Inside the Archive #75: Bristol, Bologna and the Elsewhere in India project

In July, the BFI National Archive returned to Cinema Rediscovered at Watershed in Bristol. From our Inside the Archive exhibition, which offers a behind-the-scenes look at the work of the archive teams, to family activities, talks, screenings of BFI titles and workshops, it was an opportunity to share the breadth of our work with new audiences. Below, some of the team reflect on their activities and what made this year’s festival such a success.

Inside the Archive exhibition
Cinema Rediscovered was a great host for our Inside the Archive pop-up exhibition. Over four days, we welcomed festival-goers of all ages into the exhibition, chatting about film preservation and showcasing some of our archive materials. Our trainee film conservator, Oscar Woodiwiss, who joined us at the festival, helped explain in more detail what goes on behind the scenes at the BFI National Archive. It was brilliant to see people discovering the exhibition between screenings and finding new ways to connect with film preservation in a relaxed, hands-on environment.

– Molly Petter, Outreach & Engagement Producer

Chronically Online lunchtime talk
My talk with Creative Nonfiction Film Weekend (CNFW) and viral video star Paul Weedon, of I Can’t Believe You’ve Done This (2007), was an adventure far removed from the world of feature films. We discussed the challenges of curating and framing internet video for cinema and archival contexts.

We started with Orla Smith from CNFW taking us down some of the rabbit holes involved in securing permission to screen cultural touchstones such as British lads hit each other with chair (2016) and Tractor Boy (2006). Then, with a lot of input from our engaged and insightful audience, we discussed the history of internet video, the conflicted role of nostalgia in curation, and the value and future of preserving online video.

– Will Swinburne, Curator

The films of Black and South Asian workshops: reframing film session
Colleagues from across UK-wide exhibition, curation and audience development were invited to take part in a conversation on State of Emergence, a major BFI National Archive initiative to remaster, preserve and reintroduce films from the Black and South Asian Workshops of the late 1980s and early 1990s. As plans were developed to share the season more widely, participants discussed how the programme could reach audiences across the UK in thoughtful and locally responsive ways. The session introduced the programme and opened up conversation around exhibition opportunities, partnerships and how best to engage with audiences.

– Miranda Gower-Qian, Cultural Partnerships Manager

Whistle down the Wind (1961)
A screening of the BFI’s new 35mm print of Whistle down the Wind (1961) was well attended (despite being on a Sunday morning) and got a great reception. There are hopes that other venues might request the print for screening, where suitable projection conditions exist.

– Josephine Botting, Curator (Fiction)

It’s a common misconception that a projectionist can reap the perks of free entertainment on the job. Inside the projection room you’ll find only small portholes to view the distant screen, far from an ideal cinematic experience. During Cinema Rediscovered, this is where I met Ewan Dunford, Watershed’s Technical Resources Manager, hard at work on the premiere of the BFI’s new 35mm print of Whistle down the Wind.

Whistle down the Wind consists of five film reels with an approximate runtime of 20 minutes each. In order to create a seamless transition between them, Ewan operates two projectors, alternating reels between them so that light and sound can be transferred within seconds. As each reel winds closer to the final frame, it’s important to watch the screen for cue dots. These are small marks, often located in the top right hand corner of the frame, that let projectionists know the exact moment to switch from one projector to the other.

The end result is no result at all. If done correctly, the projected image continues unhindered by the reality of its separate physical parts. It’s worth keeping an eye out for those cue dots if you attend a 35mm screening in the future. They serve as a quiet indicator of the careful work that has taken place behind the audience for over a century.

– Oscar Woodiwiss, Trainee Film Conservator

Working within the Archive Access team, my role as producer includes developing collaborations and co-productions in traditional genres and formats, for example historical feature documentaries such as National Geographic’s Endurance (2024). However, I’m also interested in expanding the boundaries of creative reuse of archive moving image in immersive contexts, having first dipped my toe into XR with the StoryTrails project, which toured the UK in 2022.

In June this year, the BFI collaborated with Sheffield DocFest and two visionary Indian artists on a live performance of their extraordinary transmedia project Elsewhere in India, reimagining colonial-era BFI National Archive footage through digital repatriation and AI-augmented world-building before a packed house at the Crucible Playhouse. The project also featured in the festival’s Alternate Realities Exhibition.

Elsewhere in India is the brainchild of artists Murthovic and Thiruda (aka music composer and DJ Sri Rama Murthy and media artist Avinash Kumar), supported by seed funding from the British Council and UK co-producers Crossover Labs, with further support from international partners including, since 2023, the BFI. Their goal is not to act as historians but to tell new South Asian narratives by “turning the colonial gaze into Indofuturist docufiction”.

This performance was the latest iteration of a project that is almost impossible to categorise, melding as it does footage from the BFI’s India on Film (1899–1947) collection with game engine cinematics, immersive media and electro-classical music. Previously showcased as part of the 2023 BFI London Film Festival’s LFF Expanded programme, Elsewhere in India has been evolving and touring almost constantly, from gallery installations in Australia to performances at major festivals like Magnetic Fields in Jaipur.

What particularly drew me to the project was the concept of “digital repatriation”: reactivating and reimagining objects and moving image from Western collections, to create speculative narratives about South Asian heritage. Though far from evangelists for Artificial Intelligence (AI), the artists have also been interrogating the notion of “AI for cultural good”, an increasingly potent provocation. Offshoot ideas including a video game, a full-dome experience and even a linear feature film, are now under discussion.

I was lucky enough to visit India for the first time this year as part of a UK delegation participating in the EyeMyth Media Arts Festival in New Delhi and Goa. Co-founded by Kumar and supported by the British Council in India, the festival offered an inspiring insight into the boundary-blurring nature of cross-arts creative collaboration in India, where projects like Elsewhere emerge from an open, innovative ‘sandbox’ environment.

As an organisation, the BFI is having complex conversations around the role of AI, how we decolonise our collections practices and what a screen archive of the future might look like. It feels all the more urgent, then, that we engage with artists, both in the UK and internationally, to take creative risks and facilitate experimentation across genres, formats and platforms. This can help us to see our screen heritage through a fresh lens.

Special thanks to Selma Kerlow and Miranda Gower-Qian (BFI Cultural Partnerships) and to Katrina Stokes and Espen Bale (BFI Archive Access) for their ongoing support with this project. Find out more on the Elsewhere in India website or follow Elsewhere in India on Instagram.

– Simon McCallum, Producer (Archive and Industry)

The BFI National Archive has always had a visible presence at Il Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna, held in late June and, this year, celebrating its fortieth anniversary. We’ve partnered with the festival since the beginning, whether presenting new restorations or newly created film prints, as we did last year with a new 35mm print of Vernon Sewell’s thriller Strongroom (1962). At other times that contribution has taken the form of more extended programmes, as in 2023 with a selection of Michael Powell’s then newly remastered 1930s films, or loans of original material from the Archive’s collections for the festival’s many retrospective and thematic programmes, from Golden Age Hollywood directors to early cinema.

This year the BFI was as visible as ever. The week opened with an event that encapsulated everything that makes Il Cinema Ritrovato so special. Under a balmy, starry sky in the city’s central Piazza Maggiore, a new restoration of F.W. Murnau’s masterpiece Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927) screened to more than 7,000 people, accompanied by a full orchestra performing Timothy Brock’s new score. The restoration was led by the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, with the BFI National Archive contributing film elements and restoring the surviving Movietone sound elements. The following morning, BFI Head of Conservation Kieron Webb and Film Conservation Manager Elena Nepoti took part in an illuminating panel discussion about their work.

For those so inclined, as the closing credits of Sunrise rolled and with the applause still echoing around the Piazza, you could head to see a brand new 35mm print of Ed Wood’s Plan 9 from Outer Space (1958), created by the BFI National Archive to screen originally at BFI Southbank in curator Will Fowler’s Trash Cinema programme earlier this year. The Bologna screening took place in the beautiful and recently restored underground Modernissimo cinema, which sits just yards from the Piazza’s screen. I introduced the screening, speculating that it was the double-bill Murnau would always have wanted. The so-called ‘worst film ever made’ screened in the ‘midnight movie’ slot, and the striking disconnect between the opulent surroundings of the Modernissimo, the exhilaration of those who had just seen Sunrise and the bizarro Poverty Row world of Ed Wood’s legendary B-movie brought an atmosphere all its own.

The following day I introduced the world premiere of the BFI National Archive’s new restoration of Robert Hamer’s overlooked noir thriller The Long Memory (1953), screening in the festival’s large Arlecchino cinema. The film is a revenge tale drenched in melancholic postwar atmosphere and makes broodingly expressive use of the desolate mudflats of the Thames Estuary, as well as the then-crumbling Victorian warehouses that line the river along Shad Thames. The Film Foundation-supported restoration was a hit with the audience, many of whom were programmers at international archive festivals or cinematheques and have been quick to register interest in bringing it to their audiences.

Back in the Arlecchino a couple of days later, BFI curator Jo Botting introduced a new BFI 35mm print of actor-writer-director Bryan Forbes’s debut film Whistle down the Wind (1961). The print was struck to mark Forbes’s centenary this year and premiered in Bologna ahead of a further screening at Bristol’s Cinema Rediscovered in July and then at BFI Southbank in September, as part of a short retrospective of Forbes’s work. As Jo observed in her introduction, the film is beloved here in the UK but is less widely known overseas. It was heartening to see the title embraced in Bologna. Though it’s by no means exclusively a children’s film, it is one of the greatest films about childhood, and as noted by Il Cinema Ritrovato director Gian Luca Farinelli as he introduced Jo before the screening, one of the joys of cinema is that it makes children of us all when we’re in front of the screen. Look out for Jo’s forthcoming BFI Film Classics book on the film, published on Thursday 3 September.

Elsewhere, there were several opportunities to see archival material loaned to the festival from the BFI’s collections. BFI curator of silent film Bryony Dixon introduced or facilitated titles across the festival. These included a tinted 35mm print of The Last Days of Pompeii (1926), shown in a workshop exploring representations of antiquity in silent cinema and marking the launch of a new research website devoted to the silent antiquity films held in the BFI National Archive. There were also several BFI prints screened as part of The Century of Cinema: 1906 and One Hundred Years Ago: 1926 programmes.

On the festival’s final Saturday, Bryony introduced a rare, pristine print of Lady in the Dark (1944), starring Ginger Rogers, as part of the retrospective devoted to Hollywood director Mitchell Leisen. Two years ago, Bryony received the festival’s prestigious Vittorio Boarini Award in recognition of her contribution to widening appreciation of silent cinema – particularly British silent cinema – in general, and of her ongoing contribution to Il Cinema Ritrovato. Taken together, it was a week that demonstrated the breadth of the Archive’s work, and why Il Cinema Ritrovato remains such a special place for its collections to find audiences.

– James Bell, Senior Curator (Fiction)

Whistle down the Wind screens as part of the Projecting the Archive season at BFI Southbank on 4 September. Tickets for Whistle down the Wind are available from BFI Southbank.

The Inside the Archive blog is supported by the BFI Screen Heritage Fund, awarding National Lottery funding.