The City and the Archive:Television History, Heritage and Memory Research in Action

Television archives are of vital cultural importance, but their significance is often underappreciated. Helen Wheatley and Rachel Moseley have used television archives to engage communities (particularly here in Coventry), benefit cultural organisations, identify, restore and digitise new materials for collections, exhibitions and new television programming, and raise the profile of archives within media organisations and with the public. They have worked with a range of organisations on this from the BBC to the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum, the Media Archive for Central England and Coventry Cathedral. Their research initiated and shaped an exhibition at The Herbert Art Gallery and Museum, and national tour, of The Story of Children’s Television (2014-17), and produced an exhibition and series of screenings, Ghost Town: Civic Television and the Haunting of Coventry (2018-). Their work has contributed to the exhibition 2 Tone: Lives & Legacies (Herbert Art Gallery and Museum, 2021) and the forthcoming BBC4 documentary Phoenix at Coventry (2021).

Screening Rights Film Festival

The Screening Rights Film Festival is the Midlands’ first international festival of social justice film which takes place in venues across Birmingham and Coventry. Curated by Michele Aaron, it brings some of the most compelling recent films to the region, and opens them up for discussion with attendees through the high-powered, expert-filled, panels that follow every screening. The festival is not about sharing the world’s worthiest or bleakest films or spreading the love of noble intentions. It is about harnessing the power of film to entertain, educate and inspire change; to nudge us to do as well as think and feel. Through work on the festival, Michele Aaron explores how film can effect change in practice for practitioners (film-makers; arts programmers) and activists, and changes in social action and cultural perception for various publics (general users of film venues and specific communities targeted by film/theme selection in festival).

The Projection Project

The Projection Project investigated the shift from analogue to digital cinema projection. The research team, Charlotte Brunsdon, Jon Burrows, Michael Pigott and Richard Wallace revealed an unseen history of the industry, creating innovative exhibitions that allowed the audience to engage with this history. Cinema has experienced huge transformations across its 125 year lifespan, yet little attention has been paid to the changing roles and working conditions of cinema projectionists during this time. This project gathered a set of oral history interviews with both working and retired projectionists from around the country; researched trade union archives and film industry trade papers to show how projectionists' pay, working conditions, union organisation and job requirements have changed; produced a PhD thesis on how fiction films have represented film projection itself; offered an investigation of the new uses and practices of digital projection outside of the cinema, such as 'projection-mapping' and the rise of the ‘VJ’ mixing video live in nightclubs; made sensory, ethnographic comparison between the sounds of the analogue and digital projection box; and produced an online archive, The Cinema Projectionist.

Producers and production practices in the history of Italian cinema

The AHRC project Producers and Production Practices in the History of Italian Cinema, 1949-1975 explored the archives of Italian producers and production companies to enhance the understanding of the workings of a film industry that, at its height, was the second largest in the world. The project was based on a collaboration between Stephen Gundle and Karl Schoonover, and colleagues at Queens University Belfast and project partner, the Cineteca di Bologna. Their exhibition ‘Dream Makers: How Producers Made Italian Cinema Great’, which was inaugurated during the Cinema Ritrovato festival in Bologna in 2018, brought new stories about the golden age of Italian cinema to a wider audience. It attracted an estimated 10,300 Italian and international visitors.. Gundle and Schoonover’s work with the Cineteca di Bologna has also left a legacy of digitised primary materials, a permanent resource for those with a professional, cultural or personal interest in the workings of Italian cinema. The Cristaldi archive has been catalogued in its entirety and a strategically selected one fifth of it digitised in a directly-accessible online resource. This project was also the first to make use of the archive of ANICA (The National Association of Film and Film-Related Industries, founded 1944). The project brought ANICA's attention to value of its archive in understanding past production practices and rethinking its role today, stimulating a discussion about bringing the archive back to easier public access in Rome. Three documentary films were also produced that have been presented to academic and festival audiences.

Notes on Film / Eavesdropping at the Movies

José Arroyo started blogging in 2013 as a means of exploring and incorporating some of the new affordances digital cultures brought to film criticism. Since then Notesonfilm1 also become the repository and distributor of a series of three podcasts: In Conversation With (2018-), which was mainly conceived as a series of conversations on their practice with scholars (Lawrence Napper, Ginette Vincendeau, Deborah Shaw), novelists (Guy Bolton), programmers (Ian Francis, David Baldwin), artists (Twiggy, Joaquin Aras); Eavesdropping at the Movies (2016), a film criticism site co-hosted with Michael J. Glass, which was also conceived as an archive on filmgoing in the Midlands (guests include filmmakers, programmers and regular filmgoers and the conversation also comments on physical conditions of viewing and local film cultures. It is now nearing it’s 300^th episode); and The Youssef Chahine Podcast, co-hosted with Richard Layne, a comprehensive conversation on each of the works of the celebrated Egyptian filmmaker, which has benefitted from the interest and contributions of scholars (Martin Stollery) and Arab filmmakers (Yaser Hammad). Eavesdropping was taken up by Transmission, a two-week pilot for a local arts radio station organised by Trevor Pitt and supported by a-n and New Art West Midlands, and became a central part of their programming. All of these podcasts have drawn on local arts figures and organisations, they’ve fed the department’s teaching (special podcasts have been designed for students) and Notesonfilm1 has also been a repository and distributor of podcasts and video essays by students. The blogs alone regularly reach between 8-10,000 ‘clicks’.

Sensing the City/Concrete Cinema

• The Sensing the City project developed a range of innovative humanities-based methods for investigating urban space, taking Coventry as its case study. Michael Pigott’s work on the project focussed on the use of film-making and sound-recording as means of mapping, analysing and critiquing the urban fabric of the city, establishing a theoretical approach, and practical method, known as The Ignorant Camera. This resulted in an exhibition entitled Sensing the City: An Urban Room held at the Herbert Gallery and Museum in January 2020, featuring 5 of Pigott’s films, and a looping sound installation. This work was also featured by the Arts and Place Consortium (a national organisation of architects, cultural professionals and artists) via a case-study on their website and a livestreamed interview. One of the film installations was shown at UCL Festival of Culture (June 2019), and the album RING ROAD RING, which was made from sounds gleaned from the architecture of the Coventry Ring Road, has been played on UK and International radio stations such as NTS, CITR in Canada, KEPW in the USA, and the online field recording show Framework Radio.

  This engagement with the urban space of Coventry led to a parallel project entitled Concrete Cinema, conducted in collaboration with Coventry University researcher Dr. Miriam de Rosa, artist Blanca Regina, and the residents of Pioneer House, Coventry. This project involved working with the residents of a Brutalist tower block in the Hillfields neighbourhood, to develop a community event that would use the façade of the building itself as a screen on which to project ideas, dreams and shared experiences of living in the space, generated through workshops and collaboration with the local Sidney Stringer School.