The Archive on YouTube
Unveiled a year ago, the BFI National Archive's restoration of Cecil Hepworth's Alice in Wonderland (1903) recently became the first individual film to notch up a million viewings on the BFI's YouTube channel - a success many, many times greater than anything it would have enjoyed on its original release. What's particularly gratifying is that the comments make it clear that most of its new audience had never seen a film that old before.
Launched three years ago, the BFI's YouTube channel now features over 400 items. It may now be the highest-profile showcase for the collections of the BFI National Archive, and is updated at least once weekly.
Channel editor Michael Brooke explains the selection process: "The first stage is to find material that can legitimately be published on YouTube, which is a bigger challenge than one might expect. The Archive owns physical copies of hundreds of thousands of titles, but only owns the rights to a tiny fraction - and legal publication on YouTube requires us to be able to clear global distribution rights. This is why there's a definite but unavoidable bias towards early cinema and catalogues that the BFI either owns outright (the Topical Budget newsreel, acquired in the 1990s) or manages (British Transport Films, the COI collection). "
"Fortunately, this material is demonstrably popular, and often attracts a much wider audience than just film buffs. Pretty much anything featuring steam trains, old sporting fixtures or footage shot before World War I will go down well, and we often benefit from YouTube's two-way nature, as some of the comments from viewers are exhaustively detailed. They've helped us identify subjects, locations and even individuals, and sometimes they get involved in discussions with each other, which can throw up yet more information. This can sometimes be very valuable to our curators, as we often don't have the resources to research our footage in that kind of specialised depth."
"Sometimes our YouTube pieces are explicitly linked to other BFI projects (such as the Archive's recent Boom Britain and Tales from the Shipyard), sometimes they're tied into particular dates (Christmas, Valentine's Day, anniversaries of various kinds, including one-offs such as decimal currency's 40th birthday), but some of our most successful uploads were inspired by current events that were impossible to predict in advance. For instance, England's recent Ashes triumph inspired a newsreel item about a similar cricketing achievement from 1926, and John Barry's death triggered a clip from Ridley Scott's first film Boy and Bicycle, which Barry scored - and which was funded by the BFI Experimental Film Fund. And sometimes viewers add their own topicality - when we looked at the statistics for Geoffrey Jones' Snow (1963), they showed two huge spikes of interest that coincided with the UK's last two major snowfalls."
"YouTube now accepts films of any length, but we tend to favour shorter pieces. Most are under ten minutes, many under five, and some are less than a minute. This partly serves to highlight the fact that the BFI National Archive contains a great many extremely short films that have traditionally been awkward to programme in the past, but it also reflects the nature of watching films on YouTube, where they have to have an immediate impact to prevent the viewer getting bored and clicking on another link. It's an extraordinarily powerful medium, but it has its own rules, and we have to respect that."
Links
England's Glorious Victory! (1926)
