held needs to be mentioned as it was as poetic as the opening ceremony – a traditional sacred wooden house with open walls called Vyloppilly Samskrithi Nalanda in Nanthancode, Kaudiar. Located in a small garden with colourful plants, abundant wildlife and old trees, the students and the faculty had to remove their shoes before entering as a sign of respect for the sacred space. When the heavy rain of the monsoon arrives, the house offers shelter, without removing the contact with the nature. Though everyone’s shoes get very soggy!
The seven-day course was put together by David Walsh, Training & Outreach Coordinator for FIAF (his last in this post as he plans to retire later this year), in consultation with the Film Heritage Foundation. This covered both theoretical and small group practical sessions in the best practices of the preservation and restoration of analogue film, videotapes and digital objects, plus film-related material like photographs and paper collections. To conclude each day, there were daily screenings of digitally restored classics from around the world.
The BFI National Archive hosted sessions on the following topics – the digitisation and restoration of audio soundtracks with Mike Kohler; the digital restoration of film with Elena Nepoti; and digital preservation, digital technologies and open-source software for audiovisual preservation with Joanna White.
The faculty also included professionals from FIAF, FHF, L’Immagine Ritrovata (Fondazione Cineteca di Bologna), La Cinémathèque de Toulouse, INA, Cinemateca Portuguesa, Fondation Jérôme Seydoux – Pathé, The MOMA and The Criterion Collection / Janus Films.
The most rewarding part of the workshop was the relationship with the students and seeing their passion and enthusiasm for AV archiving. Coming from a lot of different countries and with different backgrounds, some were completely new to these topics whilst others were practising professionals, including professors from international universities. A few of them had also participated in previous workshops and it was very rewarding to see how they’d applied what they’d learnt from previous editions in their professions.
Teesha, Shivendra and their team at the Film Heritage Foundation made this edition of the school memorable as always. They organise the event like they’re organising a movie set, where everything is prepared with minute detail. The professionalism and the work ethic of the FHF staff is first class leading to an atmosphere that was often as joyful as it was hectic. A good illustration of this is their seamless organisation of the iconic group photo of the faculty and students, for which we had the amazing opportunity to adopt traditional Keralan dress in cream and gold colours. It takes 30 minutes to be dressed in a sari, the Keralan way, requiring two trained helpers to drape it and many safety pins to hold it in place. All the faculty had a lot of fun! We spent all day wearing it as we dressed up in the morning and took the picture at the end of our classes in the afternoon, near the Napier Museum – so we really had to make it ours. It was such a different experience and have rarely felt more elegant than that day.
The networking opportunity with colleagues from other institutions was also enriched by shared sightseeing adventures in our spare time. We walked in the streets of Trivandrum (we saw an elephant, mongoose, fruit bats and many birds), we visited colourful and perfumed Hindu temples, visited museums and art galleries, enjoyed a sunset boat trip around Poovar Island to an estuary of the Arabian Sea, and ate fish with locals in a popular restaurant near Kovalam beach.
– Elena Nepoti (Film Conservation Manager), Joanna White (Knowledge, Learning & Collections Developer) and Mike Kohler (Video & Audio Specialist Team Leader)
Calligraphy Corner
I can’t even begin to calculate the number of reels and tapes I have labelled by hand over the last two decades in the archive. It’s a manual chore required as part of the accession process that can sometimes be therapeutic to an orderly mind and has the benefit of leaving a personal mark on the collection – a graffiti tag of sorts, marking where I have been and what I have been up to.
That same individual touch reveals that this videotape can only have been labelled by the recognisable hand of Ronald Searle, creator of St Trinian’s; part of a collection donated to the archive after his death in 2012. It’s a Betamax tape with telecined copies of a range of animated cinema commercials based on his artwork made in France in the 1960s (for which we also have film copies). Though for him it was probably a menial task of little attention, for me it is a treasured artefact that I am ridiculously impressed by.
His penmanship has me in awe, even in tiny script each letter is precise and artful. What pen did he use, surely a nib and ink? I love that he chose to switch to red to emphasise certain words. And spelt out that “NTSC” meant “[USA] Standard”.
Has it made me pay more attention to my own scrawl? Probably not, I think my calligraphy is a lost cause. But the label also contains the useful reference to art direction from Ivor Wood, who shortly after went on to work with Serge Danot on Le Manège enchanté (1964), later released in the UK as The Magic Roundabout. Ivor animated and directed the stop-motion children’s series Postman Pat (1981) and Paddington (1976-1980), and his own creations Bertha (1985-1986) and Charlie Chalk (1988-1989) – definite favourites of my childhood. This little piece of data has made its way to our catalogue record, enriching our understanding of these works and the creator behind them. Thanks Ronald.
– Jez Stewart, Curator of Animation
London Screen Archives Conference – Undocumented
Several members of BFI staff were among the assembled film archivists, curators, students and more at the London’s Screen Archives conference held at London Museum Docklands on Thursday 28 November. The conference was centred around the ‘Undocumented’ project being run by London’s Screen Archives and the New Black Film Collective which seeks to address some of the gaps in representation in archives.
A thoughtful keynote and ‘fireside’ chat between Adrian Wootton (chief executive of Film London) and legendary artist filmmaker John Akomfrah opened the day, and was followed by panels on cultural sensitivity and film archives, led by Arike Oke of the BFI and including panellists from the Black Cultural Archives, North West Film Archive and Northern Ireland Screen; a session on reinterpretation and storytelling with a strong emphasis on the Beyond the Bassline: 500 Years of Black British Music exhibition held earlier this year at the British Library, talking with Dr Mikaell Riley who curated the exhibition, filmmakers Yv Shells and Hannah Oliver who created a film for it, and also bringing the perspective of Delphine Lievens of TAPE collective, a group that respond to a lack of representation on screen by providing a platform for under-served films, new and old.
The final panel of the day was led by Dr June Givanni, founder of the June Givanni Pan African Cinema Archive and asked the question ‘where are all the Black home movies?’. The discussion covered the need for safe and trusted spaces for these home movies to live and be held, and how young people can be encouraged into these spaces and collections to discover these personal, local and very intentional pieces of moving image.
The day was an encouraging insight into some of the work being done to address absences in archives, in their collections and in their audiences, and set the bar for many welcoming, thoughtful conversations to come.
– Kitty Robertson, Assistant Curator (Outreach & Engagement)
WhispersRed at the Conservation Centre
ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response) is a tingling sensation some people feel in response to certain sounds and actions such as whispering, tapping and soft brushing. Today, ASMR videos on the internet have proliferated into a global phenomenon, helping millions of people to relax, relieve stress, fall asleep and generally feel better.
Last week, colleagues from across the Conservation Centre had the pleasure of taking part in the making of a video directed by ASMRtist WhispersRed (Emma Smith) one of the UK’s most prominent pioneers in the field. This exciting new commission will take a comforting sound-led tour around the archive, showing our preservation work in a way never previously experienced before.
Look (and listen) out for the video in 2025, which will feature the sounds of our collections, machines, staff and WhispersRed herself.
– Kristina Tarasova, Assistant Curator (Acquisitions)
The Inside the Archive blog is supported by the BFI Screen Heritage Fund, awarding National Lottery funding.
