Databasing Key Documents and Narrative Chronologies of Artists' Film and Video Distributors in the UK

Project Team:
Julia Knight (Principal Investigator, University of Sunderland)
Peter Thomas (Postdoctoral Research Fellow, University of Sunderland)
David Curtis (British Artists' Film and Video Study Collection)
Steven Ball (British Artists' Film and Video Study Collection)
Jane Gowman (Research Administrator)
Maisoon Rehani (Transcription/Support)

Project summary

The project will create a database of chronological information and key documents relating to artists'/independent film and video distributors in the UK from the 1960s to date, which have been collected as part of an AHRB funded research project. The database will be accessible via the British Artists' Film & Video Study Collection's website. Users' searches will generate bespoke chronologies, fully referenced bibliographies of the related documents held online, and direct the user to further relevant material on the BAFV Study Collection website. This will provide an extensive and previously unavailable research resource.

The research resource

For the past two years Julia Knight and Peter Thomas have been engaged on an AHRB-funded research project looking at independent film and video distribution in the UK during the 1980s and 1990s. This project has received a year's extension funding to examine developments since 2000 in the promotion of artists' film and video in particular. The research has focused mainly on the London Filmmakers Coop, London Video Access/Electronic Arts, the Lux, Circles, Cinema of Women, Cinenova, Film and Video Umbrella, FACT, the Arts Council, the British Film Institute, Channel Four, Greater London Arts, the London Film and Video Development Agency, and the GLC. We have collected hundreds of documents, including committee meeting minutes, policy documents, promotional material, development prospectuses, reports, funding applications, press coverage, budgets, artists' and funders' correspondence, royalty statements, and audience feedback sheets. We have also conducted around 50 interviews, with more scheduled before the end of the project.

Much of the history detailed in this material had been buried or forgotten, and we have had to track the documents down and reconstruct the history via a number of different sources - including the funders, other researchers, artists, curators, public libraries, and museums, as well as the distribution and artists' organisations themselves. Some documents have only survived due to individuals keeping their own paperwork long after they have left the organisations. We now have a large collection of material which forms an extensive institutional history of independent/artists' film and video in the UK, and of how that work was promoted and delivered to audiences. At the moment, however, all this material is stored either in electronic form offline or in paper form, and is accessible only to the members of the research team.

The proposed resource enhancement project will be a collaboration between the University of Sunderland (where Thomas and Knight are now based) and the British Artists' Film & Video (BAFV) Study Collection at Central St. Martins College of Art & Design. The aim of the project is to link together the collection developed through our current research project with that of the BAFV Study Collection via the latter's existing website. Given the institutional focus of our own collection and the artist-based emphasis of the Study Collection holdings, the two collections are highly complementary and, together, offer a huge research resource which can facilitate a much fuller understanding of how and in what context independent/artists' film and video has been produced, promoted and circulated in the UK. Such an extensive research resource has not to date been available.

The resource that this proposed project will put in place will be of enormous value and benefit to future researchers working in this area, and it is the intention of both the University of Sunderland and Central St. Martins to target future PhD studentships in this area of postgraduate research. The proposed resource enhancement will allow research to be developed in new directions, and also provide a framework within which to make future research findings available to the wider research community.

It is necessary to undertake this work because many of the organisations which nurtured and promoted independent/artists' film and video never saw it as a priority to properly archive their own records, and some have also evolved into different organisations over the years. The net effect is that their documents and records have become dispersed. As the British Film Institute has not collected this material, there is a real danger that much of this institutional history will be lost. Without this proposed resource enhancement, this material will remain uncatalogued and unavailable to the research community.

We have consulted with a number of researchers working in this field, with the Arts Council of England, the Lux and the LUXONLINE management team, and the REWIND early British Video Art Archiving Project. All of those consulted have identified the proposed resource enhancement as being of enormous potential value to researchers. They have advised that:

(1) the combining of our research materials with those of the BAFV Study Collection will substantially augment the latter's holdings and hence increase the Study Collection's value to researchers.

(2) making the material available online through a framework of narrative chronologies and a searchable database, and through links with related projects such as LUXONLINE and REWIND, is the best way of making it most accessible to as wide a community of researchers as possible.

(November 2004)

The resource is due to be launched in Autumn 2007