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IAMHIST Challenge event: Moving Images, Institutional Bodies

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Date: 5 November 2021

Time: 11:30am – 5:30pm (GMT)

Price: £4 (including booking fee) / free for members and concessions, and IAMHIST members

Venue: Cinema 1, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (this will be an in-person event)

Registration Link:  https://www.ica.art/films/symposium-moving-images-institutional-bodies

(IAMHIST members can attend this event for free: to register, please email ankorporaal@gmail.com)

This event is curated and moderated by Astrid Korporaal, PhD candidate at Kingston University and Lecturer at the University of Groningen.

This event explores the creative and ethical use of moving image, film and photography as a medium for engaging with contested institutional collections, archives and histories. Specifically, institutions connected to the incarceration, exploitation and separation of bodies and objects from specific social, geographical, and cultural contexts. The symposium aims to bring the history of representational image-making and mass media at the service of colonial, carceral and imperialist archives and collections, into dialogue with the potential capacity of image-makers to disrupt these institutional lineages. It aims to explore how documentary media have been used to shape the collective definitions and accepted values of authenticity, truth, belonging, criminality and ownership in public and private spaces

While research has been done into the history of audio-visual media used as techniques for categorising, classifying, documenting and surveilling colonial and incarcerated subjects, this event aims to develop a further perspective. It brings together academics, artists, curators and historians, to explore what Ariella Azoulay calls ‘potential history’ in promoting the creative, critical and decolonial repositioning of archives, institutions and creative practices.

The artists and researchers presenting in this event expand our notions of what it means to give and receive access to restricted spaces. How do the images we are able to circulate run parallel the movements that bodies can make across borders? And might creative interventions with the technologies that give us access to images, influence the histories of bodies that we are able to tell?

Schedule:

11:30: Introductions + screening (tbc)

12:00: Panel 1: Institutional Archives, Research Companions and Unruly Histories

12:15: Erika Tan on her film works engaging with colonial museums in ‘Malaya’ and the connection between historical and technological dislocations of objects and entering into a dialogue with the forgotten history of a Malayan weaver, Halimah Binti Abdullah, who was brought to the British Empire exhibition in Wembley in 1924.

12:45: Nikolaus Perneczsky in conversation with Didi Cheeka on moving image restitution histories and archives, with a screening of Cheeka’s film Memory Also Die (2020) which focuses on memory as political taboo, fifty years after the collective trauma responsible for the death of memory in Nigeria: Biafra.

13:15: Panel discussion

13:45: Lunch break

14:45: Panel 2: Institutional Inversions and Reclamations

15:00: Screening of Adam Khalil, Zack Khalil and Jackson Polys’ video works, The Violence of a Civilization Without Secrets (2019) and Culture Capture: Terminal Adddition (2017, with Bayley Sweitzer) which critique institutional archives, collection and the excavation of indigenous cultural heritage for outsiders’ consumption.

15:30: Judy Price on her research on Holloway Woman’s Prison and her film installation The Good Enough Mother (2020), which features a sculpture of a baby from the Dorich House Museum acquired for the first Mother and Baby Unit at HMP Holloway in 1948 and explores the subject of incarcerated pregnancy.

16:00 Khadija Carroll on her artistic work and collaborative research with the Immigration Detention Archive and the Pitt Rivers Museum.

16:30 Rhea Storr on her work and research into the heritage and bodily resistance of Junkanoo, Bahamian carnival, with a screening of her work Here is the Imagination of the Black Radical (2020)

17:00 Panel discussion

 Speakers include: 

Erika Tan is an artist, curator and researcher whose work focuses on the postcolonial, transnational and decolonial – working with archival artefacts, exhibition histories, received narratives, contested heritage, subjugated voices and the transnational movement of ideas, people and objects. Tan is currently The Stanley Picker Fine Art Fellow. Her work has been exhibited & collected internationally. Current projects include: Art Histories of a Forever War—Modernism Between Space and Home, Taipei Fine Art Museum; ESOK, Jakarta Biennial, Indonesia; Frequencies of Tradition, Incheon Art Platform, Korea; In/reproduction: The 4th Global Overseas Chinese Artists Exhibition, He Xiangning Art Museum, Shenzhen China; Barang-Barang, Stanley Picker Fellowship exhibition, Kingston School of Art; “Asian Heads” Dorich House Museum, London.

Didi Cheeka is co-founder and curator of Lagos Film Society – an alternative cinema center dedicated to the founding of Nigeria’s first arthouse cinema. He is the artistic director of Decasia – Berlin-Lagos Archive Film Festival. Didi is currently researching and digitizing Nigeria’s rediscovered audiovisual archives.

Nikolaus Perneczky is a writer and curator based in London. His postdoctoral research project—a critical inquiry into the politics and ethics of global film heritage—considers the archive(s) of World Cinema in relation to colonial legacies of epistemic violence and unequal exchange. Along with curator and archivist June Givanni, Nikolaus is currently working on a podcast series on Africa’s moving image heritage and the question of restitution.

Adam Khalil and Zack Khalil (Ojibway) are filmmakers and artists from Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan and currently based in Brooklyn, New York. Their work subverts traditional forms of ethnography through humor, transgression, and innovative documentary practice. Their films and installations have been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, Walker Arts Center, e-flux, UnionDocs, and Microscope Gallery.

Jackson Polys is an artist who lives and works between what is currently called Alaska and New York.  His work reflects examinations into the limits and viability of desires for indigenous growth. He began carving with his father, Tlingit artist Nathan Jackson, in high school, has worked as an artist based in Alaska as Stron Softi, with solo exhibitions at the Alaska State Museum and the Anchorage Museum, and holds an MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University’s School of the Arts (2015).

Judy Rabinowitz Price is interested in how art can produce different ways of thinking about contested sites and engage with collective struggles. Her research-led practice includes photography, moving image and sound, composed as single-screen works and multiscreen installations.  Price often draws on images and sounds from archival sources as well as the sustained study of a place or space through networks, collaborations and activism. Palestine was an enduring focus of her work from 2008-2017 with two bodies of work Within This Narrow Strip of Land (2008) and Quarries of Wandering Form (2017).Her most recent work explores how women are affected by the criminal justice system in the UK through the prism of HMS Holloway that was decommissioned in 2016.  The End of a Sentence 2020 draws on individual and collective stories of prison to make visible issues around gender, class, race and economy as well as reflecting on Holloway’s legacy spatially and ideologically as a site of remembrance and absence.

Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll is an Austrian-Australian artist and historian based in Vienna. She is the Chair of Global Art at the University of Birmingham, Professor of History at the Central European University. Her films and installations have been shown internationally including at the Venice, Marrakech, and Sharjah Biennales, ZKM, Manifesta, Taxispalais, Extracity, HKW, Royal Museums Greenwich, Savvy, LUX, Chisenhale, SPACE, Project Art Centre Gallery Dublin, St Kilda, Melbourne, and the Casablanca Film Festival. She is the author of the books Art in the Time of Colony (2014); The Importance of Being Anachronistic: Contemporary Aboriginal Art and Museum Reparations (2016), Botanical Drift: Protagonists of the Invasive Herbarium (2017); Mit Fremden Federn: El Penacho und die Frage der Restitution (2021); The Contested Crown: Repatriation Politics between Mexico and Europe (2022). She is the co-author of Bordered Lives: Immigration Detention Archive (2020) and co-editor of Third Text journal.  www.kdja.org

Rhea Storr is an artist filmmaker who makes work about the representation of Black and mixed-race cultures. Masquerade as a site of protest or subversion is an ongoing theme in her work in addition to the effect of environment on cultural production. She is a co-director of not nowhere an artists’ film co-operative and resident at Somerset House, London. Storr is the winner of the Aesthetica Art Prize 2020 and the inaugural Louis Le Prince Experimental Film Prize. Recent screenings/exhibitions include New York Film Festival, London Film Festival, European Media Art Festival, Hamburg Short Film Festival, Artist Film International (Whitechapel Gallery) and National Museum of African American History and Culture.

This is event is support by the International Association for Media and Art History’s IAMHIST Challenge, and the Make Film History project. Make Film History is funded by UKRI-AHRC and the Irish Research Council under the ‘UK-Ireland Collaboration in the Digital Humanities Networking Call’ (grant numbers AH/V002066/1 and IRC/V002066/1).

Rhea Storr, Here is the Imagination of the Black Radical (Still), 2020

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The film raw stock shortage in the British zone of occupied Germany and its impact on the film industry after 1945

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Hanja Dämon, independent scholar

24 September 2021

This blog post engages with one of the biggest material obstacles in restarting film production in the British Zone of occupied Germany (one of four zones established following the Allied victory) after the Second World War: the shortage of film raw stock. It was essential for newsreels, for making copies of feature films to be exhibited in German cinemas, as well as for making new documentaries and feature films. Indeed, films were supposed to assist in steering the Germans away from National Socialist ideology, and to teach them about the outside world from which they had been supposedly cut off during twelve years of dictatorship. In this vein, the British feared that without raw stock ‘the whole scheme of re-education will be in danger of collapse’, and looked for ways to secure the provision of this sought-after material for non-fiction and feature films alike.[i] Yet this task was not always easy, as archival sources from the UK National Archives in Kew Gardens reveal. They testify to the fact that insufficient raw stock provision significantly impacted on German film production after 1945.

National Socialism’s defeat in May 1945 and Germany’s division into US-American, British, French and Soviet zones of occupation had initially brought German film production to a standstill, only to be re-established according to the respective agendas of the respective occupation authorities. In the western zones the main goals of the occupiers included  denazification, democratisation and decentralisation of the German film industry, which should not be concentrated in one place (to lessen the chances of state interference). In the Soviet Zone one central studio (DEFA) was established. Although  no new German films were produced for more than a year, re-establishing the film industry was considered essential across all zones for economic and psychological reasons. The Allied powers aspired to give the German filmmakers the tools of self-expression for the purpose of democratisation, although during the first years of occupation Allied supervision and control would seek to ensure that the resulting films would not propagate fascism and militaristic values.

One major obstacle in re-starting film production in the western zones was the shortage of film raw stock, at least in the Western zones. In August 1945, Major General Bishop from the British Information Control Section informed the international press, that ‘as soon as raw-stock supplies make it possible, Germans will be granted permission to produce their own films’, thereby indicating that the lack of raw stock played a role in delaying the reconstruction of the industry in the British Zone.[ii] A year later the Public Relations/Information Services Control (PR/ISC) Division explained as to why up to this point only two production companies had been licensed in the British Zone: the available amount of raw stock was ‘insufficient to allow for further commitments’ regarding the founding of additional production units.[iii] Also in the US Zone, the raw stock shortage was described as ‘one of the main problems’ in reconstructing the German film industry.[iv]

FO 1046/409/9: Raw stock procurement (The National Archives)

No raw stock producing factory existed in the Western zones of Germany, which is why it had to be imported from the Soviet Zone or from other countries. As the relationship between the British and their Soviet Allies became more strained, a member of the British occupation authorities, G.W.E.J. Erskine, began to harbour doubts in September 1946 that one could continue relying on the Soviets for raw stock provisions, for ‘the Russian character and international trends make this a source on which undue reliance should not be placed.’[v] He warned that ‘the dependence of the British Zone for its main supplies of rawstock from the Soviet Zone is capable of producing a sudden crisis at any moment if for any reason supplies were cut off’.[vi] And indeed, deliveries from the Soviet Zone were not always consistent with initial arrangements and in 1947 even stalled for months.[vii] Michael Balfour of the British Information Services Control Branch wrote on the 12th of May 1947 that he was ‘getting a bit alarmed over the raw stock position’ and, while his concern also included the dubbing of films into German, ‘German production is beginning to need rawstock acutely and there is none left.[viii] The shortage of raw stock was therefore certainly a contributing factor in why the German film industry took longer to re-emerge in the Western zones of occupation compared to the Soviet Zone.

Owing to better infrastructure and more decisive actions on the parts of the Soviets in getting the film industry restarted more swiftly, the Soviet-licensed film Die Mörder sind unter uns (The Murderers Are Amongst Us, D: Wolfgang Staudte) was the first German new film to premiere in post-war Germany in October 1946. It was, however, closely followed by the British-licensed film Sag die Wahrheit (Tell the Truth, D: Helmut Weiss) in December 1946, filmed in the Tempelhof studios in the US sector of Berlin. Sag die Wahrheit recycled the script of a film that had been in production at UFA-Studios during the war, which  had remained unfinished. It was an escapist comedy that made no allusions to the post-war present, which made this film an unusual offering compared to all other British-licensed films of the early post-war period that were generally set in the present or the recent past. The British had the power to select which projects could be realised via licensing only those they found suitable, and usually rejected film scripts that were regarded as merely “escapist”. Yet this criteria was apparently not as relevant at the time when Sag die Wahrheit was allowed to go into production.

The raw stock shortage might, in fact, have played a direct role in  the British decision to license Sag die Wahrheit. The material was not only needed for making new German films, but also for making copies of old films, and in autumn 1946, a memo expressed the desire to have a new German film made. It stated that it would be ‘sad if we had to use raw stock to make fresh copies of old films because we have not enough films to circulate’.[ix] Hence, to finally have a new German film available, the British might have allowed Sag die Wahrheit (D: Helmut Weiss, 1946) to become the very first film to be made in their zone, as this project promised a quick production. After this first film, the British tended to license films that at least attempted to deal with contemporary issues, and begun to pre-censor film scripts with this criteria in mind.

The British based their argument for the necessity of pre-censoring of German film scripts directly on the lack of raw stock: pre-censorship was thought ‘essential in view of the extreme shortage of rawstock not only in Germany but all over the world and is to avoid wastage of stock on film production, which, when finished, would have to be rejected on political grounds’.[x] In July 1948, a series of articles in the Hamburger Freie Presse started to ask what kind of films were considered politically desirable by the British authorities. Were films required to spread optimistic messages in the British Zone, as one author of these articles assumed? The Film Section reiterated that pre-censorship was necessary in light of the limited availability of raw stock, furthermore claiming it was too precious to allow the making of ‘pure entertainment films’, confirming thereby that instead of escapism the British privileged films with a message suited to post-war circumstances.[xi] One proposal that was indeed rejected by the British Film Section because it was regarded as nothing more than ‘quite a nice story’ was German director Wolfgang Liebeneiner’s plan to make a film about a young and poor aspiring dancer, entitled Tanz in die Welt (Dance into the World).[xii] Apparently different standards were applied to subsequent film projects than to the first film made in the British Zone, Sag die Wahrheit.

Raw stock was also needed for export copies of new post-war German films, in order to be able to send prints to potential buyers abroad. Once the first films had been made, considerations to export them meant that even more raw stock would be needed in addition to  existing requirements. The British film adviser and documentary filmmaker Arthur Elton deemed it necessary to import additional raw stock  for this purpose. Elton highlights in a memorandum how short supply of raw stock  might hinder the export chances of new German films.[xiii] The material constraints, then, were posing significant obstacles to get the German film industry up and running again.

Lastly, the lack of raw stock also determined what British films were shown in the British Zone. The British producer J. Arthur Rank at first provided raw stock free of charge that was used for dubbing British films into German, but in 1946 he signalled unwillingness to continue this arrangement. It was at this point that the idea arose to allow Rank to set up a distribution organisation in Germany, in order to secure the import of raw stock.[xiv] An initial plan of the Finance Division to make British distribution companies pay a ‘good-will’ fee to the German state when operating in Germany – money intended for the use of re-building the German film industry – was abandoned to accommodate Rank and to guarantee his future cooperation.[xv] Unlike Rank, other British companies did not have the means to distribute their films in post-war Germany because they were financially unable to provide the raw stock for copies of their films, which was a prerequisite for showing them in Germany.[xvi]

The link between material issues – such as the lack of raw stock – and post-war German film production is a topic where the archives can reveal more than was previously known about the German film industry’s re-establishment in the British Zone. I researched the holdings in the UK National Archives to learn more about material obstacles such as the raw stock shortage as well as to explore how the British supervised and controlled German filmmaking in the immediate post-war years. I also consulted personal documents of German filmmakers located in German archives that reveal more details about film production in the British Zone after 1945. My forthcoming book that will be published with Peter Lang will present my findings on British film policy in occupied Germany in more detail.

[i] FO 943/549 Film, 1945-1948.

[ii] FO 371/46702 Control of Propaganda in Germany. Code 18. File 3. “British control policy for Newspapers, books, radio and entertainments. Transmits copy of statement made in Berlin by Major General Bishop to the international press on August 10th”.

[iii] FO 1056/86 PR/ISC Meetings and Reports. “Minutes of the Seventh Meeting held in Berlin”, 1 Aug 1946.

[iv] Military Government of Germany. U.S. Zone. Information Control. Bi-Monthly Review 24 (1 Jul 1947-30 Jun 1947).

[v] FO 1056/39. G.W.E.J. Erskine to the Office of the Deputy Military Governor, C.C.G (British Element), 6 Sep 1946.

[vi] FO 1006/216. G.W.E.J. Erskine, “Films in the British Zone of Germany”, 6 Sep 1946.

[vii] FO 1056/74. Public Relations/Information Services Control Group, “Minutes of the Thirtieth Meeting held in Berlin”, 3 July 1947.

[viii] FO 946/69. Michael Balfour to R.S. Crawford, Foreign Office (German Section), 12 May 1947.

[ix] FO 1056/86. Public Relations/Information Services Control Group. “Minutes of the Thirteenth Meeting held in Berlin”, 24th October 1946. See “Appendix A” of document.

[x] FO 1056/114: Draft of “Film Policy Directive”, to be approved by Chief, ISD, 14th May 1948.

[xi] [‘für den reinen Unterhaltungsfilm zu schade’.] ‘Und was sagt die Film-Section?’, Hamburger Freie Presse, 10 Aug 1948.

[xii] Adk: Liebeneiner 93. Handwritten note on exposé for Tanz in die Welt.

[xiii] FO 946/8. Arthur Elton, “Memorandum on Export of German Films”, 19 Nov 1947.

[xiv] FO 943/162 Film Production in the British Zone of Germany 1946.

[xv] FO 1056/39 Films: Policy and General. Chief of PR/ISC Group to Headquarters, C.C.G. (British Element) Distribution of British Film in Germany, 26 Jun 1947.

[xvi] Gabriele Clemens, Britische Kulturpolitik, p. 167.

Hanja Dämon has studied History at the University of Vienna and then obtained her PhD at King’s College London. Her thesis project on the German film industry after 1945 was sponsored for three years by the European Research Council (ECR)-funded project “Beyond Enemy Lines: Literature and Film in the British and American Zones of Occupied Germany, 1945-1949”. Dämon’s monograph on British film policies in post-war Germany will be upcoming with Peter Lang.

Disclaimer: The IAMHIST Blog is a platform that offers individual scholars the opportunity to present their work and thoughts. They alone are responsible for the content, which does not represent the view of the IAMHIST council or other IAMHIST members.

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A Day at the Archives… Media Archive for Central England (MACE)

  By ,

Kat Pearson, University of Warwick

7 April 2021

[print-me]

I am a PhD student at the University of Warwick, and my work on Cities of Culture (linked to Coventry’s year in 2021) is co-supervised by Professor John Wyver at Illuminations Media, and also by Dr Clare Watson the Media Archive for Central England (MACE). This collaborative way of working has given me a unique perspective on the work that MACE do. I encounter the archive both as a researcher (using the archive for my PhD thesis) and as a kind of representative for MACE because I am engaging communities in Coventry with the archive’s collections.

Founded in 2000, MACE is the charitable regional film archive and strategic lead organisation for screen heritage in the Midlands. The archive is based at the University of Lincoln but the area it covers is vast, stretching across twelve counties and regions in the East and West Midlands

Because I live in Birmingham, have previously studied in Birmingham and Leicester, and am now based at the University of Warwick – which is actually in the Coventry suburb of Canley! – I am fairly familiar with a lot of MACE’s geographical area. Before the pandemic I made a number of trips to MACE, spending days with their staff and collections to see and understand their work which was fascinating and really beneficial in understanding the inner workings of a media archive. However, rather than only talking about what I’m doing with MACE, I also spoke to Dr Watson (Director of MACE), to find out a bit more about how they work with the research community. She told me that, ‘MACE is proactively engaged in supporting the research environment in many more ways than beyond a simple repository.’ MACE is very interested in collaborating with researchers and students, for instance on research projects and through academic networks, and my Collaborative Doctoral Award comes out of that. In terms of more traditional access, MACE’s collections are available for research, and researchers have access to viewing facilities which can also be used to view external BFI content. Two recent research projects that have used MACE’s collections are Dr Christine Grandy’s article, “‘The Show Is Not about Race’’: Custom, Screen Culture, and the Black and White Minstrel Show,”[i] and Dr Rachel Yemm’s “Immigration, race and local media: Smethwick and the 1964 general election.”[ii]

Supporting access, MACE Senior Curator Phil Leach is an invaluable resource for projects which have public engagement outputs: for example, my supervisor Professor Helen Wheatley’s ‘Ghost Town’ project focussing on Coventry’s screen heritage. All this is to say that MACE’s role extends beyond preservation – it is an active and engaged partner foracademic research and can help to translate outputs to the public.

Something that really highlighted to me the importance to MACE of the collections being used and engaged with was the experience of my friend Andy Howlett who produced Paradise Lost,[iii] a film about Birmingham Central Library. MACE worked with him to find footage of the library that fitted with his film and to organise rights clearances. I asked Andy about his experiences of working with MACE to get the filmmaker perspective and this was his response:

When I first searched MACE’s online catalogue for material pertaining to the modernist rebuilding of Birmingham, I was overwhelmed by the sheer volume of content. It was difficult to know where to begin so I got in touch and explained my needs and they very kindly invited me to come visit the archive to see the footage in person. When I arrived they had everything set up and I spent a fascinating few hours viewing everything from regional news footage to construction firm propaganda to polemical documentaries. The formats ranged from 16mm film to VHS and I got a real sense of the materiality of the archive and the incredible level of technical know-how required to maintain and operate it. It was like being given a glimpse inside a treasure trove and I came away with a much clearer idea of what I needed for my film and how to proceed with the licensing process.

Use of archive footage in this way usually attracts licence fees. Unlike some private collections, however, MACE tries to support non-commercial uses of its collection through reduced fees. In Andy’s film the archive footage is an important feature, adding historical context to a building that (at the time of making) was under-threat, controversial and familiar to many as a neglected part of Birmingham’s built environment. When constructed, the building looked and functioned differently, so the footage from MACE helps to contextualise the building and the ethos of planning in the city at different points in time. In support of MACE’s mission ‘to make film, video and digital materials of the region as accessible as possible,’[iv] the archive is very happy to work with film makers, local organisations and researchers like me to make sure that their archives are not only preserved but ‘discovered, watched and enjoyed.’ If you are interested in using material from the MACE collection within a project, just contact the team with your brief and they’ll be able to assist with research, access and that all importance copyright clearance. You can find out more about how to license footage on the MACE website.[v]

As part of my research, I was recently awarded a small grant to run a collaborative project and screening in Foleshill, a community suffering from economic deprivation just outside of Coventry city centre. Due to the impact of Covid-19 the screening was reconfigured to a small socially-distanced event hosted by the Foleshill Community Centre and Social Supermarket with an accompanying online version.[vi] Both events featured the same films from MACE’s collection focused on the local area and on food and drink in Coventry. We also included an introduction on the work that MACE does and the variety of material that exists within their collection. Although we were limited in number of participants and room layout, we even managed to facilitate a socially distanced group discussion afterwards. Having worked on this for over eight months (including a visit to Lincoln and then countless Zoom calls and planning meetings) it was really exciting to hear people’s opinions about these films which had become familiar to me, and which Phil and I had worked so hard to curate. Because these films really showcased Foleshill and Coventry, this screening brought home to me the importance to people of seeing their communities and histories on screen and the fact that this was obviously a very new experience to most of the people in the room. This was made even more obvious by people highlighting the communities and people who weren’t visible in the films that we had chosen and asking for future events to redress this absence.

While it is not often possible to bring people together to watch archive footage in this way, MACE’s collection is very easily searchable on their website[vii] and over 7,000 of their videos are available online. Over the years MACE’s cataloguers have done an impressive job of making the text associated with the films available as part of this search tool, so you can search via various criteria, like date ranges, key words and even whether the films are in colour or have sound. If there are films which you would like to view but which aren’t digitised then you can contact MACE and arrange an appointment for viewing. Depending on the format of the footage you want to view you will either need the help of MACE staff (for example if celluloid film needs to be viewed using the Steenbeck machine) or will be able to view it on your own.

MACE is based on the University of Lincoln campus around a 10-minute walk from the train station and overlooking Brayford Pool. Should you (in non-pandemic times) wish to visit MACE to view their collections, or to view BFI material (which is arranged through the BFI but MACE act as a screening facility) then you will find yourself in the heart of the city. You might also want to visit some of the sights of Lincoln such as the medieval Cathedral, the castle and my personal favourite Steep Hill. I recommend Coffee Aroma on Guildhall Street for excellent coffee and cakes, and the Tiny Tavern if you like a micropub, but as I learned when I stayed in Lincoln for a few days, the city centre pubs and restaurants are strangely quiet in the evenings, especially for a university town.

While I have used MACE for my research and for public screenings, I have also spent hours just browsing their collections online and finding videos which made me think and/or smile. This really short introduction reel which showcases things about Coventry from MACE’s collection gives you a sense of the variety of things they hold, as demonstrated by this short film put together about Coventry’s film history.

MACE’s collection was originally formed around the ATV regional television archive so features a lot of news footage, but now includes a wider range of materials and I have really enjoyed trying to understand Coventry’s history, heritage and different communities through this lens. I considered the fashion trends (and sexist attitudes) of the 1970s while watching this piece about a milkman looking for a wife[viii] and enjoyed seeing some much loved (and now slightly neglected) Coventry architecture in the context of modernity and forward-thinking.[ix]

MACE’s collection has also provided me with opportunities to understand more about Coventry’s history of industry and industrial action. There are lots of moving films about people in various trades especially striking miners and automotive workers, but one of my favourites is a more light-hearted film about a strike over the amount of tea given to workers which both the presenter and a striking worker take great delight in calling ‘a storm in a tea-cup’.[x]

In 2020, while thinking about Black Lives Matters protests across the country, Coventry as a City of Sanctuary, and Steve McQueen’s Small Axe films, I have looked at the MACE archive to reflect on the history of race in Coventry. I watched films ranging from this difficult to watch 1966 vox pops clip capturing public responses to the first black policeman,[xi] to a film about racial tensions in the 1980s[xii], but also to a celebration of the 2-tone scene and the importance of the ‘Coventry Sound’ to a new generation of Coventarians.[xiii] All of these examples demonstrate that even if the collections at MACE don’t seem to fit with your research at first glance, it is an excellent resource for understanding aspects of socio-cultural histories captured on film.

As I’ve been writing this, I have become increasingly aware that I am essentially composing a love story to MACE! Perhaps because I have spent pretty much all of the last year in the West Midlands, I have found MACE an invaluable resource not only for my work but as a way of encouraging myself to look at the region through fresh eyes.

[i] Christine Grandy, ‘‘The Show Is Not about Race’: Custom, Screen Culture, and the Black and White Minstrel Show’,  Journal of British Studies, 59: 4 (2020) 857–84.

[ii] Rachel Yemm, ‘Immigration, race and local media: Smethwick and the 1964 general election’, Contemporary British History, 33:1 (2019) 98-122.

[iii] Paradise Lost: History in the Unmaking http://paradiselostfilm.uk/ [Accessed 16 February 2021].

[iv] MACE, About MACE, https://www.macearchive.org/about-mace [Accessed 10 November 2020].

[v] MACE, How to License Footage, https://www.macearchive.org/how-license-footage [Accessed 16 February 2021].

[vi] Vimeo, MACE Archive- Foleshill Community Centre Screening, https://vimeo.com/468531427 [Accessed 19 October 2020].

[vii] MACE https://www.macearchive.org/ [Accessed 10 November 2020].

[viii] MACE, ATV Today: 05.02.1970: Coventry milkman looking for a wife, https://www.macearchive.org/films/atv-today-05021970-coventry-milkman-looking-wife [Accessed 16 February 2021].

[ix] MACE, Midlands News: 01.05.1962: Opening of Rebuilt Coventry station, https://www.macearchive.org/films/midlands-news-01051962-opening-rebuilt-coventry-station [Accessed 16 February 2021].

[x] MACE, ATV Today: 13.07.1972: Coventry Tea Strike, https://www.macearchive.org/films/atv-today-13071972-coventry-tea-strike [Accessed 16 February 2021].

[xi] MACE, ATV Today: 08.02.1966: Vox Pops on Black Police Officers, https://www.macearchive.org/films/atv-today-08021966-vox-pops-black-police-officers [Accessed 16 February 2021].

[xii] MACE, ATV Today: 06.05.1981: Coventry Racial Tension, https://www.macearchive.org/films/atv-today-06051981-coventry-racial-tension [Accessed 16 February 2021].

[xiii] MACE, ATV Today: 13.12.1979: The Coventry Sound, https://www.macearchive.org/films/atv-today-13121979-coventry-sound [Accessed 16 February 2021].

Kat Pearson is in the second year of her PhD at the University of Warwick studying television and UK Cities of Culture.  Because Kat’s work is a Collaborative Doctoral Award, partly supervised by the Media Archive for Central England (MACE), archival television is central to her research. Kat’s thesis will use television programming and archives to look at the two previous UKCoCs (Hull and Derry) and at Coventry’s year in 2021 and evaluate the role of television in placemaking and reputational change. Alongside, and feeding into- this research, Kat is working with MACE to create and run outreach events (including one in Foleshill which was reconfigured due to the pandemic https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/film/tvhistories/blog/foleshillscreenings). These events aim to take the archive out into the community and during Coventry 2021 will hopefully also provide opportunities for new material to be added to the archive. Another strand of Kat’s PhD is working with Professor John Wyver at Illuminations Media (an independent production company) who have been commissioned to make an archive focused documentary about Coventry Cathedral which will be screened in 2021.

Disclaimer: The IAMHIST Blog is a platform that offers individual scholars the opportunity to present their work and thoughts. They alone are responsible for the content, which does not represent the view of the IAMHIST council or other IAMHIST members.

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