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NEWSLETTER
Summer 04
THE
YEAR AHEAD SHEFFIELD
IN PREMIER POSITION...
…No, not in today’s Premiership, however much supporter John Garrett
(above) might wish, as he looks for his grandfather in the early
1900s crowd. At this time, Sheffield United had a vast following,
like many football clubs, and some of the Mitchell and Kenyon hoard
of early films show Sheffield and other historic northern clubs
in action.
Spring is the season of postgraduate training for the Centre this
year, with a total of four events planned. First comes a day at Birkbeck
on 25 February devoted to the relatively new issue of ‘practice-based
research’. Next, the scheme launched last year in association with
Nottingham’s British Silent Film Festival, to bring postgraduates
for a special ‘collegium’, continues in April. This year the annual
All-Ireland Postgraduate Film Seminar meets in Dublin on 21 April,
with the theme of regional and national film and television. And on
19-20 May Lincoln offers a residential postgraduate training event
on film and broadcasting policy.
Planning for the new Film and Media Research Centre at Birkbeck continues,
with a timetable that begins in August with demolition work and will
see the new building designed by award-winning Surface Architects
open in Spring 2006. As well as housing the AHRB Centre’s co-ordinating
office, this will provide greatly expanded facilities for screenings
in a 70-seat state of the art auditorium, equipped with 35mm, 16mm
and digital projection, together with a large seminar room and some
exciting interior spaces (think Caligari in Warhol colours!).
This year the AHRB becomes a research council, with inevitable changes
to follow. The Centre has not been offered Phase II core funding (only
two applicants have been successful), but discussions are under way
to see how the Centre will continue. A majority of Centre partners
have indicated they wish to continue working together, to build on
the Centre’s achievements and pursue its work. A number of major grant
applications are pending. IC
Behind the recent BBC Television series, The Lost World of Mitchell
and Kenyon, which has brought the films to a gratifyingly wide audience,
lies a pioneering AHRB-funded research project linking the British
Film Institute’s National Film and Television Archive to a network
of historians. Co-ordinated by Vanessa Toulmin of the National Fairground
Archive at Sheffield University, and Patrick Russell of the National
Film and Television Archive, with Simon Popple of the University
of Teeside, the first fruits of this research are published in a
BFI book, which scrutinises the evidence supplied by the films from
a wide range of specialist standpoints – from early cinema historians
and regional experts to historians of football and ceremonial, and
including the current AHRB Fellow in Creative Arts, Patrick Keiller.
The Peter Worden Collection of M&K is likely to remain a unique
find – the Tutankhamen’s Treasure of early cinema, as it has been
dubbed. But many less spectacular collections are housed in regional
(and national) audiovisual archives, still awaiting the research
that can bring them back to life. With the welcome news that the
DCMS Museums, Libraries and Archives Council is looking closely
at the funding of regional film archives, it is to be hoped that
M&K points the way for more and higher-profile research into
the audiovisual heritage. There’s more gold in them there cans and
cartons…