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Last Friday evening, at the Scala
Theatre, was an occasion in many
respects as significant and memorable
as it was wonderful. It may be left for
future generations to realise the full
extent of its importance ­ men and
women yet unborn who, by the magic
of a little box and a roll of film, will
be enabled to witness the marvels of
a hundred years before their age, in
all the colour and movement of life.
Perverse old grandfathers will no
longer be able to indulge disdainfully
in reminiscences of the superiority of
the times `when they were boys'; the
past will be an open book for all to
read in, and, if the grandfathers
exaggerate, they may be convicted by
the camera's living record. Man has
conquered most things; now he has
vanquished Time. With the
cinematograph and the gramophone
he can `poť the centuries as they roll
past him, letting them loose at will,
as he would a tame animal, to exhibit
themselves for his edification and
delight. The cinematograph, in short,
is the modern Elixir of Life ­ at any
rate, that part of life which is visible
to the eye. It will preserve our bodies
against the ravages of age, and the
beauty, which was once for but a day,
will now be for all time.
The above is a review of a
notable film from 1912, The
Coronation Durbar at Delhi, filmed
in the early colour process
Kinemacolor, and produced by
Charles Urban. It raises a number of
points relevant to a consideration of
the history of film archiving. In the
first instance, it expresses a sentiment
central to any film archiving operation,
viewing film as a time machine that
will make the past or present visible
to grateful future generations. Calls
for film archives were common in the
early years of filmmaking in this
country, and it was notable news or
actuality films such as that of the
Delhi Durbar which were cited as
suitable examples for inclusion, not
fiction films, unless they perhaps
recorded the performance of some
notable stage performer. The review
presupposes that future generations
will share the same interests as those
in 1912, in this case in a pageant of
Empire, or that they will still view
such a film in the same spirit as when
it was made. And, despite its romantic
fervour, the passage does
acknowledge some limitation of the
film record, which can only confer
immortality on what is visible to the
eye.
The next point is that the
Kinemacolor film of the Delhi Durbar
is considered to be a lost film. No
print is said to survive in any of the
worlďs film archives, and only 88
years later those future generations
are denied the chance to see what
would certainly be a film of
considerable interest to us still, from
a number of perspectives. The Delhi
Durbar film was made over twenty
years before any national film archive
had been established, and the
company that made it and most of its
Kinemacolor productions were lost
to history, neglected or destroyed once
they became of no financial value.
But there is a further,
archival twist to the tale, because no
longer is the Kinemacolor Delhi
Durbar film a lost film. A portion of
it has been discovered, in the
Krasnagorsk film archive in Russia.
Lost films are just occasionally
rediscovered, and this film had been
lurking in an unsuspected corner of
the film archiving world, hidden under
a different name for all those 88 years.
But the twists of fate continue, because
it is not the whole of the film that has
survived. The original film lasted
almost three hours ­ what has survived
is around twenty minutes, and that of
mostly uninteresting military reviews
that took place after the main Durbar
ceremonies, and it does not feature
the spectacular main ceremonies,
parades of elephants, and so forth. A
fragment from the edges of a greater
thing is all that now exists, its story
perhaps more interesting that the film
that survives itself.
Why the film survives in this
form gives us a further lesson in the
nature of film archives and their
holdings. This particular section was
extracted from the main film when
the First World War broke out, and
any film of troop movements was
considered good box office. Film has
this particular quality as a medium,
whereby you can cut pieces out of it
and create a whole new work, like
some biological process. Film can not
only be re-edited, it can give birth to
new works out of itself. The Durbar
film had been catalogued in the
A Short History
of Film Archiving
This article was first given as a paper on the study day, `Film Archives and Collections: Exploring
the Sector' held at Birkbeck College for the AHRB Centre for British Film & Television Studies.
Luke McKernan is Head of Information at the British Universities Film & Video Council.
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British Universities Film & Video Council
www.bufvc.ac.uk
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Russian archive as a First World War
production, which in terms of this
particular ediťs production history
was quite correct. The film was only
found because a film researcher was
looking for footage to go into a
television production on the history
of the British Empire, and so the film
finds itself a new home and a new
identity, and in the form of the edited
television programme will eventually
reside in a television archive. Such
are the complexities of the medium,
and how a film survives and where
alters its history and its meaning for
those who care for it, or wish to learn
from it.
Film is not
the elixir of life, and
we now put in
q u a l i f i c a t i o n s
b e f o r e e v e n
considering it as a
time machine. That
we have come to
q u e s t i o n i t s
messages has not
l e s s e n e d i t s
i m p o r t a n c e ,
however ­ indeed
the film record
becomes all the
richer for the
multiplicity of ways
in which it can be
interrogated. But
there is some irony
in the fact that when film archives
were eventually established in the
1930s, it was largely not from an
impulse to preserve actuality records
of the past that would otherwise
vanish, but to preserve the best of
what was seen as the `art of film'.
That is a simplification, certainly (it
ignores the anomalous existence of
the Imperial War Museum, which
undertook to preserve official film
records of the First World War from
its inception in 1917), and there was
effort made to preserve what were
seen as news and actuality records of
value, but the people who founded
and manned the first film archives
were brought up on the burgeoning
art film movement (notably Soviet
films) of the 1920s, and were
particularly activated by the threat to
silent films by a callous film industry
which had now discovered sound. A
statement made at the founding of
the Museum of Modern Arťs Film
Library in New York in 1935 makes
the aims clear:
The art of the motion picture
is the only art peculiar to the twentieth
century. As an art it is practically
unknown and unstudied. ... This new
and living form of expression, a vital
force in our time, is such a young art
that it can be studied from its
beginnings; the `primitives' among
the movies are only forty years old.
Yet the bulk of all films that are
important historically or aesthetically,
whether foreign or domestic, old or
new, are invisible under existing
conditions. To preserve these films
and make them available to the public
for study and research is the aim of
the new Film Library.
The focus was to be the film
that was deemed important,
historically or aesthetically, a
selectivity borne partly out of limited
resources, but also out of a quite
particular view, from a particular
point in time, of what sort of film
should be preserved and made
available for study.
Those words `to preserve'
and `to make available' are of course
central to the purpose of a film
archive. It is possible to be quite
prescriptive about what a film archive
should be, and it follows rules laid
down to a large extent by the first
film archives, following from the
particular nature of the medium itself.
An archive, according to the
dictionary, is `a repository of public
records or of records and monuments
generally'. A film archive, however,
means a particular process by which
a film repository is maintained. A
collection of videos on a shelf is not
a film archive. It will not last; it
preserves nothing. Inherent in any
film archive with a true `public gooď
remit is that word `preservation'. Film
is a fragile medium, and in going
through a mechanical
process each time it is
viewed necessarily
suffers from wear-andtear,
as well as being
subject to inevitable
chemical decay that
affects both nitrate and
acetate film stock. A
principle was of
acquiring, in simple
terms, a master copy
which would then
remain inviolate and
u n v i e w e d , w i t h
duplicate printing
material and then a
viewing print being
made from this
original, subject to
funds, which would
then become the copy to which the
public could have access for study.
This basic principle has been the
cause of no end of trouble for film
archives, which have been too often
seen as preventing material from
being seen, sitting on it until those
future generations should get the
benefit, not realising that posterity
might just be now.
The history of the national
film archive in this country illustrates
something of the changing territories
and priorities for moving image
archives. In 1935 the British Film
Institute established a National Film
Library, with the aim of creating a
`repository of films of permanent
value'. It was recognised even then
that an ideal archive would preserve
every film, its Committee noting that
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British Universities Film & Video Council
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A reconstructed colour image from the rediscovered Delhi Durbar film
CopyrightTWI2000
`every film has a historical value of
some kinď. But limited resources
imposed selectivity. It was also
recognised that a system of statutory
deposit would be essential if the
archive were not to be continually
holding out a begging bowl. Sixtyfive
years on it is still waiting for such
a system to be instituted (however, a
partial system of statutory deposit has
existed for commercial British
television since 1990).
The National Film Library
became the National Film Archive in
1955, by which change of name it
posted that its prime purpose was not
to be a lending service but to preserve.
A further name change in 1993 to the
National Film and Television Archive
made clear a responsibility for both
media that had in fact been in force
for some while. Now the archive has
undergone a further change of name,
absorbed within a larger concept of
BFI Collections, reflecting a BFI wish
to streamline its operations, and
maybe expressing a fear of that very
word `archive', with all its
connotations of something had hides
its treasures away, promising them
only for that posterity that never
comes.
There are in fact four
national film archives in this country:
the BFI's, the Imperial War Museum's
Film and Video Archive, the Wales
Film and Television Archive and the
Scottish Screen Archive. All are
recognised by FIAF, the international
federation of film archives, which
also has as a member the North West
Film Archive. The North West is one
of a network of eight so called regional
film archives, a network which has
been growing since the founding of
the East Anglian Film Archive in
1976. All of these archives are
represented collectively as the Film
Archive Forum. This blossoming of
what have been best described as
public sector moving image archives
shows how really the concept of a
`national film archive' is now wider
than one institution could or should
represent, and reflects in particular
moving image productions made for
and by local communities that were
not considered when the notion of a
`repository of films of permanent
value' was first put forward. The
`national film archive' has become a
collective responsibility.
In short, the focus has
shifted, and our sense of film history
and film culture has shifted. That
history and that culture is, or should
be, a far broader and more complex
picture than the traditional history of
cinema which the national film
archives were founded to preserve. It
is necessary to put in that qualification,
because we need to reflect on why
the attention of students and
researchers is drawn to certain sectors
of the overall national film archive,
and not to others. To what extent is
there a canon of films obscuring the
value of other film holdings, other
histories of cinema? What can be done
to encourage academic or creative
interest in the less frequented corners?
Is such a potential interest justified?
What can the history of film teach us
that the history of cinema does not?
There are many kinds of film
archives and film collections in this
country. The British Universities Film
& Video Counciľs Researcher's
Guide now identifies some 450
moving image collections in the UK
that are open to some degree or other
to researchers. They range from stock
shot libraries to newsfilm libraries to
subject specialist collections to
television libraries. Few are concerned
with preservation, but without
preservation we will end up with no
film heritage at all. We must never
forget this. Meanwhile, let us uncover
and learn from all that we can. The
variety and the complexity and the
richness of the moving image records
of our time should not only entrance
those future generations that were
evoked in 1912, but demand our
fullest attention here and now.
Luke McKernan
Head of Information, BUFVC
Luke@bufvc.ac.uk
References:
Articles
`The Durbar in Kinemacolor', The
Bioscope, 8 February 1912
Roger Smither and David Walsh,
`Unknown Pioneer: Edward Foxen
Cooper and the Imperial War Museum
Film Archive, 1919-1934, Imperial
War Museum Review, no. 9, 1994
Books
James Ballantyne (ed.), The
Researcher's Guide: British Film,
Television, Radio and Related
Documentation Collections (London:
British Universities Film & Video
Council, 2001)
Penelope Houston, Keepers of the
Frame: the film archives (London:
British Film Institute, 1994)
Websites
Charles Urban, Motion Picture
Pioneer
http://website.lineone.net/~luke.mc
kernan/Urban.htm
The International Federation of Film
Archives (FIAF)
http://www.cinema.ucla.edu/fiaf/
The Film Archive Forum
http://ww.bufvc.ac.uk/faf
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British Universities Film & Video Council
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