Select Committee on Culture, Media and Sport Written Evidence


Memorandum submitted by the UK Film Council

1.  INTRODUCTION

  1.1  The UK Film Council welcomes the new inquiry by the Culture Media and Sport Committee into the care of archive collections. In particular our submission focuses upon the care of and access to moving image collections nationally and in the regions.

  1.2  The UK Film Council supports the evidence submitted by BFI to the previous inquiry on Protecting and Preserving our Heritage (HC 912). This short paper offers supplementary evidence to address the specific questions raised in connection with funding, acquisition and disposal and the remit and effectiveness of DCMS, MLA and other relevant organisations.

  1.3  This paper draws upon the submission drafted by the BFI and highlights issues of particular relevance to the UK Film Council's strategic role and remit.

2.  FUNDING

  2.1  Care of film collections is extremely expensive, perhaps more so than any other cultural material. The media are expensive and unstable, and demand very high quality storage environments to retard deterioration. In the long term, film must be copied to preserve it, and further copies must be made to allow it to be seen. For a simple sound print from a colour film, this might cost £8,000 for a typical feature around 90 minutes in duration. Specialist conservation work multiplies this many times over. There are several hundred thousand hours of material in the BFI National Archive. There are substantial collections in regional film and video archives in England and the national collections in Wales and Scotland. The publicly funded English Regional Film Archives (RFAs) alone contain in excess of 280,000 separate films, programmes and videos.

  2.2  Revenue funding of the BFI National Archive is currently in the region of £4 million per annum, and this is under pressure owing to increasing costs set against grant-in-aid that is declining in real terms. Public funding for the main eight RFA collections in England comes from a variety of sources including the Regional Screen Agencies, local authorities, higher education and the Heritage Lottery Fund. These eight RFAs have an approximate annual turnover of £1.7 million, of which less than £600,000 is in the form of annual revenue support, the balance being one-off and project funding and earned income. Many smaller collections in the English regions receive no public funding at all. The total public support for the BFI National Archive and the RFAs is a small fraction of the funds made available to other cultural sectors, including libraries, museums and galleries - which are also known to be under funded.

  2.3  The National Audit Office inquiry of April 2003[42] identified serious shortcomings in the care of the BFI's National collections, with a significant proportion of the Nation's heritage actively at risk—despite application of significant additional funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund and through generous donations from the Late Sir John Paul Getty. Since then, the BFI has been able to invest significant additional sums in storage to safeguard the collections. The solutions are, however, temporary in nature and significant extra funding needs to be found to effect a permanent solution.

  2.4  The situation at the RFAs is very variable with some collections well-catalogued and held in modern, stable facilities. However there are significant parts of the holdings of the eight RFAs which are at risk of decay, or held in unsuitable conditions, or uncatalogued. The Media Archive for Central England (MACE) for example has found it impossible to find a permanent home for its collections and has recently been given notice to quit its current premises by its landlord, the University of Nottingham.

  2.5  This lack of resources is an area where the HLF can only provide a partial solution. Some of the challenges faced by the BFI and RFAs can be broken into discrete projects with the sort of strong access outcomes which HLF—quite properly—requires. There is however a real need for additional infrastructure and revenue funding to bring stability to these institutions and allow for the unglamorous tasks of preserving, cataloguing and storing vulnerable material in the long term.

  2.6  So far as access is concerned, the BFI stands out, internationally, in the level of access it provides to its collections through traditional means: research access; theatrical distribution and loan of prints for film clubs; DVD release. It is also taking a lead in digital access. Its ground-breaking screenonline service reaches users across the UK and will soon be available in all schools. Screenonline, however, features about 450 hours of material, almost exclusively clips because of rights restrictions. To give a similar level of access to the collection as a whole would require the investment of an estimated £100 million, excluding rights clearance. RFAs at their best provide first-class regional access via broadcast partnerships, bespoke DVD releases and the creation of educational material. MACE's touring programme Midland Journeys, for example, generated different programmes for Nottingham, Leicester, Birmingham, Derby and Coventry featuring material from its own collections, the BFI and elsewhere. Yorkshire Film Archive has produced ground-breaking educational materials illuminating local topics for schools in the region. Such initiatives excite great interest from local audiences and are invaluable in generating sense of place and encouraging an interest in local history and citizenship. RFA access programmes are however held back not only by the condition of collections but the lack of staff time to generate project proposals, attract project funds and curate material.

  2.7  In short, funding for both care of the collections and providing access is woefully inadequate, both for the BFI National Archive and throughout the entire audio-visual archive sector. The film and moving image archive has the potential to offer significant "public value" and provide a lasting legacy for the UK as a whole.

  2.8  So far as the 2012 London Olympics is concerned, the impact on lottery funding is not yet clear. Whist there are opportunities for film archive projects to benefit from Olympic funding and to add great value to the cultural events surrounding the Games, the level of support for such projects is not yet evident.

3.  ACQUISITION AND DISPOSAL

  3.1  Compared with other cultural heritage artefacts, film, video and other moving image material is subject to a range of unusual features and constraints:

    —    It is reprographic, and the technical process of production is complex. This means that the concept of the "original object" is hard to define, and authentic copies—and alternative versions or works—proliferate. The original production materials generally occupy a far higher volume than the final viewing or distribution materials, and are inherently hard to access (an original camera negative without sound is essentially useless to the consumer). Nevertheless, the production materials are highly prized and often jealously guarded.

    —    It is prone to the rapid evolution of technology. This has been especially marked with video, with new formats appearing, being adopted and then phased out at an alarming rate. This means that archives are faced with managing collections of original material that cannot easily be viewed, or undertaking to migrate the content to new formats at great expense (and often with some compromise to the quality of the material).

    —    It is overtly commercial, and rights are separated from the physical materials. So although an archive may hold a copy, or even the original production materials of a work, it may not (and usually doesn't) hold any rights beyond individual research access on its own premises. Indeed, the problem of rights ownership means 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. Furthermore, a great deal of significant material is not deposited at all, but retained by the producer.

    —    The transition to digital production and distribution raises two new problems, one practical and one more philosophical. Practically, there are major conservation issues surrounding digital film. The technology is expensive and yet not stable, raising serious questions about the archive's ability to preserve material in the long term, even presuming that studios would be prepared to deposit digital production materials to archives. Philosophically, one can speculate whether it will be meaningful, in the long term, for archives to hold digital copies, when it is assumed that they will be universally available.

  3.2  Disposal, therefore, is rarely a problem from the perspective of legal restrictions. Of greater concern is the requirement to contact owners of the materials and rights holders before disposal. Because rights frequently change hands, but rights holders do not notify the BFI/RFA of the fact (indeed, they may not be aware that the BFI/RFA holds physical materials), this can be difficult—so much so that it is cheaper to leave the material in store.

  3.3  It should also be noted that, unlike many heritage collections, film and video are mass, reproduced and reproducible media: there is a public expectation that films and programmes should be shown in multiple locations (exactly as films on release are) and a lack of awareness or understanding of the limitation which rights issues place on wide access. Put bluntly, many members of the public do not understand why archive films are not widely and easily available in cinemas and online.

  3.4  In light of all the above, one must ask whether it is reasonable to preserve large collections of moving image material, at public expense, when the archive is so severely restricted in the use of the material.

  3.5  The answer is that a great deal of material, highly valued today, has only survived because archives collected and preserved what they could. And, as centres of knowledge and expertise, archives have used their collections to safeguard and promote a broader and deeper cultural understanding of film and television, far beyond the narrow view of commercial producers. Furthermore, by developing and retaining the specialised skills required in the care of archive moving images, they are frequently able to assist the commercial sector in keeping our heritage accessible.

  3.6  Statutory Deposit, as recommended by the Kenny Committee in 1999, would offer a partial remedy. It has, however, been resisted by some sectors of the film industry, and the BFI has been locked in negotiation over voluntary deposit ever since. Note that films funded by the UK Film Council and other public agencies include the requirement for deposit as a term in the funding agreement.

  3.7  BFI collecting policy takes account of these unique and difficult factors. A current initiative by the UK Film Council, BFI, Regional Screen Agencies, RFAs and MLA to formulate a UK Film Archive strategy will co-ordinate the collecting policies of all of the publicly-funded film archives in the UK; it should be pointed out however that resources and to achieve this are limited.

  3.8  The draft of that strategy defines three key criteria that must be taken into account when considering material for acquisition: cultural significance to the people of the UK, fitness for purpose and affordability:

    —    Cultural significance to the people of the UK enables us to place a proper emphasis on British production, but collect international material where it has had a significant impact or where it reflects the diversity of the UK population.

    —    Fitness for purpose encapsulates a number of issues concerning the purpose of collecting, and intended use. This will also seek to prevent the unnecessary retention of multiple copies in more than one location other than for access purposes.

    —    Affordability recognises that there are significant costs associated with the acquisition process, long-term storage and access, which must be balanced against cultural significance and fitness for purpose.

4.  REMIT AND EFFECTIVENESS OF RELEVANT ORGANISATIONS

  The remit and effectiveness of DCMS, the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council and other relevant organisations in representing cultural interests inside and outside Government.

    —    As noted above, the UK Film Council is currently working with the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council as well as with the BFI, Regional Screen Agencies and others to formulate a UK-wide Film Archives Strategy. The level of co-operation on this project from all parties is to be welcomed and the opportunity which must be grasped by all concerned is how to ensure that the Archives are fully supported and funded for the future.

September 2006





42   Improving access to, and education about, the moving image through the British Film Institute, report by the Comptroller and auditor General, HC 593 Session 2002-03: 11 April 2003. Back


 
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