Regional Archives – Negotiating the Actual and the Virtual in Changing Times

The regional film archives of England are owned and operated within different contexts and each one has nurtured partnerships and relationships that have provided varying degrees of revenue and support. Each archive brings to its region a very particular and unique set of skills, facilities and experience that are essential to the preservation and development of that region’s film heritage. What they continue to generate are organic collections which contain amateur and professional production, fiction and non-fiction, and on all gauges and formats. For many of the collections, it is amateur silent non-fiction on narrow gauges that predominates. As such, they offer rich and varied representations of the landscapes, lives, work, leisure, culture, history and identities which are quite different from the material drawn from more corporate and commercial sources (and as exemplified by the history of feature films). What is fascinating is that these archivists have been developing collections that reflect the diversity and variety of film history and it is because of their representations of and multiples connections to communities and everyday lives that these archives and their collections have built such strong and powerful bonds with individuals and communities and their memories. These are collections that relate not just to a history of film but also to a much more pluralistic understanding of history, connecting as they do to such histories as those of communities, gender, art & design, work, industry, economics, the home, family, tourism, commemoration, identity and place. Given this pluralism, what the archives nurture are the many the uses of their collections – in education, by communities and individuals, within commercial production and through creative re-use.