Anne Fleming

Behp 0698 T Anne Fleming. Transcript.

This transcript was originally produced automatically using Speechmatics, and has been edited by David Sharp for the British Entertainment History Project.

This transcript has been edited to remove hesitation and repetition where it was felt that the speech recognition software had been too thorough!

Interviewee: Anne Fleming (AF)
Interviewer: Murray Weston (MW):

Murray Weston:  It's Friday the 21st of April 2017 and this is interview number 698 with Anne Fleming for the British Entertainment History Project.

Anne Fleming: Very good.
 

MW: Very nice to see you Anne and what we'd like to do is start right at the very beginning. We'd like to talk right through your life and your work in the world of archives and other things in film.

AF: Okay.

MW: But let's start at the very beginning: where abouts were you born?
 

AF: I was born on a farm called Old Montrose four miles outside Montrose. My - I was born on the 12th of August 1944. And I went to school in Montrose and I followed that by going to university in Edinburgh. And while in Edinburgh I suppose my already, I already had an interest in film because movies were just about the only entertainment to be had in Montrose as you can imagine. So, I was a member of the Film Society at University and from there worked for the Edinburgh Film Festival in school - university vacations. And then that took me through to a certain point where I decided I had to get a serious job. I kind of spent a year teaching English as a foreign language in Sicily and around about the beginning of 1970 I thought I can't go on just doing odds and ends all my life, I have to [do something]. So I applied for anything at all that mentioned the word film and that job was a job at the Imperial War Museum.

MW: How interesting. And what was your discipline in the form of a degree?

AF: I did the English language and literature. Which I mean an enormous degree in that subject In Scottish universities, well in Edinburgh. If you do English literature and language you have to do a first-year history degree which is the whole of - the whole of British history starting with the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles and carrying on from there. And that was because the professor at the time really felt very strongly that despite the concentration in the 60s on textual analysis, that unless you had some concept of the background in which books were written you would not fully understand them. And I have to say I agree with that. I'm always very grateful for having had that solid backing in history. And it also stood me in very good stead a little later.
 

MW: Absolutely. So how did you find out about the post at the Imperial War Museum. Do you remember how?
 

AF: Oh yes. I was on the train going back to Edinburgh from home after Christmas. And the jobs were advertised in either The Observer or The Sunday Times I can't remember which at this point might have been either. And I looked at this and I thought hm, well I'm not qualified for this but I might as well practice filling in a job application. So I did. I filled in the job application which was for the post of Keeper of Information Retrieval. And the job was a cataloguing job. And the idea was that information retrieval would catalogue not just film but the entire holdings of the War Museum from ammunition through to aeroplanes tanks and films, documents, books, you name it. It would cover everything and would become eventually a computerised database. So, I was entirely unqualified. However, I did get an interview. I don't know quite how- I didn't get the job - but Franklin invited me, Noble Frankland, who was the director at the time wrote me a letter afterwards because everything went through the Civil Service Commission at the time so my letter of rejection came from the Civil Service Commission. I had a follow-up letter from Frankland saying that while I didn't get that job, they had liked my interview and there were two more jobs coming up. Which he thought I might be interested in. And that he asked me to look out for them. So I did and I then applied for both the jobs that came up because one was in cataloguing film-

5 minutes

AF:  -and the other was in film programming. And since I'd been working at the Edinburgh Film Festival and involved to a certain degree in programming I thought either would be interesting. And I got the film programming job.

MW:  And do you remember who was on the board for that interview, presumably the second interview?

AF: Yes. Well, Noble Frankland; Christopher Rhodes. Clive Coultass and Frances Thorpe and there was a fifth member who was more involved in the side of computerisation but he didn't, he wasn't as involved in that interview as in the first interview, shall we say. I can't remember his name and I never saw him again and it is a long time ago.

MW: But it was still 1970?

AF: It was.

MW: It was 1970 - because that was an early time for computerisation.

AF: Yes it was. And of course Christopher Rhodes was very active in that sphere. Deputy Director of the museum at the time. Working closely with Frankland.

MW:  And was the Imperial War Museum one of the few museums that was using computers for cataloguing at that point or was it a general move amongst maybe ACM [?] and other places?
 

AF: I think that the ambition that the museum had at the time was actually quite unusual. The museum had a number of problems with computerisation as I suspect many, many, places did at the time. Documentation wasn't, it was certainly nothing like as detailed as it is today. And we had, the museum had, inherited documentation from different ministries that had deposited material with the museum over the years and that applied not just to film but also to other collections like photographs and, and indeed, documents to a certain extent. And so the ambition to computerise was I think a little too early. As it transpired but by the mid 70s it was becoming more serious. Yeah.
 

MW: But you're in film programming.

AF: Yup.

MW: And the Imperial War Museum at that time, and I'm not sure whether it still has one now, had a cinema. And tell us more about what you actually did in film programming because there were regular screenings.

AF: There were regular screenings and we had effectively a monthly programme and we ran that program daily and over each weekend as well. It was non-stop. We had -we had two projectionists which meant that they could alternate weekends and have days off. We also had a small preview theatre which enabled us to screen films to be certain that they were, well of a quality that you could put on a cinema screen as opposed to just watch on a Steenbeck [film editing table. DS] shall we say.

And my job initially entailed watching just masses and masses of material to be able to identify film titles that were suitable for programming in the cinema because of course a lot of the museum's collection at the time, well still is, record film is unedited, it's of a different category to the collections held by say the British Film Institute. However, there was a great deal of film that was suitable for programming and I had the great privilege of having it as my job to watch film every day.
 

MW: Was there a predecessor to you in this role or had you gone to this new thing?
 

AF: Well Clive Coultass had been appointed as Keeper of Film Programming. Well yes. Keeper of Film Programming the year before and had decided he needed an assistant in this capacity because he had also set up a film loan scheme, a 16 millimeter film loan scheme for universities and to a certain extent further education colleges where they were running courses where material we held would be of interest. So the job had escalated. So I was appointed in 1970.

10 mins.

AF: Things changed quite rapidly after that. The museum’s structure went through a massive reorganisation. At the time- the reason reason that film programming was separate from what was the Film Section at the time - ironically that's what it is now. It's a film section now. The film section was part of a larger department called Collections which included photographs, printed books, documents, and film. Effectively all the non-object material in the collection. And it was run, it had a single keeper and film programming was off to one side. In ‘71 Noble Frankland made a major restructuring of the museum and he appointed heads to Documents, Printed books, Photographs, Film and the person who had been Keeper of Collections became the Keeper of a new department which was the Keeper of Sound Records. And that was a complete innovation. There was no collection of sound records at the time. It was, its ambition was very similar to the one that the present exercise has, which was to interview as many people as possible that had played a part in either the First or Second World Wars or indeed, post wars, post-war British conflicts and who might have something that they wouldn't have communicated. They wouldn't have written they wouldn't have written anything [about]. The focus was on people who hadn't published and I think that slowly expanded: to take in film cameramen. There are a lot of film camera-mens’ interviews at the at the War Museum.

So, restructuring and I moved from Film Programming into the Department of Film and the nature of the job changes. With that I still, I'm still responsible for programming the cinema and I'm still responsible for film loans but I'm also responsible to some extent to interacting with users of the collection particularly television companies. So that's the beginning of my sort of career at the War Museum.

MW: And the Films Department or the Films Section-

AF:  Department.

MW: - had quite a number of other people in it and I was just wondering if you have any names of people who were there at that time as it restructured as I think it built up a little bit.

AF: Well at the time the film section had two main people who coped with all users. John Sutter's who had been there pretty well since, I think about 1950, John had joined and Iris English. Both of them would have been well known to anyone who - certainly would have been very well known to the makers of The Great War series and subsequently to the makers of The Life and Times of Lord Mountbatten which are the two major programs that the museum was involved in through the ‘60s. If you - I mean The Great War was a breakthrough programme. For the museum. And from then on, the demands on the collection grew with every year.

MW: Peter Morley I think made that, The Life and Times of Lord Mountbatten.
 

AF: That's right. Yes that's right. And I think, I think he worked with John Terraine on that as well. Yeah, yeah.
 

MW: Yeah, could be. Could be.
So it's nineteen seventy-ish and you were restructured in this department and gradually moved in a sense away a little bit from programming into other areas.

AF: Yeah, we eventually appointed someone else to be responsible for film programming and for film loans and my responsibility became more, more and more administrative shall we say and I became Clive's deputy in the department. But still privileged to be able to watch as much film as possible. So I got to know the collection really well. And. In many ways much luckier than I would have been had I been cataloguing the collection where the focus was on, you know, you had you had to catalogue each film in great detail.

15 mins

 

AF:  At the time that, that, was the focus for the first four or five years it was a shot-by-shot analysis.

MW: I’m sure. Now, in that period in the early seventies you were in parallel with the British Film Institute National Film and Television Archive presumably.
I'm trying to remind myself who was actually Head of the National Film and Television Archive at that time when I think-

AF:  Well when I started it was actually Ernest Lindgren. He was still alive In 1970. Of course he became ill very shortly afterwards. And I'm not sure of the exact dates but there was an interim period where Kevin Gough-Yates was well if not Curator he was Acting Curator and then David Francis was appointed and was very much the person in charge through most of my most of my time at the War Museum from then on and Clyde Jeavons [BEHP Interview 694] of course was also there at the time.

MW: And really in the UK in terms of publicly funded film archives and they were just film archives at that time there was just the Natural Film Archive and the Imperial War Museum.

AF: That's right. Yes.

MW: There were no regional -
 

AF: There were no regional film archives at the time. And sometime in the late ‘70s the Scottish Film Archive was established. I think then under the auspices of the Scottish Film Council and David Bruce and others very much involved in that. I'm sure you've spoken to them as well - or you will. [laughter] The evolution of the - the evolution of the regional film archives took place actually over quite a long period through the ‘80s. You had, you had Manchester, The North West Film Archive and I think they were one of the first English regional film archives.

MW: Maybe East Anglia around the same time.
 

AF: Yes a little earlier I think. Yes. David Cleveland of course very active in that whole movement and very important in that whole movement.

But I enjoyed working with the regional film archives. I've never seen - and I think there is more than enough work in the film archive world for it to be shared across the countries. I mean, I've always felt that and I and I have always felt that the BFI [British Film Institute] was slightly imperialistic.[laughs] In its attitudes and I personally tried not to not to be like that and to encourage the regional film archives as much as I could.

MW: I think there's an argument about provenance as well and calculating-

AF: Yes, absolutely, and regional knowledge, regional knowledge. Yes.

MW: It's not necessarily connected to London.

AF: It’s not. Not at all. 18.35

MW: Which is also a healthy thing. So your job was evolving in the Imperial War Museum.

AF: Yeah.

MW: At some point you made a move from the War Museum.

AF: Oh, that was later. It took 20 years.

MW:  Twenty years.

AF: I mean in that period. I worked on The World at War; I Worked on,
you know Secret History, oh all sorts of programs that I was directly involved with assisting in the research. So… and also, I eventually became Keeper of the. Department of Film. Because Clive had moved upwards and onwards.
 

MW: Tell us more about that because Clive was very much part of the film department.
 

AF: Oh yeah. Clive was Keeper of the Film Department. I was his deputy throughout that for most of that period; now I think it was around nineteen eighty four, eighty five that I became Keeper and was Keeper for the last five years of my time at the War Museum.

Clive at that point was involved in overseeing photographs as well as film and sound records as well.

20 mins

AF: There was an evolution if you like in his responsibilities and he was also very engaged at that point in the first restructuring of the galleries of the museum where film, for the first time became, it became possible to use film on a touch screen basis. The galleries were re-opened and restructured in 1989 and [Alan] Borg oversaw that as Director. And it was Clive who was responsible for putting film very much into the galleries and it was there you could stand alongside a V2 or V1 rocket touch the screen and see a take-off, a firing and from the German collection alongside the exhibit. 21.00
 

MW: During your time from the start of the Department as a department and your involvement in television production and supporting producers and so on,
how much emphasis was there then on earning income for the Imperial War Museum out of that endeavour? Was it something which was just sort of a nice thing to have?
 

AF: No no. There was a lot of emphasis on it. The World at War was perhaps one of the most extraordinary deals done at the time, and the Department of Film was not responsible for that. Christopher Rhodes was responsible for that and he negotiated a deal whereby we got - the museum got - a percentage of all earnings from sales overseas as well as a lump sum which was quite substantial at the time, so the earnings continue to come in because there are still sales, remarkably, in different forms.
 

MW: It was most successful.

AF: Yes exactly.

MW:  Most successful series ever made.

AF: Yeah. At this point, and I think that Thames Television were quite surprised to be asked for that kind of deal. They were used to an all-out complete buy out for world television rights. But then Christopher decided that that's not what we would do this time round. I think because there was a feeling in the Museum that the BBC had perhaps not agreed to the kind of deal that they should have for The Great War series although quite a lot of money continued to come in from The Great War series while I was still at the museum so-
 

MW: But The Great War series seemed to get caught up a little bit, it didn't get the exposure perhaps of repeated exposure that The World at War did.
 

AF: I think that's true. I think there came a point where there was an interest in re-releasing it but the problem they had was clearing rights because after all - not so much with the Museum, but it wasn't just the Imperial War Museum. They had drawn material from all across the world to go into the series and tracking that down was actually quite difficult and I think that stopped the re-release of the series.
 

MW: And The World at War seemed to have a very special sort of contract as well because it seems to be almost perpetual, that it operates in a similar fashion from the very from the get go until now.

AF: Indeed and I don't know enough about how they negotiated rights with other archives but certainly the clearance was for as long as they there was an interest in the series and for us that was excellent because of that percentage deal that had been agreed.

MW: Apart from those two series, well certainly The World at War, when you were there, there were other peaks of activity presumably? I imagine that some of the Thames series like Palestine.

AF: Yes.

MW: Can you remind us of some of those programs from memory that maybe stick out in your mind for good or bad reasons?
 

AF: Look. Palestine was another of those and was another of the programs that clearly the War Museum was very, very, involved with but only in programme one.

25 mins

AF:  Because after all there was very little footage and, really, shot in Israel in the later- or indeed in Palestine- through the Second World War. The main, our main contribution was for the First World War and the immediate post -First World War settlements in Palestine. So we might not have been quite as involved as you think.

What we did find was a growing interest in the, if you like the concept of the secret histories and with the revelations that you know of Bletchley Park and all that kind of thing. Now, we didn't have any film of Bletchley Park. But we did have footage of all kinds of technical innovations that happened during the Second World War War, both German and British. And those collections were of course record film rather than edited film and there was a huge and growing interest in exploring those collections. People like Brian Johnson from the BBC made several series focusing on those developments, weapon development of various kinds.
 

MW: Of course, The Imperial War Museum inherited a lot of windfall film. I think as Germany fell. Is that right? And I'm interested in the sort of locus of that content post-war because I think it was very much within the Imperial War Museum, held by the British government. And then there may have been a changing set of politics as time went on. Can you say something about that?

AF: Well the German film collection was very much part of the Allied Control Commission's brief. Both the United States and Britain inherited German news-reels, German feature films that were regarded as being related to the Nazi government of Germany. There was the Enemy Property Act, passed in 1953 and that gave us, gave the Museum rather, the right to exploit the film, the German film on behalf of the Crown, certainly within Britain. And I think within the Commonwealth nations all of whom had been part, of course, of the conflict. So that footage was released on that basis. The German authorities increasingly through late ‘60s and early ‘70s very much resented the fact that footage was being used in this way. Particularly I think since in the Kennedy period a lot of material was returned to Germany from the States. I don't know the details of that, it's before my time if you like but I'm sure that others could fill you in and that if you're interested.

But certainly there were tensions about all of that. Interestingly the gentleman who ran Transit Film who controlled the-that footage on behalf of the German government, Dr. Fatelheuser [?] I believe his name was, well he had worked under Goebbels during the Second World War. And our feelings about his relationship to the footage was not -well you can imagine it's very difficult to have a completely, completely, objective response to someone claiming rights in material filmed by the Nazis [and] who was involved at the period as a very young man obviously. He did challenge the Museum and there were several meetings at the German Embassy which Clive Coultass attended. And Clive upheld the position as it stood under The Enemy Property Act. The Enemy Property Act had not been repealed. And as far as I know that is still the position.

30 mins

 AF: I don't think it was ever changed. But … The museum not then and not now does not release the material for world distribution but it does claim the right to allow it to be used within the United Kingdom without reference to Germany or to Transit Film.
 

MW: I don't know whether the situation has changed but I do know Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will was one of those that went backwards and forwards.
 

AF: Oh yes, oh yes, oh yes.

MW: So is there something to be said about Triumph of the Will?

AF: Well again Triumph of the Will was one of is one of these films. Which it is undoubtedly a great, a very great film, very great documentary film. And that's perhaps why it also was quite so dangerous because it, it, does capture the spirit of the time and it does it does encapsulate the appeal if you like of National Socialism. And I, myself, did experience an occasion where I had arranged for a professor to view Triumph of the Will in our preview cinema. And unknown to me one of our other people had had arranged for two others whose names I don't know to join him. And I was summoned from a viewing done on a Steenbeck. I was summoned up by the projectionist to say that these two people were behaving slightly oddly in the preview cinema. And they were sitting in the front Hans Koch was sitting at the back. And they were sort of jumping up and saluting the screen. And at that moment you do, you do wonder, about the power of some material. We let the film run - we'd said they could see it. But we tended to avoid that kind of private viewing in future. It was very difficult because they did ask if they if there was a possibility of viewing atrocity footage immediately afterwards. To which the answer was no. Not censorship, simply most of that footage wasn't viewable. We didn't have viewing copies.

MW: There must have been film records. Excuse me.[clears throat] In the Imperial War Museum though, which were highly sensitive for a very long time indeed. Maybe I don't - I'm making this up - but I imagine that there would be films from the Second World War which might be kept slightly away from the rest of the collection for all sorts of reasons. There may even be secret sensitivities about technology or whatever, even from that time.
 

AF: Well, oh well there were there were films that were marked and were held as secret for quite a long time post the Second World War and some of those came - some of those were requested during the making of The Life and Times of Lord Mountbatten. Again I wasn't involved directly in that but the stories, the stories, were recounted to me. One of these one of that one of the. One of the things that Mountbatten was involved with was the whole business of D-Day and combined operations and some of the special equipment that was developed for the beach landings. Some of these were experimental and didn't really work terribly well. There was one called the Grand Panjandrum or the Great Panjandrum, I can't remember which [the latter. DS] it was a a giant sort of Catherine wheel fired on rockets that ran up the beach and it was going to, it was supposedly going to clear everything. In its wake.

35 mins.

AF: Except of course it was completely uncontrollable, completely uncontrollable, and then turned on the cameraman, turned on small dogs yapping on the beach when they were testing it and then that this piece of equipment, we were told by the man from the Ministry of Defence who came down to view the footage before it could be released, he said “No, no, we can't release that.” Really?  So, it was reported to Mountbatten. He said “Ridiculous, I'll see to that.” And it was released! And used in The Life and Times… because it's a hugely entertaining sequence. Well, you obviously have seen it.

MW: I have. Great fun. Are there other things besides?

AF: Yeah.

MW: More and more of those come out.
Now as far as the Department was concerned, at some point there were people joining. There's Paul Sargent amongst others and I wondered if we could talk a little bit about that and indeed about Taylor Downing [BEHP Interview No 699] I imagine, arriving at some point within the department and because of the nature of our discussion it's probably worth exploring what happened then.

AF: OK. Well. I guess as time went on and people who had been in post retired. And new people came in to take over the Production Library, Production office. The Production Office at the Museum and Paul Sargent was the second of those and, and, he stayed for, as you know, for I think 30-odd years. So it was, his was a good appointment. Jane Fish was also appointed in that period and she, she's of course still with the Museum. And have been extremely important in, as, the public face of the Museum's Film Department throughout that period throughout the late ‘80s, ‘90s really late ‘80s early-  and completely through the 90s and up to 2010, 2011.

MW: And Taylor: at some point Taylor arrived.

AF: Well Taylor arrived as a consequence of my being seconded to UNESCO. Again this is thanks to Christopher Rhodes, who had built up a relationship with Jordan. And the idea was that we would establish a film archive or a television archive at very least, at JTV in Jordan and that I should go out there and offer advice on how this should be done. So, I spent something like eight months in Jordan. In 1976. And, as a result of that, the museum earned quite a lot of money because they were being paid for releasing me from my duties. And, as a result of that, we could employ a film cataloguer to catalogue a lot of the amateur film that I had been acquiring but unable to catalogue because you can't do everything. And so Taylor was employed initially to catalogue our holdings of amateur film. And he spent six or seven months with the Museum and the money ran out. His contract came to an end and he almost, well about three months after that he was employed by Thames Television on the series Palestine and I'll let him tell you about that.

MW: Absolutely, that will be discussed it another interview.
Now you - Clive Coultass had moved on.

AF: Oh yeah.

MW: You are a Keeper of Film and at some point you decided that - or maybe someone came and knocked on your door and said “We'd like you to move.” Potentially. Tell us about how you moved away from The Imperial War Museum and some of that circumstance.
 

AF: Well, um, I had at that point, I'd been at the War Museum for 20 years and I had a feeling that if I didn't make a move quite soon I'd probably be there to the end of my working career and I wasn't sure that's what I wanted to do.

40 mins

AF: I'd had a very varied time at the War Museum, I'd been very lucky. Because as you heard I had had time in Jordan. I travelled a lot. I know I've been, I've been very fortunate but I felt there must be more. There's more out there. And at that point David Francis and Michelle Snapes as she was then, both left the BFI. And that meant there were two vacancies or apparent vacancies within the organisation. David Francis was replaced by Clyde Jeavons [BEHP Interview No 694] eventually. And about a year after that Clyde was enabled to advertise the Deputy Curatorship and I applied for that. Clyde had said “You know, you could think about, you could think about applying.” So, I thought about it and thought ‘yes it was probably something I should do.’ I didn't - I wasn't sure I would get that job to be perfectly honest, but it certainly interested me.

MW: Very good. We'll explore your time in the BFI in a moment. But before we do that FIAF [International Federation of Film Archives] is an organisation which was established in the 1950s I think maybe.

AF: No no no no no:  1930s.

MW:1930s, I beg your pardon. I've got that wrong completely.
Now your relationship with FIAF, you must have, while you were in The Imperial War Museum, started to attend meetings while you were there.

AF: Yes.

MW: IWM a full member, was it?

AF: No not initially. Indeed, it wasn't a member at all in the in the sixties. It made application: I think the first the first contacts were made through Christopher Rhodes. In fact in the (probably) late 60s. Then Clive became Keeper of the Department of Film. And when that happened in fact, the archive the Film archive which had always existed, as it as it were, been in existence since 1917 effectively. The Film archive suddenly became eligible because … it existed as an independent entity within the Museum. It wasn't part of a larger conglomeration of artefacts. And that's one of the tenets that FIAF has as its, or it did have it as a proviso for entry. Initially we didn't have, we were not full members and … I think it was Clive who took the museum into full membership of FIAF. Clive and I alternated, we never attended at the same time we alternated in attending FIAF. I think my first my first FIAF was in Rapallo in Italy. And I think Clive suggested I should attend that partly because the main language would be Italian. But actually the main languages were French and English as always. So, from then on ,I as I say, I alternated with Clive.

MW: The profession of film archivist. I would just like to reflect on this slightly because there are those around who say “well there aren't there aren't many qualifications for this.” But it is definitely a profession. And there's a tension isn't there or there has been it seems to me between those who are Keepers of Film and those who are museum artifact curators and because of this different set of disciplines and FIAF is one of those big organisations which has a hook and one can hang one's hat on as a film archivist with saying-

AF:  Yes.

45 mins

MW: - that there aren't many organisations because it’s a rare occupation really film archivist.

AF: It is. Although it has of course grown over the years: there are more film archives around the world than there were. Many of them may not be dealing anymore in celluloid but they are dealing in moving images and film is now I think expanded to cover the whole range of moving images whether they be digital or video or celluloid. And you know the ‘old fashioned’, the old -fashioned sprocket-based stuff.

MW: For a moment without being too spikey. I'd like to explore this relationship between museum curators and film archivists.
 

AF: I suppose you mean that museum curators focus on the original, and with film - most film not all - has a negative and the negative is not screened, you have to- and by definition you make multiple copies so that you can distribute it. So of course there is no single, one, museum object. So, what are we talking about? What is a film restoration? All these questions are those that need to be asked and I'm not sure that it's easy to answer them. It never has been. But as long as you can retain an original negative, if you are lucky enough to have one. And a print that is contemporary to the time the film was produced, you are, you have a fighting chance of producing another copy that will be close to what the film looked like on the screen originally. It's only a fighting chance and it can never be exact. No two copies are identical. We all know that. A digital technology could of course have changed all that….But even digital technology has its problems. It can clean film sometimes it cleans it too much in my view, it doesn't look like film anymore. I mean these are subjective judgments that I'm making of course. But they are often shared by the film-makers. When you talk to them about what they see on the screen. And it's interesting that - and certainly until very recently - some of the big Hollywood studios were taking digital material, even things that had originated digitally back to film for that, for their master material. And I find all that quite interesting even although that things are being distributed as DCPs, often the original is still held on celluloid and I know that still the War Museum has its original collections. And I know that I know that the BFI espouses film forever.

MW: Mm. Mm. So, so, in a way a film archivist is almost a keeper of art. As an intellectual property, rather than being an artifact. Rather than put a label on and say it’s on this shelf.

AF: You can, you can never put a label on it and say it’s on that on the shelf forever. You can try to conserve those originals for as long as possible and by duplication protect originals from being trashed because we know that film projection is a tricky business and it's easy to damage. It's a delicate material. You can put a scratch, a scratch, through a piece of celluloid all too easily. No doubt about that. And you can you can completely screw up the sound as well. Soundtracks are vulnerable too. And so, all of that applies. So, keeping your original, conserving your original is something that I think we've always been about. And. Lindgren – and that goes for the early film conservationists at the War Museum as well. They realise that nitrate was what was vulnerable and began to talk to the government chemist.

50 mins

AF: And Kodak. About what you do about all of that. And as a result, we got advice that was perhaps not the best because the first copies of the Battle of the Somme were on diacetate. Not, not, very helpful but the original was kept or [rather] the only original we had was kept.

MW: And from that original recently-

AF:  - there has been a complete restoration. Digital restoration.

MW: Marvellous things have been found … lots more information in the picture than was known about which is marvellous.

AF: Yes. Yeah. I think I think the information was always in the picture. But you had to be looking at it slowly on a Steenbeck to catch it. Now you can see it on the big screen and it comes through clear.

MW: Yeah.

AF: You're thinking of the attack sequence. Where you see that the figures running and falling.

MW: Yeah.

AF: Which is a genuine attack on the first day of the Battle of the Somme.
 

MW: And then there was a large column of troops coming down a track. Yeah, it could be because it was washed out in one of those scenes. But it’s been brought back digitally. Which is a marvellous thing.

So we've talked a little bit about FIAF. And FIAF is one of the few organisations that glues together internationally film archivists who all have similar issues problems and indeed and challenges.
 

AF: Indeed. There is, there are, FIAF isn't the only organisation. There is of course, in the States they have their own. AMIA. [Association of Moving Image Archivists. DS] Meets every year. And in the Southeast Pacific you have. It has a very, very, awkward… set of initials SEAPFA? up. Can you remember. Can anyone remember what they stand for? I can't quite -  South – South East Asian Archival [SEAPAVAA – Southeast Asia-Pacific Audiovisual Archives. DS] anyway-

MW: Is that not good?

AF: -that has become … increasingly important for people in Southeast Asia.

And I think one has to remember that some of the new archives are in that region: Malaysia, Thailand, all these places now have their own film archives. And it's really quite exciting because these are new industries, new, well not exactly new industries but it's a new interest in conserving their film culture.

MW: And in those climates rather more challenging.

AF: … Very, very, difficult. Yes. Yes, very difficult, very difficult.
 

MW: In that sense, yeah. Keeping the content of the pictures alive.
So: You've moved to the BFI.

AF: I’ve moved to the BFI.

MW: Remind us of the date of that move.

AF: That was 1990.

MW: Right.

AF: September 1990: actually I moved to the BFI on September the 3rd 1990. The day war broke out!
 

MW: Oh right.

AF: How ironic is that? [They laugh]
 

MW: And as you moved away from Imperial War Museum you came to be in touch with all sorts of different disciplines in film record and feature films and so on which were greater in quantity than you'd had.

AF: Yes. It was a different scale of collection. Although I think the size of the War Museum's collection is often underestimated. But the scale of the BFI is collection is outstrips, certainly anything else in the country.

MW: Did you find this challenging?

AF: Oh yes, extremely challenging a steep learning curve, a very steep - a very steep learning curve, and on many, many, different levels. And it was a much, much bigger organisation and I don't just mean the BFI as a whole, I mean the archive and the archive staff were much, much, bigger and the whole of the Department at the War Museum when I left was about thirty-five people including those that their outstations at Hayes were the nitrate was stored and Duxford, where safety film was stored by that time. So I had to … readjust my thinking. You can know, individually, everyone in a 30, 35-person department.

55 mins

AF:  And be able to judge their abilities and capacities quite accurately. Much harder when you come into something. I mean the staff at Stephen Street must've been around 30. And of course the staff at Berkhamsted was another hundred people.

MW: Aston Clinton I suppose as well.

AF: Well Aston Clinton by that time was all, had made the transfer.

MW: Alright.

AF: It's ’87, I think that everyone moved from Aston Clinton to Berkhamsted. And the nitrate by that time was at Gaydon. Not Aston Clinton, that much I can tell you.

MW: And so there's a challenge in a way of being, a split site as well. Or of course you were split-sited at the Imperial War Museum. But on a bigger scale.

AF: Yes. But a much, much, bigger scale, a much bigger scale. And that is always a challenge. Gayden was very isolated and in the sense that you know it's … quite a long haul up to Warwickshire. Berkhamsted one could get to very easily. And one had to I mean we met, we used to - our departmental meetings were always at Berkhamsted.  So everyone, all Department Section Heads went out to a Berkhamsted regularly. And focused on, and focused on, getting to know people out there and understanding how the site worked because of course it wasn't just it wasn't just The Archive that had material at Berkhamsted. Documents - the whole …  printed books did as well. David, I'm looking at you at this moment.

David Sharp [DS]: Yup, yeah. We had lots of paper collections. Yes. Yeah. And materials and-

MW: Posters I seem to recall.

AF: Posters and stills as well … and designs as well. And of course they weren't formally part of the archive: Posters and Stills were not part of the archive.
They were a separate department at the time. So we coexisted. And the person in charge of the Centre had responsibility for the safekeeping of those collections in terms of keeping the overall fabric of the building capable of maintaining even temperatures and appropriate storage. Throughout

MW: Remind us: 1990, and I'm forgetting the chronology of Directorships at BFI.  Was this Tony Smith time? Or was it now Wilf.

AF: it was now Wilf Stevenson, Wilf had already taken over from Tony. Yes Wilf was there from 1990 to 1997 or 98.

DS: I’m not sure.

AF: Well, he certainly he certainly was there to the end of ‘97 I think. I think that's when Wilf left. And John Woodward was appointed. So John Woodward was appointed and was at the museum [a slip: Anne meant BFI] throughout ninety eight. Then Jon Teckman.

MW: Yeah, yeah.

AF: I could not tell you exact dates of that. It was it was a very fast-moving time.

MW: Sure, and quite challenged financially, I think within the BFI: I think I'm summarising now. But I think Tony Smith had been quite successful in raising funds of various sorts. And then I think the government was probably not helping the BFI as much as it might have done.

AF: There were a lot, there were a lot of very challenging times. And, as a result of that I think the 1990s was a period where we seemed to be in a, it felt as if we were in a, state of constant restructuring. And that's how I would describe how it felt coming from what, looking back on it now, at the War Museum would be a very stable environment. In 1990 at the BFI, things seemed to be in constant flux and … trying to maintain stability within a Department and make people feel that they could get on with their work –

1 hour

AF: - and weren't going to be constantly challenged about whether or not they still had a job the next day was actually very difficult. And because I was Deputy and in charge of budgets and drawing up budgets. And including staff salary, that had to be taken into account in the overall picture. I was very aware of that. And … I mean that was a difficult decade for the BFI. I hope things are better now. 1.00.32

MW: But you're also facing the challenge, presumably, of the whole question of how computerisation had moved on or was moving on, and where it was all going.

AF: Yeah. [laughs]

MW: And the legacy systems that you might have had before. I wonder if you'd like to say something about that because filmographic information and computers it has had an additionally difficult path.

AF:  It has. The filmographic information was held on SIFT [Summary of Information on Film and Television, the BFI’s own internal database. DS] and, like, as was most of the material about photographs such as it was and posters and designs such as the information was it was on SIFT and it covered printed books as well: I believe the library did it…?

DS: No no, not at all, No we were late into that. There was an off-the-shelf system called OLIB I think.

AF: Oh yes. But for the technical side we had a separate system which was simply called Technical Records.

MW: Right.

AF: Which was Oracle based. As you know, talking about that as the basis under which everything was constructed and it was very much, it was capable of more complexity to be honest than SIFT. And was extraordinarily useful to us because of the multiple copies we held of just about every film in the collection not just in terms of negs but in terms of dupe negs, fine grained, multiple prints, some prints complete, some prints that were not complete, and all the footages could be listed separately and it was possible to track any individual item, reel of film, and know as much as possible about it. Without that it was really difficult to provide access. You didn't know which copy was the copy that you could safely release into the world without damaging something.

I don't think that's something that's easily understood about the BFI’s collection at the time which is that you couldn't just take a film off the shelf and say “Here you are.” We did have identified viewing copies, and for that, that was easy, you could just take the viewing copy off, let people have it. Not a problem. Where you have multiple copies and the technical selection hasn't been made. You don't know what you might be using to print from in future. So, you had to look at everything you held. If suddenly something was requested that hadn't been looked at before, you know, and that could be a tiny newsreel item-

MW: And it's highly work intensive.

AF: It's highly work intensive, so you do need a lot of bodies on seats and these people need skills as well.

MW: Absolutely.
 

AF: They need technical skills which actually aren't that common. And one of the things that we, as a result of all this and as a result much that went on through the early half of the ‘90s, the BFI launched its Heritage Lottery Fund bid which was a very major bid. It meant I believe that there already had been a bid for the Museum of the Moving Image. This was a bid that encapsulated new build for the Institute and it included, in the new build for the Institute a collection management plan for the archive which I was put in charge of drawing up…. That sounds easy. Collection management is not easy as we all know.

1 hour 5 mins.

AF: And we put it in what was actually quite a detailed collection management bid which, in itself, amounted to about 20 million [pounds]. Most of that being staff costs because … we were looking at initially a five-year project but with staff trained to take Technical Selection to identify materials; to look at acquisitions that had not been examined. There was a huge expansion of staff at Berkhamsted on the back of that bid. And also a huge expansion of cataloguing staff at Stephen Street. That part that part of the bid … the BFI’s bid that got money. 19 million was, 19 million in total was allocated. But, of course you had to find within that 19 million, 5 million of matched funding, so in other words you were getting thirteen point five million assuming that you could raise five million alongside it. Which was challenging shall we say.

Eventually Getty came through with, not a gift of five million but he agreed that as moneys were required, he would release the matched funding required.
Over, over, the entire period. And without him I'm not sure that we could have done it. Because raising that kind of money isn't easy at any time and it certainly wasn't easy in the late ‘90s.

MW: I wonder if we could reflect for a moment, because that just shows this schism in Britain, really, about the treatment of moving image as against say text where, for instance, the British Library and the six copyright libraries, not just five, six are supported, not always as much as they'd like to be, but the millions and millions and millions we seem to spend on public libraries, on the British Library, on Boston Spa, the Scottish National Library and so on … and we support Dublin with the Copyright Act. What's your feeling about that? Do you think legal deposit is something which should have come in a long time ago? Or is it something-  you know with that would have come cataloguing perhaps - an [equivalent of] ISBN. {International Standard Book Numbering]

AF: Yes. I think that legal deposit is something that the BFI has argued for over many years and it would indeed have been an extremely helpful - it would be extremely helpful because it would mean that you got a copy of a film more-or- less intact instead of scooping up the remains from laboratories or companies that were folding, or things that had been round the distribution track and therefore were shot, frankly, when they get to you. So legal deposit would make an enormous difference and, actually, would be, would enable money to be saved or would have enabled money to be saved. Perhaps if we're talking digital cinema packages it's perhaps less relevant these days but I think still relevant and I think it would enable things to be run more economically than. If you think about what the BFI had to do through the ‘80s when I wasn't there. But also, the 90s, you had Rank moving all its nitrate [stock] putting it under tarpaulin in the yard and then saying “Would somebody come and like to collect it?” I mean that is what happened because they were suddenly told they couldn't store nitrate in those conditions. And that happened with many labs. But, by that time, you know, you don't know quite what you're getting and it's not detailed and you're just picking material up. Other material comes from skips. You know.

1 hour 10 mins

MW: It's industrial archaeology. [inaudible]

AF: Yes, it really is. Exactly. And it shouldn't be that way but it has been for the bulk of the second half of the 20th Century.

MW: And it's probably continuing to grow.

AF: I'm sure. I'm sure that's the case. Yeah.

MW: And we're talking in the main about film at this moment but then we talk about television as that was part of your responsibilities as well of course.

AF: Yes.

MW: In the National Film and Television Archive as it was. That was another set of issues and problems and relationships.

AF: Yes. Well as you probably have heard from Clyde already. Clyde Jeavons, who was Curator throughout most of my time at the BFI and. We had, we had an agreement with the BBC where we recorded on Super-VHS, viewing copies, because the BBC was not able to provide a viewing facility. So, the BFI took on that responsibility and recorded live, off-air, Super-VHS copies plus a VHS for viewing purposes. And it was simply for viewing, nothing more, simply for access. For the ITV and Channel 4…. We were recording on to 1 inch tape initially and we were recording therefore a viewing copy on VHS and a master copy on one inch for preservation because with - certainly with ITV - the experience had been that as companies cease to exist, Thames replaced by Central, whatever… you could not ensure, you could not ensure, that the material produced under that company would survive. So, inevitably, we had to be selective on those.
So we were selecting documentaries, comedies, actually soaps, a lot of soaps were recorded because [they were] key to ITV’s whole being at the time. And then later we took in from the BBC masses of 2-inch tape which we were responsible for eventually transferring to digibeta. I'm sure somebody now has the problem of transferring it to something else. But tape was a real problem because the way formats changed and changed very quickly. Brian Jenkinson who was our video engineer at the time said “if it goes on like this you know they'll be changing formats halfway through making a programme”.

MW: They probably did! [laughter]

AF:  So tape, videotape, … was a headache in itself and just recording television … was a complete… it was a 24 hour exercise. Steve Bryant who was in overall charge of that - you should interview him too one of these days and he will tell you a great deal more about that.
But the decision to go to for digibeta: it didn't seem to be any other option at the time. It seemed to be the only way to go. And, of course, ten years later that was a mistake, wasn't it? Or was it? I don't know.

MW: I think it was not a bad mistake. You know there will be worse mistakes and I think digibeta will be transferred eventually.

AF: Yes, I’m sure it will. Yes.

MW: I think it will break down just like any other tape.

AF: Of course it will.

MW: But for the time being, people are capturing from that format quite successfully, but they're not making the machines anymore.

AF: Exactly.

MW: It's a huge challenge. The way the industry moves on and doesn't really support legacy formats very well.

AF: Well it can't. Really. I mean. Well, the thing is that that becomes the responsibility of the archives. Who - I mean to transfer the two-inch tapes
we had to maintain two-inch machines.

1 hour 15 mins

AF: To do the transfer from two-inch to Digibeta. And that was another major part of the expenditure under the HLF.[Heritage Lottery Fund]

MW: No of course. Yeah. All of those really old machines. More and more difficult to keep running at moment.
So we're at the BFI-

AF: We are.

MW:  And we have various exciting things happening there during your time and you were based as much at Berkhamsted because of the circumstance rather.

AF: Well. At the end. I was - as you probably - Well in the restructuring of 1996, I think it was… Clyde Jeavons decided that his time should end as it were. And he didn't leave until the - I think - the spring of ‘97. But at that point he left the BFI. That left myself, and Henning Schou and I was based at Stephen Street. In the autumn of that year, or I think September of that year, there were interviews for the curatorship. I applied for that. And I was appointed Curator in September ’97. Wilf Stevenson was at that point still in charge of the BFI. He was replaced, I think, in the early part of ’98: John Woodward came in as Director. He undertook another major restructuring. And over the then heads of department there were collection… there were several new Heads, Headships created, almost like a return to the old Divisions, I suppose. Caroline Ellis became Head of Collections. I remained as Curator and Head of Preservation; Henning Schou lost his job. I mean there were extraordinary movements throughout that period. I moved to Berkhamsted I think in - some time at the end of ‘98 and I was at Berhamsted mainly throughout ‘99 and 2000 because by then the HLF Project was very much underway. And you're right of course my focus was very much on that and overseeing that as far as I could and it was a demanding time.

MW: And the restructuring, by and large, were about cost cutting as much as anything.

AF: They were. Yes…. the restructurings were mainly about losing jobs. A lot of people lost their jobs, or,  I mean parts of the BFI ceased to exist. The photographic- the ability to make photographic prints within the BFI went in the restructuring of ‘96 ‘97. And people who lost their jobs, lost those jobs, actually transferred into the film laboratories because we needed additional people there because of the work that was being generated through the lottery fund. But that was because of lottery money. Without that we'd have, these people would have lost their jobs completely.

MW:  And the laboratories: was this Henderson's or another laboratory?

AF: No, no - they are at Berkhamsted. There was one and there still is one..

MW: Okay. Very good. And there should be, too!
And so at some point, you came to leave the BFI.

AF:  In 2000 I left the BFI. I left. Really because I think my position was becoming more and more difficult, more - actually almost untenable. You can't have several different heads wagging, wagging, one tail.

1 hour 20 mins

AF:  -and then I thought it was time it was time to go. I left at the end of 2000. I'd completed just over 10 years.

MW:  And you were planning to do what after that? I'm only asking because I know what you did. [laughs] For a short time.

AF: I wasn't planning to work for the BUFVC. [laughter] [Anne is referring to the British Universities Film & Video Council – now Learning On Screen – which Murray was in charge of. DS]

AF: But wonderfully it happened that I could, because there was this fantastic again, funded project. And you approached me and asked if I would assist as Head of Content, in putting together the material for Mass Media Online. And the rest….

MW: Well yes. The rest is a sort of history and there is another history to be explored there, and what happened to that content.
I mean how's it going. Who has it now?

AF: Yeah well I don't know if you've noticed but there is, you remember that one of the things we did was talk to Stanley.

MW: A name I was going to raise in a minute.

AF: Yes. Well we took a lot of his material as you know.

MW: This is Stanley Forman. [BEHP Interview No 255]

AF: Stanley Forman, formerly of Plato Film and then ETV [Educational and  Television Films] Stanley allowed us to copy large amounts of his material and make it accessible online for higher and further education. And it's a wonderful collection. I have noticed quite recently that that material is now held, the whole of the ETV collection it is of course now with the BFI which is entirely appropriate. But I have noticed that it is to be made accessible as a set of - I'm not sure whether it's downloads or digital packages. It's not at all clear. I've only seen an advert for it but it is apparently being released in several volumes with different headings appropriate to different sections of material he had. So it doesn't appear to be the BFI themselves who are doing this but they're doing it in collaboration with an outside organisation. After the interview is over I will show you the….
[They are slightly coy about this. DS]
MW: I think I know who it is actually.

AF: You're aware of this.

MW: We can go through the fine details of that later.

AF: Okay. I think it's fascinating that the material is being made available in much the same way as we were making it available

MW: Quite.

AF:  Back in 2005.

MW: Well I think yes, we in 2000, 2001, we were some of the earliest in online delivery of content. And in a way your career had gone from film at the Edinburgh Film Festival-

AF: Yes.

MW: From programming, right through most of the technological changes until we were encoding and transcoding … and getting ready with metadata for online delivery which really is where most archivists want to see content without it being jeopardized in any way shape or form.

AF: Exactly.

MW: To provide maximum and least damage.

AF: Yes exactly: Maximum access. Least damage. Yes, you've summed it up Murray.

MW: So we haven't quite achieved that yet.

AF: I know that it is a lot easier now than it once was. There's no doubt about that. It's just easier to provide access without damaging originals than it ever was. And for that we have to thank digital technology. That brings with it its own problems.

MW: Completely. So would you -  looking now as you're doing and seeing content being delivered online and so on and looking at the archive world, the film archive world and television archive world, for that matter, across the piste, so to speak, what do you think are the big challenges ahead?

AF: Well I think actually we just we just identified it. Digital content is now held in many, many, many, different servers all over the world and it is enormously vulnerable despite being held in many different places because I feel that the vulnerability of our own home computers to cyber-attack is one thing. But we've seen Sony, Sony-Columbia being hacked into.

1 hour 25 mins

AF:  By Korea, by North Korea. And they had severe problems because of that. Down to one of their films having featured the North Korean leader as a great leader. But if you think about the vulnerability of footage that is held, of material, let's say moving images, held in digital formats: digital formats are very, very, vulnerable to all kinds of attack. We have switched from - it’s not just technological change and that's ongoing, obviously. So … constant migration from one format to another. But even what you're holding - again what you're holding your masters on is vulnerable to outside attack. You may ask who would want to attack a film archive or a moving image archive? Well, I would think a lot of people might in the future. You can't really tell.

MW: Well, I think it's in the realm of the Defence Industries as a matter of fact to blitz countries to be able to wipe out our memory.

AF: Yes because that's what it is.

MW: One of their strategies. [They talk over each other]

AF: And we might have something meaningful you … destroy the culture of the country.

MW: At the press of a button potentially. Well I think that-

AF:  On that note… don't be too. I think that there's also hope. At least migration is possible and it is cheaper than it once was.

MW: Absolutely. I'm sure there's lots of ground we should have covered which we didn't cover but this has been very interesting very useful and thank you very much.

DS: There's a point to raise. If I might ask one question: and that is simply that when you were at the War Museum, were you are obliged to sign the Official Secrets Act?

AF: Yes yes.

DS: I assumed that would be the case. But I just wanted to clarify that. And my mistake: we did contribute to the SIFT database at the library, but it was the journal holdings and certain articles that were derived from those holdings that were held on site that were catalogued.

AF: it was separate yes.

MW: So that was bfine. Excellent. Thank you,

AF: Thank you

MW: Thank you very much one and all.

END of INTERVIEW

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