School's not out: Research Viewing Service
The bfi's Research Viewing service is an invaluable resource for anyone studying film and television. It offers research access to the National Archive (National Archive) collections, including many titles unavailable elsewhere, and perhaps rarely or never screened.
The broad range of material held in the National Archive makes it a useful and well-used resource for many other subjects. The collections encompass documentary filmmaking, newsreels, and all kinds of television - a medium which itself manages to cover an incredible range of subjects - as well as feature films and other fiction films from all eras.
Below are some examples of how teachers and students of History, English literature, Politics, Music, Law, Psychology, Art & Design, Architecture, Medicine & Health Education, Theatre & Dance, have all made use of the Archive collection to further their studies.
Read more about our Research Viewing service.
Cancer - the Smoker's Gamble: Horizon (BBC, tx 20.6.1967)
A detailed study of the latest scientific evidence of research carried out in Britain and America in relation to smoking and the occurrence of cancer, and an assessment of its meaning. This and other episodes of Horizon, a documentary series which looks at the world of science and technology, were viewed for a Social Psychology PhD on the representation of scientists.
Der Gelbe Schein (GE, 1918, aka The Yellow Ticket)
This important silent film, featuring a young Pola Negri, portrays Jewish life under the Tsars at the turn of the century. Lea, a Jewish girl, living with her father in Sokolowice, Poland, wants to study medicine in St. Petersberg, though her religion would count against her and she will have to accept the "yellow ticket" (identity card) of a prostitute in order to do so. To enrol at the university she assumes the identity of her teacher's dead sister. Following an investigation her dual identity is exposed, she attempts suicide and is brought to the university to be operated on. The operation is successfully carried out by her professor who turns out to be her real father. Warsaw stood in as a location for both Sokolowice and St. Petersburg and some of the scenes were shot in the ghetto before its destruction. This film was viewed for an undergraduate dissertation on the representation of Jews in Weimar Germany.
The Weakest Link (BBC, tx 2000 - )
General knowledge quiz, famously hosted by Anne Robinson, in which nine contestants eliminate each other, one at a time, while attempting to accumulate a cash prize of £1000 per round. A PhD candidate, writing an article on decision making in mixed motive games, viewed the first 100 episodes of this programme.
Professional Foul: The Play of the Week (BBC, tx 24.9.1977)
Giving a good picture of the communist regime, and the difficulties of intellectual life, in Czechoslovakia around 1977 the plot centers around a Cambridge professor attending an international "Colloquium Philosophicum" and a former student who asks him to smuggle his doctoral thesis out of the country. Events force the professor to reconsider his position on ethics and he delivers a paper which does not please his hosts. This Tom Stoppard play for television was viewed for an English Lit. school essay.
The Lamp Still Burns (GB, 1943)
From the novel 'One pair of Feet' by Monica Dickens this is a propaganda drama made in collaboration with the Ministry of Health showing home-front heroism in a London hospital during World War II. Hilary Clark (Rosamund John) is a successful architect who decides to become a nurse. The film follows her through training and the demands of nursing. When she falls in love with a patient, engineer Larry Rains (Stewart Granger), she makes the tough decision to give up her love for the sake of nursing. This film was viewed by a postgraduate student researching the representation of nurses during World War II for their MA in History.
