Moving images have been with us since the late 19th century, and from day one they’ve been forever in flux, technologically and culturally. But the moving image screen has experienced three full-fledged revolutions: fundamental changes in technology causing equally seismic shifts in film content and form, production and consumption permanently altering the nature of moving image itself, and its relationship to society.
First came the coming of projected film from the late 19th century. Second the arrival of broadcast television in the middle decades of the 20th century. And the third revolution? The revolution of our own time is the coming of webfilm, or online video, accessed on platforms such as YouTube, TikTok, Vine and many more. We cannot understand moving image today – either the creativity of its practitioners and content, or its societal impact – without placing online moving image at the heart of our analysis.
This revolution has seen so many new forms of filmmaking emerge. But it’s also seen other genres, sectors and traditions, rooted in earlier eras and long preserved in the Archive, revived and mutated as online forms.
The online moving image landscape extends from vlogs to advertising to web series; it encompasses music video and fiction shorts, independent documentary and citizen journalism; it includes official public information, oppositional campaigning, corporate promotion and training, charity and health awareness-raising, fashion and dance film, educational resources, personal testimonies, formal experiments and more.
In other words, so many of the things that film has done since its birth as a medium it now, principally, does online, changing its nature in the process. And beyond doubt, the online landscape has enabled a far greater demographic diversity of filmmakers to emerge than has ever been seen in any other field of screen production.
Given the enormous and ever-growing scale and fragmentation of webfilm, and the complex challenges that the Archive faces in acquiring it, such material remains under-represented in the national collection (despite some successful curatorial interventions over recent years to acquire examples).
However, thanks to the support of the BFI Screen Heritage Fund, awarding National Lottery funding, the BFI National Archive is now actively addressing this gap via a dedicated acquisition programme.
- Patrick Russell, Senior Curator of Non-Fiction
This project is supported by the BFI Screen Heritage Fund, awarding National Lottery funding.
