If you ask most people what a film archive is for, they probably think it’s about ensuring that we still have copies of movies like Blade Runner to watch even after a nuclear apocalypse. However, it’s easily argued that a more important part of their job is safeguarding the thousands upon thousand of hours of social history footage that would otherwise be left to rot, and which shows us how people have actually lived since invention of the movie camera (and not just life through a fiction filmmakers lens).
It’s not just about locking the footage away for future sociologists to see what life was like before hover cars and teleportation, but so that everyone has access to as much of them as possible. The BFI and regional film archives across the UK are working together to try and ensure everyone has access to their film heritage for free via a new cataloguing and online access drive – Search Your Film Archives – which you can find at http://unionsearch.bfi.org.uk/
To promote the initiative, three great little featurettes, full of amazing archive footage, have been released, and we’ve included them here for you to have a look at. They’re all pretty fascinating, so watch them and head over new search site to see what footage exists that was filmed near you in the past 100 years.
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