Filming fashions: early cinemagazines are showcased on the BUND site |
BACK IN 2001 we ran a story about an archive of materials from the golden age of cinema newsreels, which had just then gone online. This was a project by the wonderful British Universities Film and Video Council (BUFVC), which exists to promote the study and use of sound and film in higher education.
This summer, the BUFVC got back in touch with us and pointed out that things have moved on a little over the past seven years, and perhaps we could take another look at their site, and at the other online resources now available to UK students. Which, as it turns out, was some kind of invitation.
The importance of newsreels to British culture in the first half of the twentieth century is hard to overstate. Newsreels were, of course, the only source of moving-image news before the advent of television, and they were watched by vast numbers of people on a weekly basis. Newsreel organisations such as Pathé and Gaumont shaped the UK’s news agenda and its politics, and had a profound influence on cultural norms and identities. Fortunately, the great majority of the films made by newsreel companies survive in commercial newsfilm libraries.
In 2001, though you could sift online through wonderful collections of documentary material – shooting scripts, shot lists, commentaries and the like – you would have been hard-pressed to access the actual cinema news. Now, amazingly, students can view, at the click of a mouse, around 80 percent of the documentary material that still exists: the complete archives of Pathé, Movietone, Gaumont, and some of Paramount. With the addition of early television news and commercial archives, from Associated Press Television News for example, students can engage with the full history of British moving-image news, as well as material on a range of specialised subjects: areas such as fashion and design, the history of computing and medicine.
Whatever your interested in, the place to start is the BUFVC’s fabulous online archive, the British Universities Newsreel Database (BUND). This is a world-leading resource for the study of newsreels and cinemagazines, which has been much expanded since our last visit. BUND is a free, fully searchable database of 180,000 stories charting the history of British cinema news since 1910. It includes 80,000 digitised production documents – commentaries, dope sheets, shotlists etc. – providing evidence of how the news was made, eyewitness accounts of historical events and primary source material. There are also individual histories of 100 series, audio interviews with newsreel staff (provided by BECTU History Project), a historical Who's Who of the newsreel and cinemagazine industry, and comprehensive web links to related online resources.
The big attraction of newsreel history is, of course, the newsreels themselves, and this is where the internet comes into its own. An excellent BUND micro-site, for example, tells the story of early sound news through the work of one its first editors – who would go on to be a famous film director. David Lean and Gaumont Sound News includes 30 minutes of streamed GSN stories including the first election address by Oswald Mosley in 1931.
You can also now view many hours of cinema newsreel online. BUND links directly into the Pathé archive, with direct access to 3,500 hours of material. The other key site is NewsFilm Online (NfO), which has around 3000 hours of newsfilm drawn from newsreels (primarily Gaumont) and selected television news footage dating back to the mid 1950s. NfO also holds an online archive of digitised studio scripts, and individual histories of newsreels and television news. Video playback and downloading are available to staff and students at subscribing universities and colleges.
NfO and BUND, in other words, are throwing you the keys to the film vaults. Now it’s up to you to catch them! |
