Learning on Screen10 Years of the IWM Student Film Festival
The Imperial War Museum’s Student Film Festival, to be renamed the ‘IWM Short Film Festival’, will return in 2014 after the IWM’s closure for major refurbishment. Toby Haggith, Senior Curator in the Department of Research at the Museum, provides a guided tour of its history and celebrates the festival’s first decade of activity.
About the Author: Toby Haggith is a historian who joined the Imperial War Museum’s Film Department in 1988. He has a PhD in Social History from the University of Warwick and has published various essays on film and history. In 2000 he became head of non-commercial access to the film and video collection and responsible for devising the daily Public Film Show programme. In 2001, he started the IWM Student Film Festival (now the IWM Short Film Festival) and was closely involved in the creation and recording of the musical tracks on the Museum’s DVD release of the digitally restored 1916 film, The Battle of the Somme. He is now a Senior Curator in the Department of Research and is currently leading the Museum’s project to restore and complete the British concentration camp documentary, retrospectively titled, Memory of the Camps.
… the Museum has often been critical of the way that its footage has been misused in television programmes
Origins
The Imperial War Museum was set up in the wake of the First World War as a memorial to the sacrifice and effort of that great conflict. In a particularly far-sighted initiative by the Museum’s first curator and trustees, it was decided that film should be among the categories of record and artefact that would be collected and preserved to memorialise and document the war. The Museum’s moving image collection became the world’s first film archive and by some fifteen years the oldest in the UK. Despite its pedigree and the size of the holdings (it now holds over 20,000 hours of film and video tape), the Museum’s moving image collection is still relatively little known beyond a small community of scholars and professional film researchers.
The Ghost of Morris Horn, winner of the 2010 'Best Imaginative Response to the Subject of War'.
Since 1999 I have been the person mainly responsible for devising the Public Film Show programme and have also tried to use these screenings as a way of supporting the curatorial work of the Archive and to promote some of its aims. It was while thinking of ways that we might use the cinema programme to promote a more responsible and sensitive use of IWM archive footage in historical documentaries that I viewed Breaking Home Ties (1999), a short film sent in by Matthew Strong that he made while studying for a BA in Graphic Design and Film at Buckingham Chilterns University. I was bowled over by the imaginative way he used archival images to tell the story of his father’s experience of National Service during the 1956 Suez Crisis. It occurred to me that there must be many such films and videos produced by students as part of their course work but which were probably only ever shown publicly a handful of times and that potentially they deserved a much wider audience. At the IWM my colleague Matthew Lee and myself had already long been facilitating the production of such student films by providing access to IWM footage and arranging the telecine of selected clips at preferential rates. If we could provide a public showcase for these short films and videos, could we not also begin to engage aspiring young filmmakers in some of the issues that concerned us as well as making them aware of the riches of the Museum’s collection? In short, the Festival could not only contribute to the professional training of young film and television producers but also create greater awareness of the Museum’s film archive among the general public.
