The 'Moving Picture' and Historical Research

Abstract

The Researcher's Guide to British Film and Television Collections' demonstrates how extensive is the record material which is available to the historian of the twentieth century in the form of the 'moving picture', either as film or as its electronic version, video-tape. Published in 1981, it lists ninety-one institutions, two-thirds of them maintained by public funds, which hold films and 32 others which hold material originally for television. Repositories maintained from public funds range from the National Film Archive with over 40,000 titles and the Imperial War Museum with over 25,000 separate items, amounting to over 50 million feet of film, to county Record Offices, city libraries and universities, some with just one or two items to others with several hundred or even thousands of films or videotapes. Private collections range from the BBC Film and Videotape Library of over 360,000 cans containing more than 330 million feet of film and 55,000 videotapes, and the newsfilm agency VISNEWS with some 40 million feet of film, some of it dating back to 1896 and to which is being added some 500,000 feet of newsfilm, the equivalent of some 250 hours of material, every year, to the film collections of industrial companies and associations for a variety of subjects. Awareness of the historical importance of this vast moving picture record material has been rapidly growing since the 1960s. There are few historians today who would still deny, at least in principle, that the moving picture provides an important addition to the range of sources available for the study of the twentieth century. There has also been a noticeable change of attitude concerning the difficulties which this non-written record material presents for the historian, or indeed about the desirability of using it at all. As a growing proportion of our profession came to consist of those who were already brought up in a society in which the moving picture, televised or projected, provided the primary form of communication as children we viewed before we learned to read and as adults we see and hear the news before we read about it the next day so too diminished the proportion of those