Neither sublimes nor catastrophes: digital affordances in silent film heritage and suggestions from home movies collections

Abstract

ABSTRACT The digital optimism of the past decade has been reflected in many policy documents related to cultural heritage in which digital technology is portrayed as a great opportunity to bring cultural heritage to a much wider audience. This potential has been contested as widening access has proved much more complex than some at first thought. Despite that, in this paper we argue that curators of national silent film collections can realistically get inspired by grassroots participatory projects. We consider two digital projects: silent feature films in the British context; and silent home movies in Italy. The first study considers the BFI Player as part of the broader BFI digital strategy. We examine the development of institutional practices to digitally publish silent films, the role of the archive and curators, and the new public experiences of silent cinema. The second study is a grassroots project that looks at the role of digitisation in the re-use of digitised footage from Sicilian home movie collections. The study explores digital forms of organisation and access to this material and how they encourage creative reuse. We extrapolate some best practices that curators and policy makers might find useful and could follow nationally and locally.