Using Moving Image Archives

Blank Page A Scope e-Book Using Moving Image Archives Edited by Nandana Bose & Lee Grieveson Published by: Scope: An Online Journal of Film and Television Studies, 2010 Copyright: Scope: An Online Journal of Film and Television Studies ISBN 978-0-9564641-1-8 Cover Design: Nandana Bose Cover image: still of Annabelle More in Serpentine Dance (American Mustoscope Company, 1896) Using Moving image Archives Table of Contents Notes on Contributors .................................................................................. i Acknowledgements ................................................................................... iii Introduction .............................................................................................. 1 Nandana Bose and Lee Grieveson Part I: The Archive and the Nation Amateur Film and the Interwar English Countryside ....................................... 6 Michael McCluskey Critical Reflections on Film as a Historical Source: A Case of the Military Regime in Brazil .................................................................................................. 16 Nina Schneider Part II: The Ephemerality and Textuality of the Archives Audiences from the Film Archive: Women‘s Writing and Silent Cinema ............ 32 Lisa Stead Archival Realities and Contagious Spaces: Shop Girls, Censorship and the City in Damaged Goods ...................................................................................... 48 Heida Johannsdottir Part III: The Televisual and Digital Archive Reading Political Comedy: Yes, Minister and Discursive Contexts ................... 64 Matt Crowder The Representation by French Television of Building Construction Work in and around Paris during the 1960s ................................................................... 82 Jacob Paskins Archives and Prefigurative Practices: Digital Games Walkthough Archives as Record and Resource .............................................................................. 101 Daniel Ashton, Bath Spa University Notes on Contributors Editors: Nandana Bose is Assistant Professor in the Department of Film Studies at University of North Carolina Wilmington. She has published in Velvet Light Trap, Studies in South Asian Film and Media and Feminist Media Studies, and has a forthcoming article in Cinema Journal. Lee Grieveson is Reader in Film Studies and Director of the Graduate Programme in Film Studies at University College London. He is the author of Policing Cinema: Movies and Censorship in Early Twentieth Century America (University of California Press, 2004), and co-editor, most re- cently, of Inventing Film Studies (Duke University Press, 2008), with Hai- dee Wasson. Grieveson is the co-director, with Colin MacCabe, of an Arts and Humanities Research Council funded project ―Colonial Cinema: Mov- ing Images of the British Empire.‖ Contributors: Daniel Ashton is Senior Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies at Bath Spa University. His research interests include digital culture, media indus- tries, and cultural labour. He has published in M/C, Participations, and the Journal of Media Practice. Matt Crowder is currently researching a PhD into the reception of British television political comedy at the Media Arts Department of Royal Hollo- way, University of London. His research addresses how viewers enjoy or criticise television in the context of the text, television culture and British social history. He previously studied Film and Literature at the University of Warwick and Film and Television Production at University of Bristol. He also works part-time at the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea and lives in south London. Heida Johannsdottir is working towards a PhD in Film and Cultural Stu- dies at University College London, where she is a research fellow. Her dis- sertation focuses on British silent cinema and representations of women, work and city space. She has taught courses in language and culture at the University of Iceland, the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Univer- sity College London. Her research interests include silent and contempo- rary cinema, representations of the city, gender politics, and ideologies in media and popular culture. Michael McCluskey is a PhD student in the Department of English at University College London. His thesis on the writer and filmmaker Humph- i rey Jennings looks at interwar and post-war urbanisation and shifts in in- dividual, regional and national identity. Jacob Paskins is a PhD student in Architectural History and Theory at the Bartlett School of Architecture at University College London. His AHRC-supported thesis is a social and cultural history of building construction work in and around Paris during the 1960s. Jacob obtained a BA in French & History of Art (UCL, 2006) and an MSc in Built Environment: Architectural History (UCL, 2007). He is a member of the research project ―Autopsies: the afterlife of dead objects,‖ which forms part of the UCL Film Studies Space work in ―Cinematic Memory, Consumer Culture, and Everyday Life.‖ Nina Schneider studied History, Theatre- and Film Studies in Leipzig and at the University of Essex, where she is currently finishing her PhD (―The Official Propaganda during the Military Regime in Brazil, 1968-1979‖). She has been teaching European and Latin American History at the University of Essex and the FernUniversität Hagen, Germany. Moreover, she gained work experience in film production companies in Munich and the BBC His- tory Unit. Trying to reintroduce the notion of power into cultural history, she is interested in reconstructing the complex ways in which films are products and/or shapers of culture and identity in a specific historic context. Lisa Stead is a PhD student in the Department of English at the Universi- ty of Exeter, where she is completing a thesis entitled ―The Popular Fe- male Cultures of the British Silent Cinema.‖ This AHRC-funded project in- vestigates female-centred early British film cultures, exploring women‘s active involvement within a wide range of extra-textual cinematic dis- courses. Lisa also volunteers as a cataloguing assistant at the University‘s Bill Douglas Centre for the History of Cinema and Popular culture and acts as student representative for the BDC advisory board. Her wider research interests include adaptation, gothic cinema and literature, and textual scholarship and literary archives. ii Acknowledgements We would like to thank the Arts and Humanities Research Council which funded the ―Using Moving Images in Academic Research‖ project for over two years. None of this would have been possible without the vision and direction of Roberta Pearson. We would like to acknowledge the important role played by the numerous institutions, speakers and delegates who were involved in the delivery and administration of three workshops as part of the training programme for doctoral students based in United Kingdom. We extend our thanks and gratitude to Toby Haggith and the Imperial War Museum, Bryony Dixon and the British Film Institute, Lar- raine Porter and the Broadway Cinema and Media Centre in Nottingham, Iestyn Hughes and the National Screen and Sound Archives of Wales, Ruth Washbrook and the Scottish Screen Archive, James Patterson and the Media Archive of Central England, and Frank Gray and Screen Archive Southeast, and University College London. Special thanks to Maire Mes- senger-Davies, Ian Christie, William Uricchio, Peter Kramer, Jon Burrows Stephen Hughes, Patrick Russell, Philip Wickham, Kay Gladstone, William Fowler and David Walsh, Andreas Fickers, Giovanna Fossati, Mathew Lee, Francis Eames, Orlagh Mulcahy, Kevin Brownlow, Luke McKernan and Heida Johannsdottir. Special thanks to Elizabeth Evans, Mark Gallagher, Julian Stringer and An- thony Smith for their support during the editorial process. Above all, our thanks go to all the contributors of this special issue. iii Blank page Using Moving Image Archives ISBN: 978-0-9564641-1-8 Introduction Nandana Bose, University of North Carolina Wilmington, and Lee Grieveson, University College London In January 2009, doctoral students from across the United Kingdom, archivists, and scholars gathered in London for the third and final time to discuss and de- bate the use of archives in their interdisciplinary study of moving images. What did an archive represent, both materially and symbolically, to researchers from fields as diverse as archaeology, communications, gender studies, history of medicine, and film and media? How could moving images held in archives be utilized in interdisciplinary research? The closing graduate conference was the culmination of a two year programme funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, led by Roberta Pearson and Lee Grieveson, with the collaboration in particular of the Imperial War Mu- seum (IWM) and the British Film Institute (BFI). The events were held at the IWM, the BFI, Broadway Cinema in Nottingham, and at UCL. Collectively, archivists, graduate students, and faculty reflected on the nature and intent of archival research and how archival resources could be utilized in a plethora of ways, and treated as an object of academic study through multiple, cross-disciplinary ap- proaches. These events were unique opportunities to foster dialogue between archivists and academics about archival holdings, practices, and usages, and to address broader questions on the nature and function of archives and moving images. Various issues and challenges encountered by students highlighted the need to address questions

Load more