Learning on ScreenBFI InView – A New Source of History
The InView resource is a collaboration between Jisc and the British Film Institute, delivering hundreds of hours of material from the BFI Film and TV Archives. Patrick Russell looks at the aims of the project.
About the author: Patrick Russell is author of 100 British Documentaries (2007) and co-editor of Shadows of Progress: Documentary Film in Post-War Britain (2010) and The Lost World of Mitchell and Kenyon (2004). Patrick’s specialism is sponsored and industrial film. Patrick has worked at the BFI since 2000, and has been closely involved in many major archival projects from Mitchell and Kenyon to Land of Promise and Shadows of Progress.
Email: patrick.russell@bfi.org.uk
‘A New Source of History’
This bold prognosis for the infant medium of 35mm projected film was made by camera operator and fledgling theorist Boleslaw Matuszewski in 1898. He further urged that specialist repositories – film archives – should be founded to handmaiden this historic mission.
Matuszewski’s prescient manifesto subsequently acquired a certain fame among the archival film research community. But its implementation has been slow indeed. It wasn’t until the 1930s that film archiving grew into a vibrant international movement – with many financial, cultural and ideological odds stacked against it. (Britain, via the collecting work of the Imperial War Museum and the BFI, can reasonably claim to have taken a pioneering lead in preserving the non-fiction ‘film of record’ on an equal basis with the ‘art of cinema’).
… the paradigm shift is finally, perhaps, upon us
As for Matuszewski’s first prediction, that film would prove a mould-breaking source of evidence and illustration for historians, geographers and scholars across the curriculum: following decades of patchy developments, the paradigm shift is finally, perhaps, upon us. While a generation of fully visually literate historians has contributed, advances in digital technologies and network distribution are of course at the centre of this revolution, whose repercussions are yet to be fully understood. In September 2009 a new JISC-funded educational website, BFI InView (www.bfi.org.uk/inview), was launched, joining the ever growing suite of digital film resources available to academics (the BFI’s Screenonline among them).
Driving InView was the BFI’s desire to see its collections far more extensively used across HE – beyond its traditional film and media studies constituency. Thus, the resource makes available over 800 hours of non-fiction films and programmes for streaming and download, carefully selected from the BFI National Archive’s collections to benefit scholars and students across the curriculum. With the support of JISC, InView was able to digitise its film and video masters at High Definition, with concomitant benefits for the quality of the output digital files.
