Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee Visit
In early December, members of the House of Commons Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee visited the BFI Conservation Centre.
The purpose was to host an informal roundtable discussion which supported the committee in their inquiry into the future of British Film and High-End Television. The discussion was intended to gather sector views on what more can be done to protect and promote the UK’s screen heritage. The BFI National Archive team were in attendance as well as representatives from several UK film, television, moving image archive and library organisations.
As part of the visit, the group were taken on a tour of the Conservation Centre to meet the team and see the work and expertise that goes into preserving, restoring and making accessible the BFI National Archive’s collection. The spaces visited included the Film Operations Team (pictured), Special Collections (paper, photographs and film ephemera) plus the film and video vaults.
Another tour stop was the Technical Operations Team, who facilitate the preservation of video and television. They were able to show footage from the children’s television programme How. The episode was presented by Fred Dinenage who is the father of CMS Committee Chair, Dame Caroline Dinenage.
The inquiry is continuing into early 2025 and it was noted by the Committee that the insights from the experts and practitioners in attendance provided a valuable perspective and will inform their findings.
– Jo Molyneux, Collections Operations Coordinator
Archive Top 5, by the numbers
The BFI website is certainly prone to the odd listicle, 10 to try, films of the year… Sight and Sound’s once-a-decade ‘Greatest Films Of All Time‘ mega poll is perhaps the venerable ancestor of them all. But what are the ‘Top 5’ films in the BFI National Archive? Or more accurately, what are the first five films in our database?
To be clear, this isn’t the first five films acquired and catalogued by the fledgling National Film Library, established by the BFI in 1935 (though that sounds like a future blog post…). No, these are work records 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 created over four decades later in what was a then new iteration of our filmographic database, gathering information on film releases and the personalities and institutions behind them. It was a separate but related set of data to our archive holdings that has since been linked, with the unique numbering system retained. Without further ado, let’s countdown our ‘Top 5’!
In at 5 is Milkmaid, a silent comedy short from 1905 in which a “Milkmaid pours milk bucket over squire”. Running just over a minute this short seems typical of the skit-based film fillers that formed part of the early cinema programme, and later evolved into longer narratives with sequences of gags and more defined characters at the centre. Interestingly the original archive nitrate copy of this film was received with the shots out of sequence, so the sexpest squire appears sodden with milk before he is shown having it tipped over his head.
At 4 we have Medieval Dutch Sculpture, a short 1950 documentary from the Netherlands that probably does what it says on the tin and surveys statues and figurines from the country’s Middle Ages. It’s a film that would be unlikely to meet our collections policy today but was distributed for many years by the BFI, before copies become part of the preservation collection.
Number 3 is occupied by a trailer for the 1977 US feature film Between the Lines directed by Joan Micklin Silver, and featuring a young Jeff Goldblum. As documented in an earlier weekly blog, the archive does collect promotional trailers and they form a useful record of how releases were marketed to the British public.
At 2 is U-Boats in Action (Germany 1941), a film put together by the BFI Compilation Unit in 1957 for non-theatrical distribution. It’s a presentation of German Second World War propaganda footage with added English intertitles primarily for use in educational settings. The BFI Compilation Unit was a rather sporadic operation dating back to the late 1930s that is well worth further investigation (makes mental note to self).
And at number 1 we have that classic of modern cinema, Rockall Plateau – Rock Sampling 1971 (Short Version), to give the film its full title. Produced by the Institute of Geological Sciences, this film documents a visit to the uninhabitable islet of Rockall in the North Atlantic Ocean, claimed by the UK but of disputed ownership. This joint military and civil expedition was christened “Operation Top Hat”, collecting rock samples and flattening a bit off the top off with explosives. Good work, chaps. We also preserve copies of the “Long Version”, running an additional 200 feet (about 5-6 minutes of 16mm film). But although these materials came to the BFI at the same time, for reasons that currently completely escape me the catalogue reference number for that film is number 10949.
It’s an unusual set of films and unlikely to be anyone’s first choice five to start a collection. But if this rather pointless examination of arbitrary fate shows anything, it’s a demonstration of the breadth and disparate nature of parts of the BFI National Archive collection. Next up, catalogue bingo?
– Jez Stewart, Curator of Animation
Malcolm Le Grice (1940-2024)
It was sad indeed to hear of the passing of important, brilliant artist and filmmaker Malcolm Le Grice who died in the run up to Christmas.
Only a few months before, I had been to see his last show, at the Velarde Gallery, in Le Grice’s home county of Devon, where paintings and pastel works, unseen for decades, were presented alongside key, iconic film works – and a DNA imprinted record, contained inside a small metal capsule, of aspects of his filmmaking practice.
I had got to know Malcolm through the deposit of his entire film negative collection, plus numerous digital works, restorations and a retrospective, in 2016. Just before we reached Christmas, I wrote this obituary.
– Will Fowler, Curator of Artists’ Moving Image
New ‘Inside the Archive’ videos
Over the Christmas period we added two new videos to our ‘Inside the Archive’ YouTube playlist.
First up, in a suitably seasonal special, Acquisitions and Metadata Librarian Anastasia Kerameos explores our pre-cinema collection and shines a spotlight on a lantern reading of Dickens’s timeless classic, A Christmas Carol.
Then we time-travel, from Victorian entertainments to 21st century amusements, as we explore how the archive is adding Netflix titles to our collections.
Huge thanks to the teams involved in the production of these videos, which have both been received very well on YouTube and across the BFI’s social media channels.
– Alex Prideaux, Marketing & Events Manager (Our Screen Heritage)
The Inside the Archive blog is supported by the BFI Screen Heritage Fund, awarding National Lottery funding.
