2015 | 8 | Archive-Based Productions

In 1927, when Esfir Schub released her commissioned film The fall of the Romanov Dynasty to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the October Revolution, she hardly knew that her extensive use of film footage and newsreels of the event would mark the invention of a new ‘genre’: the archive-based production or compilation genre. Television has adopted this genre, but audiovisual archives have fuelled a wide array of programmes and genres beyond compilation productions.
Government, business, broadcast and film archives as well as amateur collections and home videos are commonly used to spark memories and re-enact events from the past in various contexts. They are made widely accessible and re-used in traditional broadcast productions or given a second life in digital environments through online circulation.
In this issue of VIEW, scholars, archivists, and other media practitioners consider, highlight and elaborate on the use and re-use of moving image archives in various productions.
Co-edited by Claude Mussou and Mette Charis Buchman

Now showing 1 - 11 of 11

'Goodwill Ambassador': The Legacy of Dutch Colonial Films
Hendriks, Gerda Jansen (2015-12-30)
This article looks back at the films commissioned and produced by the Dutch government about their colony in the East Indies between 1912 and 1962. The main focus is on newsreels and documentaries about the colonial war between the Netherlands and Indonesia (1945 to 1949). The article discusses these films and their re-use in later television programmes. The programmes often look back at the colonial war in ways that go beyond the purpose of the original films and the article aims to show the methods that are used to do this.
'Plundering' the Archive and the Recurring Joys of Television
Kerrigan, Lisa (2015-12-30)
As we experience unprecedented access to archive material through online platforms and archive based productions, it is tempting to think that the appreciation of archive film and television material as a historical object in and of itself is a contemporary popular development. The growth of television archives within national institutions and broadcasting companies in the last thirty years, and the large number of missing programmes from earlier decades, seems to confirm the idea that television in the 1950s and 1960s was viewed and experienced as ephemeral. It is unusual then, to find a series devoted to archive television in the BBC2 Saturday night schedule in the mid 1960s. Plunder was billed as “a weekly raid on the BBC archives” and ran as part of the discussion series Late Night Line-Up from 1965–67. Largely showing excerpts from pre-1955 programmes, the series invited viewers to enjoy what presenter Michell Raper called ‘the vanished joys of television’ including interviews with notable figures and more formal fixtures of early television such as ‘interlude films’. This article will detail the use of archive footage within the series and consider the programme’s production and reception.
Archive Footage in New Programmes: Presentational Issues and Perspectives
Bryant, Steve (2015-12-30)
Archivists have traditionally been concerned about what they have seen as incorrect usage of archival footage in new documentaries, but changing technologies and programme-making conventions have made this inevitable. This paper considers aspects of these changes, focussing particularly on the issue of how the introduction of widescren television affected and continues to affect the aspect ratios in which archival materials are presented, using examples from recent and contemporary television documentaries from Britain and the USA.
Authorship, Autobiography and the Archive: Marilyn on Marilyn, Television and Documentary Theory
Kerr, Paul (2015-12-30)
In 2004, documentary theorist Michael Renov described “the recent turn to filmic autobiography” as “the defining trend of ‘post-verite’ documentary practice...” In 2008 Renov went further still, suggesting that “the very idea of autobiography challenges/reinvents the very idea of documentary.” Archive based autobiographical filmmaking, meanwhile, is even more problematic for documentary theory. Indeed, a number of recent documentaries, because of their status somewhere in the spectrum between biography and autobiography, have prompted the construction of an entirely new conceptual category, deploying archival film, often in the form of home movies, to document the lives of their human subjects in Renov’s formulation ‘shared textual authority.’ In this article I examine one of ‘my’ own archive based documentaries, Marilyn on Marilyn (BBC2, 2001), as a way of asking questions not just about biographical and autobiographical documentary but also - and perhaps more urgently - about attributions of authorship in archive-based documentary.
Compiling European Immigration History: The Case of Land of Promise
Meuzelaar, Andrea (2015-12-30)
Today, television’s reliance on archival footage seems to be intensifying due to the improved accessibility of European broadcast archives and the increased amount of available digitized broadcast material. This article presents an analysis of a recently broadcast Dutch television series, Land van Aankomst (‘Land of Promise,’ 2014), which has benefitted significantly from the improved accessibility of broadcast archives and the increased availability of digitized broadcast material. This three-part Dutch television series narrates the history of post-war immigration in Europe and is constructed from archival footage from various European broadcast archives. This article analyses the compilation strategy of Land of Promise and assesses what kind of European immigration history the series articulates through the selection and juxtaposition of archival footage.
Editorial
Mussou, Claude; Buchman, Mette Charis (2015-12-30)
Archives have traditionally been the result of individual or collective decisions taken on political, institutional or business grounds in order to preserve documents and make these accessible for use. In the current digital ‘era of plenty,’ which enables an unprecedented creation of, and access to archival content, it seems that the very definition of an archive and its usage is being challenged.As a journal that aims to bring together archival expertise and academic knowledge on television history and culture and the role of archives in mediating the past, VIEW is proud to present an entire issue dedicated to ‘Archive Based Productions.’ Unlike other issues, this issue features the most contributions written by archive professionals, which can be found in the Discovery section of our journal. These archival discoveries complement the more scholarly explorations, which offer a broader perspective on archives as ‘launch pads’ for new productions.
Eyewitnesses of History: Italian Amateur Cinema as Cultural Heritage and Source for Audiovisual and Media Production
Simoni, Paolo (2015-12-30)
The role of amateur footage in archiving and documenting the past has only been recently acknowledged in the Italian media landscape. The article makes a comparative overview of practices of appropriating and re-using amateur heritage in different European countries and in Italy from the 70s onwards, when home movies as audio-visual resources were discovered by television authors and experimental filmmakers. Television programmes and documentary productions based on amateur cinema such as Inédits in Belgium, La vie filmée in France, Familien Kino in Germany and later the European co-production Unknown War are just a few of the earlier examples of productions aimed at re-telling history through unknown and unofficial audio-visual materials. Unlike other European countries, Italy has been confronted with a lack of policies for the collection and preservation of private audio-visual documents, which has impeded the accessibility of this type of material. An early Italian example of a production re-using amateur footage, La nostra vita filmata (RAI, 1986), did not achieve its aim of reconstructing the 20th century history through the lens of private film material and the voice of the amateur authors and witnesses. At the beginning of the new millennium, an increasing interest in amateur footage led to the birth of the Archivio Nazionale del Film di Famiglia (Italian Amateur Film Archive), founded in Bologna by the Home Movies Association in 2002. Two successful later productions re-using amateur footage (Un’ora sola ti vorrei and La bocca del lupo) furthered the enthusiasm in Italy for archiving and accessing amateur film. All of these initiatives have strengthened awareness of the potential of amateur film to represent and recreate the past, using the bottom-up perspective of the eyewitness. This article is a descriptive piece of the different initiatives that have raised awareness of, accessed, and re-used amateur film archives in Italy as well as in other European countries.
Histoire Parallèle/Die Woche vor 50 Jahren (La SEPT/ARTE 1989-2001): Newsreels as an ‘Agent and Source of History’
Meyer, Jean Christophe (2015-12-30)
This article gives an overview of Histoire Parallèle/Die Woche vor 50 Jahren, a history programme that stands out through its longevity and format. Discussions in this article are based on archive material and statistical data from Institut National de l’Audiovisuel, Arte and Deutsches Rundfunk Archiv, an interview with Marc Ferro, the presenter of the show, as well as press material from the time.
Scratch's Third Body: Video Talks Back to Television
Goldsmith, Leo (2015-12-30)
Emerging in the UK in the 1980s, Scratch Video established a paradoxical union of mass-media critique, Left-wing politics, and music-video and advertising aesthetics with its use of moving-image appropriation in the medium of videotape. Enabled by innovative professional and consumer video technologies, artists like George Barber, The Gorilla Tapes, and Sandra Goldbacher and Kim Flitcroft deployed a style characterized by the rapid sampling and manipulation of dissociated images drawn from broadcast television. Inspired by the cut-up methods of William Burroughs and the audio sampling practiced by contemporary black American musicians, these artists developed strategies for intervening in the audiovisual archive of television and disseminating its images in new contexts: in galleries and nightclubs, and on home video. Reconceptualizing video’s ‘body,’ Scratch’s appropriation of televisual images of the human form imagined a new hybrid image of the post-industrial body, a ‘third body’ representing a new convergence of human and machine.
The Television Archive on BBC Four: From Preservation to Production
Goblot, Vana (2015-12-30)
Reusing audiovisual archive material is a growing trend on television and has many purposes, ranging for commercial to more ‘purely’ social and cultural ones. Focusing on the uses of the television archive on BBC Four, the BBC’s ‘custodian of archive’ and digital channel for arts, culture and ideas, this article examines a selection of archive rich programmes shown on the channel, in order to explore the ways in which the television archive is becoming indispensible in programme making. Based on interviews with BBC Four programme makers, the article further posits that memory, nostalgia, aesthetic and moral judgement and, crucially, self-reflexivity are at play in archive-based programme making, and propose three distinct production approaches – interpretative, interventional and imaginative – all of which contribute differently to the television archive’s being seen as a ‘creative tool’.
Visions of Reconstruction: Layers of Moving Images
Paalman, Floris (2015-12-30)
After WWII, films accompanied the reconstruction of Europe’s destroyed cities. Many contained historical footage. Howwas thismaterial used to articulate visions of reconstruction, what happened to thematerial later on, and howdo these films relate to the city film archive? This question is approached in terms of collective cognitive functions, applied to a media archaeological case study of Rotterdam. In focus are two audio-visual landmarks, a municipally sponsored ‘film suite’ from 1950 and a television documentary from 1966, as well as their historical footage, all with different temporal horizons. This study attempts to position the city film archive in media history.

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