House of Commons - Culture, Media and Sport

Select Committee on Culture, Media and Sport Sixth Report

4 Audiovisual archives

193. Although they are relative newcomers to the sector, archives of moving images are a significant and valuable part of our cultural heritage, providing an enormous amount of information about our history and society, communicating across generations to inform understanding and build community identity.[396] They have much potential to support formal and informal learning, contribute to the collective memory of the nation and provide ongoing inspiration and fuel for the creative economy.[397]

194. The popularity of film archives with the public was illustrated by the size of the audience when the BBC broadcast "The Lost World of Mitchell and Kenyon", a co-production with the British Film Institute (BFI), which featured a recently discovered collection of films of everyday life which had been made in late Victorian and early Edwardian Britain. The three episodes, on consecutive Friday nights, attracted over 4.5 million viewers a week , then a bigger audience than for "Big Brother" and only a little short of that for the "The X Factor".[398]

The composition and funding of the audio-visual archive sub-sector

195. The Film Archive Forum is the representative body for the public sector moving image archives in the UK, and its members include the two national archives and the eight film archives covering the English regions. It advocates the development of the sector and advises on national moving image archive policy.

196. The national collections are the Imperial War Museum's Film and Video Archive of 120 million feet of film and 6,500 hours of video tape, including records from the two World Wars, and home movies of life in wartime, and the British Film Institute's National Film and Television Archive. The latter's 750,000 titles from the earliest days of film-making in 1895 to the present include 50,000 fiction film titles, 150,000 non fiction films and over 650,000 television titles, rare Victorian and Edwardian films, and major news events, not to mention more than 20 years of Parliamentary proceedings. The wealth of material of every genre ranges from silent newsreels to CinemaScope epics, from home movies to avant-garde experiments, from classic documentaries to vintage television, from advertisements to 3-D films, soap opera to football. Ms Amanda Nevill, the Director of the British Film Institute (BFI), gave us a vivid picture of the size of the collection when she told us that the BFI looked after 27 acres of film archive,[399] which amounts to hundreds of thousands of hours of material.[400] BFI core funding comes from DCMS through the UK Film Council.

197. Non-print publications are not subject to legal deposit, and although extension of statutory deposit obligations to films has been recommended by a series of committees,[401] the Legal Deposit Libraries Act 2003 specifically excludes sound and film. These continue to be deposited only on a voluntary basis, with the British Library and the British Film Institute respectively.[402] Statutory deposit has been resisted, in particular by major studios, and the BFI has been locked in negotiation with them over voluntary deposit.[403] BFI, as the designated National Television Archive under with the Communications Act 2003, acts as the repository for commercial terrestrial public broadcasters in the UK.

198. Regional film archives have come into existence only during the last thirty years, with coverage of the whole country—by a network of eight regional archives—having been achieved as recently as 2000. The publicly funded regional collections contain nearly 300,000 separate films, programmes and videos, including regional television programmes, news broadcasts, newsreels, industrial films, documentaries, advertising films, travelogues, artists' film and video, campaign films, educational films, and home movies, from the end of the nineteenth-century to the present day. It has been estimated that last year over 30,000 people attended screenings presented by regional archives, that over 1.4 million people attended exhibitions in museums and public spaces featuring moving images from regional collections, and thirty million people viewed footage from those collections in regional and national television broadcasts.[404]

199. Witnesses described the funding of the regional film archives as "absurd",[405] and "pitiful",[406] referring to the total central government funding for all the regional film archives, which has remained at about £250,000 for the last five years. Most DCMS funding for film is channelled through the UK Film Council which invests £7.5 million a year into regional film activities through the Regional Investment Fund for England, which supports the nine Regional Screen Agencies, which then provide the core funding for the regional film archives. The course of this funding stream has been described as "tortuous".[407] The UK Film Council has allocated strategic responsibility for the regional film archives to BFI, but without any corresponding transfer of funds.[408]

200. We were told that regional film archives subsist largely on project funding, which some of them have been very successful at bringing in, but that this exacerbates the pressure and disguises the root problem of a lack of adequate core funding.[409] We heard that they were unable to develop or deliver from their low funding base and were almost all in a permanent state of financial crisis, with the possibility of "losing an archive or two at any moment".[410] Several, including the Yorkshire Film Archive, face imminent closure, despite the Yorkshire Archive having been seen as a "success story" and a "stunning example" which had managed to put together a very persuasive plan to draw in funding.[411] Its view was that the current situation led to instability, the inefficient use of resources, both human and financial, and threatened "to squander the investment that has already been put in place". It said that a relatively small level of central support would produce stability and unlock a range of social benefits that would be highly cost-effective:[412] the amount needed to deliver a first class, joined-up sector for the whole English Regional Film Archive sector would be £1.4 million per year.[413]

201. The Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) has provided £23 million to film archives, about half of which went to the BFI.[414] As HLF funding is required to be additional, and is tied to access, HLF cannot fund long-term infrastructure and core work which, we were told, were "unglamorous" and not attractive investment propositions for other potential sponsors.[415] Ms Nevill told us that HLF would like to fund film archives to a greater extent but that, unless it was confident that the core funding was there, it would be very difficult for HLF to look at film archives as a sector and be prepared to consider joined-up bids.[416]

202. Apart from shortage of funds, the audio-visual archive sub-sector faces particular problems specific to its structure (or lack of it) and the nature of the materials with which it is concerned. It was suggested to us that the sector had suffered from the perception if it being an immature newcomer to the heritage sector and that unnecessary tensions have been created by its falling between the creative industries and heritage sectors.[417] Another problem is that care of both film and television collections is extremely expensive,[418] as these fragile media require stable and environmentally controlled storage environments and highly specialised care strategies,[419] while formats are increasingly prone to obsolescence.[420] One unfortunate and fairly early illustration of the speed of obsolescence was the BBC's publication of a video disc of the Domesday Book to commemorate its 900th anniversary in 1986: both the disc and the system for reading it were obsolete within fifteen years.[421] We were told that the problems are not confined to older material, so that even very recent material is in danger.[422] Although digital technology provides a means of preserving high quality copies, and significant opportunities for increased access, BFI was among those who commented that the technology was not only expensive, it was also unstable, raising serious questions about the conservation and long-term preservation of the material.[423]

203. The BFI told us that it had streamlined its storage and conservation to safeguard its collections, and invested in care, but the solutions had been partial and temporary, and BFI needed more funding to effect permanent solutions.[424] The UK Film Council said that the situation at the regional film archives was very variable, with some collections well-catalogued and held in modern, stable facilities, but that significant parts of the holdings of the regional film archives were at risk of decay, held in unsuitable conditions, or uncatalogued.[425]

204. Problems of rights ownership mean that most film archives do not collect material with full title, as museums generally aim to do, but accept material "on deposit"—a form of long-term loan, with ownership of both rights and the materials retained by the depositor. The National Film and Television Archive, for example, owns the rights to only about a third of the material which it holds.[426] As BFI said, in the long term, film has to be copied if the content is to be preserved, but the archives have found that current copyright law presents an obstacle because content cannot be copied or digitised without the consent of the owners of the rights.[427] The Gowers Review of Intellectual Property, which was published on 6 December, gained an immediate welcome by the Government, which said that it would take forward all the recommendations addressed to government.[428] Among these were recommendations to amend the legislation by 2008 to permit libraries to copy the master copy of all classes of work in permanent collection for archival purposes and to allow further copies to be made from the archived copy to mitigate against subsequent wear and tear (recommendation 10a) and to enable libraries to format shift archival copies by 2008 to ensure records do not become obsolete (recommendation 10b). Both the British Library (whose Sound Archive is one of the largest archives of music and other audio works in the world) and the BFI have welcomed the recommendations.[429]

205. We welcome the Government's statement that it will take forward the recommendations of the Gowers Review recommendations for which the Government is responsible. We hope that amendments to the law of copyright to allow archival copying will be brought forward in time to prevent further losses from the collections.

National strategy for audio-visual archives

206. Dr Frank Gray, the Treasurer of the Film Archive Forum, told us that building and supporting audiovisual archives as institutions had been "a patchwork affair" because it had relied on alliances with local authorities, record offices and museums, with a significant role also being played by higher education, and there had not always been a very good steer or leadership.[430] The Forum told us that, in the absence of a national strategy, there had been no coherent pattern of regional investment and development and no sustained revenue support.[431] The Archives Task Force's report, Listening to the Past, Speaking to the Future, found that, because of a lack of public policies designed to provide a strategic framework for the development and sustainability of the audiovisual archive sector, it had not benefitted from the same kind of public investment in its preservation, documentation and its availability to the public.

207. During the last five years, however, steps have been taken towards the creation of a developmental strategy for the audiovisual archives sector in the UK. In 2004 the UK Film Council convened a Film Heritage Group whose Moving Image Heritage: National Strategy Paper (2005) proposed an integrated approach in which the BFI would take a national lead while committing to an active partnership with the regional film archives. The paper proposed a 'twelve-month specification project' for the creation of a new national digital archive network and made a case for an additional £485,000 stabilising funding to be applied in 2006/07 to allow a breathing space "so that nothing vanished" while the background work was done. BFI's Director, Ms Nevill told us in October 2006 that nothing had come of that,[432] but that the BFI was leading on a coordinated approach to the creation of a strategy for the future development of archives. [433] She described to us the direction it was taking and the questions which were being asked, for instance whether it was really necessary to hold archive stores in every region.[434]

208. When he gave evidence to this inquiry, Mr David Lammy said that he thought there had been three problems for the sector, "the degree of fragmentation with film being in lots of different places and the different sectors not always being able to speak to each other", the nature of film preservation (in which digitisation was going to be key), and intellectual property issues, enabling libraries to be able to use master copies and to give access to those film archives to their communities.[435] He said that DCMS would work with the BFI and the UK Film Council, to get more investment in and coherence and greater focus in relation to film archives, when they had reported on their work on national strategy. The Film Archive Forum has been working alongside the UK Film Council, the BFI and the regional film archives and is hopeful that the work will lead to a more structured and integrated approach to delivering the benefit of these collective heritage resources to people right across the country. But it said that "the reality remains that the English archives are perilously under-funded" and "action is needed soon if we are not to lose some archives altogether".[436] It is expected that the strategy for the BFI national archive and the eight regional film archives will be published on 31 May.[437]

209. We commend the lead role being played by the British Film Institute in creating a strategy for the audio-visual archive sector which should address the issues of perceived fragmentation, and provide a basis for a sustainable future for this part of our heritage. In the short term, DCMS must address the funding shortfall of the regional film archives as an urgent priority to ensure that they do not disappear before the strategy can be put in place.

396 British Film Institute, Protecting and Preserving our Heritage, Third Report of Session 2005-06 HC 912-II Ev62, Film Archive Forum, ibid Ev 153, Yorkshire Film Archives Ev 425 Back

397 Yorkshire Film Archives Ev 425, Richard Taylor, Director of the East Anglian Film Archives Ev 398, HC Deb 4 December 2006 c130 Back

398 Ms Amanda Nevill, Director of the British Film Institute Ev 99 Q119, Media, Communications and Cultural Studies Association Ev 334, HC Deb 4 December 2006 c134 Back

399 Ev 99 Q119 Back

400 British Film Institute Ev 87 Back

401 See the Report of the Working Party on Legal Deposit set up under the chairmanship of Sir Anthony Kenny, July 1998 Back

402 British Library Ev 35 Back

403 British Film Institute Ev 88 Back

404 Film Archive Forum, Protecting and Preserving our Heritage, Third Report of the Culture, Media and Sport Committee, Session 2005-06 Written Evidence HC 912-II Ev 153 Back

405 Dr Luke McKernan, Chairman of the Film Archive Forum Ev 99 Q120 Back

406 Yorkshire Film Archive Ev 424 Back

407 HC Deb 4 December 2006 c 131 Back