Make Film History: Opening Up the Archives to Emerging Filmmakers

1 Introduction

In his seminal work Archive Fever, Jacques Derrida explained that the word “archive” derives from the Greek arkheion which denoted the residence of the archons, “those who commanded”, and who also, due to their authority, became the guardians of official documents.²

From the beginning, then, the archive has been associated with power and archons had the ability to shape collective narratives by deciding what was retained and how it was interpreted. We see similarities in archival power today: governments often redact or withhold archival information and individual archives retain the right to embargo certain artefacts. This has direct implications for filmmakers who engage with archival footage to tell stories about the past. In an environment where only those who can afford to pay high (and often prohibitively expensive) licensing fees to use copyright-protected footage, the voices of independent and emerging creatives are marginalised.

The Make Film History project aims to open up access to cultural heritage for creative reuse by students and emerging filmmakers. This case study traces the project’s evolution from an initial pilot with the British Film Institute (BFI) at Kingston School of Art in 2017 to an archival resource now offering 270 films for creative reuse in schools, film training and higher education across the UK and Ireland. The films are licensed through our archive partners: the BFI National Archive, BBC Archive, Northern Ireland Screen, the Irish Film Institute, and the London Community Video Archive.

Funded by AHRC and the Irish Research Council, “this cross-border collaboration between Kingston School of Art and University College Cork has created a new research network around the creative reuse of archive material by emerging filmmakers, developing new partnerships between academic researchers and a range of non-academic partners: audiovisual archives and cultural heritage organisations who preserve and license this material; schools and training providers developing new talent in the creative industries; and regional film festivals and cultural institutions who bring the local film community together” (Make Film History, 2022). Eighty-four higher education institutions and a dozen film festivals and training organisations across the UK and Ireland have signed up to the scheme.

This study explores the barriers to the creative reuse of audiovisual archive material in education; and how the project overcame these with the support of our archive partners to create a new, sustainable model for creative reuse in education, bringing a diversity of experiences and stories to the public in ways that were not possible before.

2 From Archives for Education to Make Film History

As discussed in O’Sullivan (2017), the project was inspired by the BBC Creative Archive, a short-lived pilot in 2005 which offered 500 archive film clips to the public for creative reuse under a non-commercial licence but was later shelved and superseded by BBC iPlayer, which does not have a creative reuse dimension.³

Make Film History began life as Archives for Education, a pilot at Kingston School of Art in early 2017, which offered first-year documentary students access to twelve non-fiction films from the BFI National Archive - “the first time the BFI [had] licensed its archive for reuse by university students on a course-related project in the United Kingdom.”⁴

While university students in the UK and Ireland could watch broadcast archive content on platforms like Learning on Screen’s Box of Broadcasts (BoB), the ability to download and creatively reuse archive films was limited at the time to the 1940s documentaries available through the British Council film archive or the Scottish films available through the Scotland on Screen portal.

After a successful pilot, the Archives for Education project was rolled out nationally and two years later, BBC Archive contributed twenty-seven films to the project, including work from directors Adam Curtis, Ken Russell, Dennis Potter, Molly Dineen, Denis Mitchell, and Phillip Donnellan. With the addition of a new project website mapping the films available for creative reuse by student filmmakers, the number of subscribing institutions quickly rose from ten to eighty-four, with institutions signing up for a free ten-year non-commercial license to access the footage under the terms of use of our archive partners.

We prepared teaser reels of one-minute excerpts from these films, so they could be concisely introduced to students in the classroom. The BBC and BFI allowed us to share still images and metadata from their websites and rather than hosting the films, our film pages direct users to click through to watch films of interest on our partners’ streaming players.

Students browse the website and decide which film they would like to respond to. We decided to limit the duration of extracts students can use to two minutes, to position the archive films as points of inspiration rather than the core of the student film, and to discourage mashups solely reliant on archival material.⁵

Michael Witt’s reflections in NECSUS (2017) on the use of the audiovisual essay to teach the “history, theory, and practice of audiovisual film criticism” at Roehampton were helpful and he spoke at our first workshop at BFI Southbank. The JCMS Teaching Dossier on the use of audiovisual essays to inspire radical pedagogy was also useful and we contributed to Learning on Screen’s Introductory Guide to Video Essays but it’s important to state that most of our users are filmmakers who use the archive as a prompt to shoot their own material rather than making video essays critiquing found footage.⁶

In 2020, the authors of this paper developed the Make Film History project, with the aim to extend access to these films beyond higher education to all educational settings in the UK and Ireland. They were awarded research network funding by AHRC and the Irish Research Council, and with the support of the existing project partners (the BFI and BBC Archive), Northern Ireland Screen and the Irish Film Institute, the pool of films available grew to over 200. Our archive partners provided in-kind support researching and curating films, clearing rights, digitising assets, and promoting access. Colm McAuliffe joined the project team as a research assistant, and 140 delegates attended an online launch symposium which included contributions from colleagues working on similar creative reuse initiatives for filmmakers.

This included the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, a pioneer in the field, whose Open Images and Op School platforms offer archive material for creative reuse by emerging creatives, supported by artistic residencies and workshops through the Open Archief project and the RE:VIVE and Remix Fest initiatives.

We ran two dozen events over the next eighteen months. One of the highlights was an online workshop led by Turner Prize-winning artist and filmmaker Jeremy Deller as part of the BFI Future Festival, which was attended by over 600 people.

3 Overcoming the Obstacles to Creative Reuse

Several obstacles exist to the creative reuse of audiovisual archive material in education. A fundamental problem is the cost and logistical prerequisites for access to the archive material, which is often only viewable at the archive itself, using specialised equipment. Several days’ notice may also be required to secure access to the specific archive footage requested and if the user does access the material and wishes to pursue some form of creative reuse, further issues emerge through copyright clearance, permissions from auxiliary rights holders, license fees and particularly the ‘moral’ rights of the work which identifies an ‘author’ and their right to object to derogatory treatment.

The Make Film History project resolved these issues by working with the curation teams at our archive partners to sub-curate films from material already digitised and available on their streaming players. This avoided potential digitisation costs and as this material had already been cleared for online platforms, it was more likely to be clearable for non-commercial reuse for educational purposes.

After initially using an institutional Dropbox account for file delivery to participating institutions, we partnered with the MAP Project (funded by the European Institute of Innovation and Technology) to provide an innovative blockchain rights management and content delivery solution for users. Staff at subscriber institutions can use the platform to license and view the BFI and BBC collections, and to download links to all the films in an easy, streamlined manner: map-marketplace.mog-technologies.com/makefilmhistory.

A further obstacle exists within the perception of the accessibility and creative potential of audiovisual archives amongst individual students and creators: creative reuse can only flourish if the contents of archives are accessible, discoverable and a fertile breeding ground for new creative ideas. Raising awareness of the specifics of archival content, through curation and sub-curation of existing archives, is a key facet of the Make Film History project. Through our collaborations with project partners, we were able to include images and descriptions of available films on the Make Film History website and often sub-curated our collection to highlight more relevant films when collaborating with regional film festivals. We presented the available material on our website in an easily accessible manner where films were broadly grouped under geographic and thematic headings. This allowed participants, and potential participants, to gain access to sometimes ephemeral archival material in a singular online resource.

When extending access to filmmakers not currently enrolled in education, our archive partners have been very flexible. When we recruited participants through a film festival, for example, the festival signed the relevant license agreements and participants signed a simple Google form agreement, summarising the key terms of use governing their reuse of the material. Once we received the signed form, specifying which film(s) they would like to reuse, we sent them download links to a high resolution MP4 file. This allowed us to work with film festival partners to expand the scheme beyond purely educational settings to all emerging filmmakers. We also moved from targeting “young filmmakers” to targeting “emerging filmmakers,” conscious that age should not be a barrier to accessing these resources for non-commercial, educational use.

While the license agreements allow participants to screen their films at not-for-profit film festivals, they don’t allow users to upload their archive-inspired films to YouTube or social media due to rights restrictions. This has also been an issue for the project, as until recently, we didn’t have many publicly available examples of short films produced through the scheme which educators could use to show students the creative potential of these archive resources. Fortunately, our archive partners have again shown flexibility in easing these restrictions. Last year, we created a two-minute teaser of clips from four films made during the project. And as noted below, all films produced through the recent BBC 100 project are now available on our project website, which feels like a significant breakthrough in sharing the creative potential of the scheme.

Over the course of the project, copyright considerations around the creative reuse of archive material in education and for documentary filmmakers have been greatly clarified through the work of Bartolomeo Meletti and his colleagues from CREATe at the University of Glasgow. Funded by the EU Horizon 2020 ReCreating Europe project, their copyright information portal Copyrightuser.org is an essential resource for those concerned with copyright and creative reuse in education. Meletti has been a regular speaker at our workshops and with Stef van Gompel, recently published a Code of Best Practices on Creative Reuse for Documentary Filmmakers outlining the many copyright exceptions through which filmmakers can legitimately reuse copyrighted material. This builds on the Documentary Filmmakers’ Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use (2005) within a European context and will shortly be followed by a Code of Fair Practice for the Use of Audiovisual Works in Film Education, authored by Meletti, Morrison, and Secker, to which we also contributed.⁷

4 Towards A Sustainable Model for Creative Reuse

The Make Film History project is indicative of the archive’s potential to function as a catalyst for a range of different creative re-imaginings. The project explores the ways in which the archive can be utilised and deployed, rather than purely imagining it as a static collection of materials from the past. This thinking underpinned our development of a sustainable model for reuse in a range of different educational settings; through focusing on ‘use’ and ‘reuse’, the dynamism of the archive is revealed which highlights the interplay between past and present, archive material and user.

In order to develop this model, the Make Film History project engaged in a process of encouraging emerging artists and filmmakers to make new films out of old ones, through differing forms of intervention where selected archival material was re-contextualised. These interventions, as Vana Goblot remarks, are imaginative developments of archival use which represent both continuity and a break from existing television aesthetic practices.⁸

Furthermore, these interventions allowed participants to realise that they are not only consumers of culture and media, but also actors who can play an important role in the proliferation of contemporary media practices. In this sense, the Make Film History project, through its collaborations with a range of cultural and educational institutions across the UK and Ireland, provided a space for academics, artists, curators and film audiences to watch, reflect, and debate images from the archive.

During the period February 2021 through March 2022, the Make Film History project worked with nine different cultural and educational institutions on projects which allowed emerging artists and filmmakers, from primary school age to adults, to creatively re-use archive films from our project partners to create entirely new films.

5 Make Film History x Rathmullan Film Festival

The EU-funded Making the Future project was an influential partner in developing our model of engagement with filmmakers. Making the Future provides creative opportunities for participants from diverse communities across Northern Ireland to use archival collections “to explore the past and create a powerful vision for future change.” We collaborated with Making the Future on a virtual film camp for twelve local teenagers at the Rathmullan Film Festival in the northwest of Ireland, sub-curating six films set in Donegal and Derry which invited participants to create films embracing the history of their cross-border communities.

The decision to work with a film festival had manifest advantages for the Make Film History project. It allowed for immediate access to a cultural institution with an existing exhibition space – albeit online due to Coronavirus restrictions – and it also provided immediate access to a film audience within the local region. But the collaboration also unearthed several challenges: how would Make Film History and the Rathmullan Film Festival convey to our target audience of 16-to-20-year-olds in Donegal and Derry the attraction and cultural capital of working with a free source of archive film, which might otherwise cost a significant amount of money to license? And how could the workshop programme be designed to allow for the time, space, and pedagogical encouragement for participants to effectively engage with and creatively re-use archive film to create an entirely new piece of work during lockdown?

We developed a twofold strategy to engage and recruit participants: first, there was an open call for creative expressions of interest from emerging filmmakers to respond to the six local archive films. Applicants were encouraged to write a brief account of their intentions: which archive film they would respond to, how they would blend this archive footage with material they would shoot themselves, and what overall story they would like to tell. Secondly, once the applicants were selected, they were invited to participate in a workshop which occurred over two weekends. This workshop included: an introduction to the Make Film History project; a talk and mentoring session from Tadhg O’Sullivan, an award-winning and critically respected Irish documentarian who has made significant use of archive footage in his own work; and a practical filmmaking and editing workshop with Póca Productions, a smartphone video production company which teaches young filmmakers to make professional video content using the technology in one’s pocket (which translates as póca in the Irish language).

This structure was designed largely to demonstrate the appeal of working with archive film, but also to provide a tangible and rigorous approach to working with the archive: the workshop served to both inspire and galvanise participants into their own individual form of creative reuse. Furthermore, the challenges of allowing the archive to fully emerge as a site of ample creativity were met through Tadhg O’Sullivan’s mentoring sessions. These were not focused upon the technical aspects of filmmaking but allowed, with the archive as a starting point, participants to think in a more general sense about the possibilities of working with archive footage and how it can be incorporated as a structural axis for an entirely new film.

O’Sullivan opened up an important area for discussion by referring to Maria Stepanova’s claim, “The dead have no rights: their property and the circumstances of their fate can be used by anyone and in any way.” ⁹ O’Sullivan asked the participants to consider the question: the dead have no rights, but perhaps they should? This discussion on the ethics of appropriation was core to one of the main aims of the project - to respect editorial integrity and to ensure viewers were not misled in decoding the films created during the project. This was crucial to our vision of the initiative and necessary in setting up and maintaining good relationships with our project partners. One of the most important aspects of ethical creative reuse is the acknowledgement of the original production context of a film. Recognising the spirit in which a film was made and shown is crucial to approaching its reuse. This is especially important when working with material that comes from private collections and was not initially intended for exhibition in the public sphere. We asked the filmmakers on the project to reflect on whether there was any potential for ethical breaches in their work, particularly in relation to the potential misrepresentation of an individual or event. It is also important to consider sensitivities that may be associated with the footage or the potential inclusion of information that is misleading. Sometimes it may be necessary to include a disclaimer, acknowledging changes in contemporary values when it comes to the language or depictions associated with the original material. This is not to say that appropriation films should not be used in dynamic and disruptive ways, but that every filmmaker has the responsibility of considering the implications of their approach to reuse.

While the standard model of mentoring is a one-to-one relationship between mentor and mentee, the online nature of the group workshops (necessitated by Coronavirus restrictions) created a community of practice for the participants, empowering them to see each other as like-minded peers who could share relatable experiences and challenges in working with archive material. The format developed through O’Sullivan’s mentorship allowed participants to create connections between their personal interests, their sense of place in their communities, and films within the archive which featured footage from the local region. It also gave them the freedom to explore, encouraging a sense of trust both in their ideas and in the creative potential of the archive footage. This model also allowed for a form of community feedback: once participants had developed early drafts of their new film, the mentor and other participants provided feedback and encouragement. This allowed for a form of intertextuality to emerge, as each participant was able to connect each other to a textual lineage underpinned by the creative reuse of archive.

The workshop programme produced twelve new films, including Be More (2021) by first-time filmmaker Pearse Donaghy, which won an award at the festival and went on to screen at further film festivals in Ireland. Donaghy chose to respond to Errigal, a lyrical film about the mountains of his native Donegal, directed by iconic independent filmmaker Patrick Carey, whose work includes a range of poetic films on Irish mythology and landscapes. Drawing upon his background in music production, Donaghy was inspired by discussions with mentor Tadhg O’Sullivan on hip hop and remix culture to construct the pacing and soundscape of his experimental piece. A mix of modern audio, newly shot black-and-white sections and images from Carey’s film, Donaghy’s piece is both politically engaged and aesthetically striking. Be More channels the visual and aural style of Carey, an artist of great distinction (having worked extensively as a photographer and cinematographer on such films as Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon).

6 Make Film History x Essay Film Festival

The success of the Rathmullan Film Festival collaboration provided the Make Film History team with the format for similar engagements with different institutions across the UK and Ireland. The most successful of these was the collaboration with the Essay Film Festival, run by the Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image (BIMI) at the University of London. Seventy emerging artists and filmmakers applied to take part in a summer workshop series which offered fourteen participants mentoring sessions with artist-filmmakers Tadhg O’Sullivan and Onyeka Igwe. Igwe’s work added a political dimension to discussions of creative reuse, demonstrating how the archive can become a site of rebellion. In films like the names have changed, including my own and truths have been altered (2019) and No Archive Can Restore You (2020), Igwe explores both the physical space (by filming the disused archive of the Nigerian Film Unit in Lagos) and the content and form of images (particularly those migrating through film to VHS to digital video formats) to deconstruct postcolonial legacies. Igwe’s approach to challenging hierarchies and power imbalances through the recuperation of archival material was replicated by several of the emerging filmmakers on the BIMI project.

The fourteen films produced through the summer workshop programme were striking and provocative in both content and form, touching on a range of significant issues from migration to mental health. One such example was Dreaming the Eye’s Separation by Anna Lindén-Boström, a powerful illustration of the problematic history of psychiatric care. The film was inspired by surrealist interventions into cinema, such as the dream sequence created by Salvador Dalí for Alfred Hitchcock’s 1945 film about psychoanalysis, Spellbound. Sequences of Understanding Aggression (1960), a drama-documentary medical training film depicting a young woman in a psychiatric unit, are intercut with close-ups of a weeping protagonist, played by the filmmaker. The soundtrack combines a score newly composed for the film with a hypnotic monologue, spoken in Swedish and captioned in English. The institutional and the personal are deftly interwoven and the result is an intimate archive-inspired reflection on the complex nature of the human mind.

When our AHRC/Irish Research Council funding ended in March 2022, we had helped sixty-one emerging artists and filmmakers produce new films, each demonstrating an individual and unique form of imaginative intervention through the archive.

7 BBC 100 project

In June 2022, we received further AHRC funding for a six-month project to engage the public with research about the BBC to mark its centenary. We worked with a BBC Archive researcher to curate seventy-three additional films to the collection on themes of the environment, mental health and neurodiversity, and cultural diversity, offering emerging filmmakers access to 150 films from the BBC collection for creative reuse in short film projects.

Fifty emerging filmmakers across the UK created short films in response to this BBC collection, uncovering the forgotten histories of underrepresented communities. Using our workshop model, participants received two days of mentoring from some of the leading professional filmmakers in the UK working with archive film in their practice, as well as online editing feedback sessions. The final films were exhibited at sold-out screenings in Belfast, Glasgow and London and a well-attended screening in Leeds. They were also published on the project website, with a selection also published on the BBC website.

The BBC 100 scheme afforded participants a unique and compelling opportunity: working with selected archive films from the BBC’s catalogue with the promise of the finalised films being promoted through the corporation’s official channels, an association which bestowed a form of cultural legitimacy to the participants’ work. The BBC 100 scheme demonstrated an example of a leading cultural institution allowing its resources to be used in a uniquely creative manner which increased its appeal to participants. Most of the films available for reuse were from the pre-2000 era; certain films proved especially popular, including the Something Else youth culture programme exploring the punk scene in Belfast and the 1995 segment, Blue Peter Discovers the Internet, which slowly explains the concept of the internet, the world wide web and email to its young audience, in a manner which greatly appealed to participants who grew up with the internet as a mainstay of their lives.

Glasgow participant Jo Reid responded to the piece with a proposal to examine the archive footage within the context of cyberpunk, analysing the shift in tone from the optimistic Blue Peter footage to more contemporary, less optimistic debates around online culture. However, her concept rapidly altered through the course of the workshops, and she was sufficiently emboldened to expand the film beyond to Blue Peter clip to explore her own discovery of the internet, using her own personal archive of vlogs created from the age of twelve and digitised footage from a VHS camera to drive the film’s narrative. This created a very personal, often humorous, and undeniably touching account of her relationship to the internet: indeed, the original Blue Peter footage was markedly less prominent in the final edit, indicating how she used the BBC footage primarily as an inspirational springboard for an analysis of her own history with the internet.

A much more direct engagement with the archive was demonstrated through Kathryn Webb’s Back. This film directly responded to Consenting Adults: The Women (1967), a documentary which featured interviews with lesbians and queers speaking about their lives and the discrimination they faced, often with their backs to camera to avoid identification. Webb uses this historic fear of being outed as the stylistic frame for her film, combining archive and contemporary footage of lesbians and queers from then and now to converse with each other in a safe space: that of the new film.

Shamica Ruddock’s experimental film is inspired by Magic Realism and propelled by a percussive sound track mixed with the steel pans and djembe drums from the original footage. The BFI film Grove Carnival, set to shot early incarnation of the Notting Hill Carnival, is used to explore her interest in Caribbean Masquerade traditions, sparked by archival glimpses of the Pierrot Grenade costume, which she weaves into devised narration about this traditional masquerade character. She also used 16mm cameraless filmmaking techniques “to produce a series of short colourful animated sequences…[and] to create a kaleidoscopic array of colour that would complement the original footage well…[and] create a hazy, syncopated flow of imagery, focusing in particular on those scenes with people dancing in costume.”¹⁰

Several filmmakers also made use of Pexels rights-free stock footage to tell personal stories in imaginative ways - The One Thing My Grandma Never Forgot(2022), for example. Several participants revisited home movies from their childhood and in the case of Shanine Gallagher, the video camera her father used to film them. Responding to the archive film The Smallest School in Britain (1974), Gallagher revisits the remote landscape of her upbringing in the Scottish Highlands, where her father still lives, and uses the archive to “think about how social and physical distance still exists living in these remote areas, forcing young people to move away to find more opportunities elsewhere.”¹¹

8 Results and Conclusions

The Make Film History project won the Excellence in Unlocking the Value and Potential of Archives Award at the FIAT/IFTA Archive Achievement Awards 2021, hosted by the world’s leading professional association for those engaged in the preservation and exploitation of broadcast archives. The judges praised its “innovative business model…[which] provides training of young people in creative re-use of archives, showing the value of the archive as an inspirational source and supporting a practice based education of next generations of film-makers. It creates a solid and inspiring frame that could be adjusted by other organisations worldwide.”

The project offers students, emerging filmmakers, and educators the long-term resource once promised by the BBC Creative Archive, the 2005 pilot which was its inspiration. And the knowledge generated through the project’s various incarnations has been consolidated into a free forty-page Guide to the Creative Reuse of Archive Film, available on the project website.¹²

We also work with footage library Screenocean to offer educational institutions access to “raw video coverage of international news and over one million clips” from the Reuters News Archive, “one of the world’s oldest, largest, and most renowned video archives” (Screenocean, 2022).¹³ We offered free trial subscriptions to the Newsfilm for Education service until July 2023, giving students unlimited access to download and reuse the archive. After years of ad hoc requests from students, Screenocean and Reuters hope the trial will lead to educational institutions signing up for a paid annual subscription, giving students a blanket license to use the footage on a non-commercial basis for coursework and to promote their portfolios online. Commercial archives are realising that supporting creative reuse in education for the next generation of filmmakers is a great strategy to develop their relationship with new talent at an affordable price.

The project has created new dialogue between archivists and educators, particularly around how rights-protected material can be reused in the digital realm, as was the case during the Covid lockdowns, when many of our engagement activities had to move online, prompting us to adapt our policies and workflows with archive partners. We can also track and study how this archive material is used through the project. We ask workshop participants to sign a simple rights agreement before downloading their selected film and archive a copy of their creative responses. Screenocean also tracks engagement with its platform by subscribing institutions and one of the stipulations of the Make Film History licence agreements are that institutions complete a regular survey, providing feedback to archive partners on how their content has been used in coursework.

Perhaps one of the most important aspects of working with archival footage is building a strong and open relationship with the archivist or custodian of a personal collection that may be under consideration for reuse. These experts will have specialist knowledge of the material and any potential sensitivities associated with it. Our partners on the Make Film History project were invaluable collaborators in advising which material could be included, giving us vital information on the provenance of the collections (including any third-party rights) and sharing their experience of dealing with filmmakers on a range of complex productions and research initiatives. Francis Jones from Northern Ireland Screen, Mark Macey from BBC Archive, Kasandra O’Connell from the Irish Film Institute and Annabelle Shaw from the BFI were enthusiastic and supportive champions of Make Film History, helping shape the project and build a network of stakeholders across the screen, education, and arts sectors.

As we have demonstrated, the archive acts as a source of inspiration for student projects, enabling participants to reinterpret and transform historical narratives by downloading and remixing audiovisual heritage with new material they have shot themselves, connecting images and sounds from the past with their lives and communities today. Through workshops and virtual film camps led by professional filmmakers at regional film festivals, emerging filmmakers have produced an extraordinary range of creative responses to this archive material, reinvigorating cultural remix and memory practices with a fresh eye and sensibility, and fostering historical engagement through the hands-on use of digital heritage.

The Make Film History research network and public engagement programmes have led to a significant opening of archival access to emerging filmmakers in the UK and Ireland, generously supported by the leading national moving image collections. This signifies a new era for students and educators, as it is now possible to embed practical modules on archival appropriation in courses in film, media and other subjects in ways that are linked to invaluable skills development.

When reusing material in new works, students and emerging filmmakers are confronted with the importance of licencing and copyright clearance; navigating the complex relationships between creative producers and archives; the integration of archival material practically and aesthetically and the ethical implications of reuse. In researching, requesting, and acquiring footage, they have the opportunity to engage with a “real-life” model of archival reuse, excellent preparation for when they begin working with production companies, broadcasters, or as independent filmmakers.

The project has also transformed archival practices in the education space through the provision of free blanket institutional licenses for creative reuse on a non-commercial basis. Through practical remix projects, the next generation of filmmakers engage with film and social history and copyright education and can share their resulting work at in-person and online film festivals.

While the players of our UK partners are geo-blocked, there is scope for a pan-European platform which could bring a range of archive material together for students and emerging filmmakers across Europe to creatively reuse and collaborate on shared archive-inspired projects, building on the EUscreen network and the thousands of hours of material already digitised and available to view on the platform.