BEHP Interview No 0726t Roger Smither (RS). Transcript.
Interviewer: Murray Weston (MW).
MW: This interview is No 726 for the British Entertainment History Project. The subject, the interviewee, is Roger Smither, and I’m Murray Weston, interviewing.
Now Roger, we start as with most of these interviews at the very start of your life.
RS: Right.
MW: Because I think in all cases we like to know about the colour, flavour, texture and so on, and background of peoples’ careers. So tell us where you were born, where you grew up, and something about your education.
RS: Okay. I was born in 1948 in Istanbul, Turkey because my father used to work for Shell, the oil company, so I have two older sisters who were born in Brazil and I was born in Turkey. My family moved when I was about six to The Canary Islands and I was sent back to England for private education, so I was at boarding school from about the age of seven; didn’t enjoy it very much. I was at Charterhouse, one of the public, i.e. private schools and in a house where sport was the big thing and I was anything but sporty so I didn’t have a great time at Charterhouse.
I left there in 1965, had what these years you would call a gap year and working at Legal & General, the insurance company to earn enough money to take myself on an extended trip to the States, and then was at Caius College Cambridge studying history from 1966 to 1969. I then embarked on a PhD, still at Cambridge, but after about a year I decided it wasn’t for me, and at almost exactly that time, a strange set of circumstances forced an advertisement for a job at the Imperial War Museum to my attention. So I applied for that. It seemed – bizarrely actually it was the same advertisement that recruited Anne Fleming [BEHP Interview No 698] to the Imperial War Museum.
She and I responded to the same advertisement. There was one job in the Film Department, which is the one that Anne got, and the second job in what was then termed the Department of Information Retrieval, but specifically to catalogue film, and that seems to me to be an ideal opportunity to continue having some engagement with history without actually having to research the stuff or teach the stuff, so I applied and got that one, so started at the IWM in the summer of 1970, as a Research Assistant, Grade 2, cataloguing film, and I don’t know how soon you want to get into details of what film cataloguing at the IWM meant, but at that time IWM had been pioneering the use of modern media, electronic media, ultimately computers, …for the purposes of museum object cataloguing, and the film collection had been one of the things on which that department had focused, and there was slightly bizarre pre-history in the days before computer technology became remotely available or affordable.
Where there were systems using optical feature cards, and 80-column punched cards, and combinations of 80-column punched cards for which the IWM had special machinery developed by ICL. ICL was going to be England’s big answer to IBM, and effectively, I arrived at the IWM, with David Penn as the Head of my department at about the time when it was becoming clear that although all of this kit was wonderfully clever and intricate, and imaginative, basically it just didn’t work, because for example you had to feed stacks of 80-column punched cards through a machine for the machine to scan, but if you dropped the stack of cards, you had manually to sort them back into the right order before you could feed them through the machine again; and also because the cards were cardboard, with multiple passes the punched holes tended tear. You got a sort of ‘hanging Chad’ situation so the cards wouldn’t read accurately. So as I say, it was a brilliantly imaginative bit of work to see how far you could push mechanical technology but basically it didn’t work.
5 mins.
RS: So my first cataloguing job at IWM was a sort of last hurrah for this kind of technology and I spent months analysing a British propaganda film on the Second World War, called Tunisian Victory, shot by shot. So for every shot even if it was only a couple of feet long, you’d have to write down a sequence number, shot number, start with …footage, camera angle, composition of shot, close-up, medium close-up, whatever, a description of what was happening for those two feet, and the transcript for the matching bit of soundtrack, and you’d do it all again for the next shot and for the whole of what I think was a five- or six-reel film. It took months and this was also an approach to film cataloguing that was going nowhere.
So David Penn and I went right back to filling out cards and doing some card cataloguing for a while, while we rethought. I should say, in fairness to the mechanised system, that it continued to underpin the technical records side of the IWM’s Film Department, so 80-column cards were used to record the shrinkage measurements of cans of film, the others, in red, test results for the nitrate film testing and various other bits and pieces, whether there was sprocket damage and so on. And, actually, that, on the basis there was only one card per can of film, so you didn’t have much of a problem with multiple cards per item, that continued to work quite well, so that level of mechanisation persisted and worked.
But we are now into the early ‘70s and we started looking at the possibilities of using actual for real computers for film cataloguing. There were some efforts to go into partnership with The NFA as it was at that time, but relations weren’t great between Ernest Lindgren, Curator of the NFA –
MW: That’s the National Film Archive.
RS: That’s the National Film Archive.
- and my ultimate bosses, the Director and Deputy Director at the IWM. So we ended up going it alone. We developed a computer system called Apparat, which ran on what is known in those days as Bureau Service, where computers at this stage were big machines with spinning discs and tapes in huge air-conditioned rooms with people in white overcoats or white lab coats looking after them. It’s such a mile away from laptops and smartphones and so on, it’s difficult to remember!
But we had a deal with the Ministry of Defence computer which was based up in Darlington, and they were going to run our system once a month. To generate the continuing technical records converted from the 80-column cards and also we developed a system for film cataloguing as well, and this seemed pretty damned hot stuff for the early to mid ‘70s, but it’s again wonderfully quaint if you look at everything now, because pretty much everything had tiny little character count limits, so you had to tell the computer how long the entry for a language was going to be or how much space you were going to need to define the type of soundtrack, and so on. All very carefully worked out and some fairly rococo methods for data input as well. We would fill out forms in handwriting which then went to a bureau which types them into OCR [Optical Character Recognition. DS] font typeface which was then scanned into the computer [and] then came back on, you know, the old wide computer stationery for proof-reading, and ultimately you got your catalogue back on microfiche. State of the Art!
MW: So, that’s – the output of all this work was microfiche.
RS: Microfiche. [A6 sized flat sheets of film carrying text or images that require a magnifying reader machine to look at. DS]
MW: And wasn’t there a VDU [Visual Display Unit] to interrogate the database?
RS: No, absolutely not. You had to basically find the right record on the microfiche and then you could read it, so there was still quite a lot of hand card indexing going on around this. We did, we were trying to develop the separate entry of index terms but there were issues with controlled vocabulary, and we were still a long way from free-text searching at that stage so still finding the records that you were interested in was a bit clunky.
10 mins
RS: But the system did work and we did get quite a lot of film catalogued.
My next two personal projects after the Tunisian Victory detour were the IWM collections of Second World War Ministry of Information films and after that I catalogued a series of German language newsreels called Welt Im film which were put out by the British and American occupation authorities in occupied Germany after The Second World War. Quite an interesting development in propaganda from sort of “no fraternisation” anti-Nazi to anti-Soviet propaganda in the space of about four years, so quite an interesting evolution and good fun to catalogue. Lost my track there.
The next stage in the great saga of computerisation, though, was that by this time, the Museum Documentation Association had (MDA) been created and this was attempting to do, across the British museum community what the Department of Information Retrieval people had been trying to do within IWM: in other words create systems and facilities and procedures for the computer cataloguing of museum collections and IWM was involved with MDA from the start because of our own track record, and various museum object collections were among those that were used for MDA development but we also – sorry, I need also to say that MDA, after a while, decided to create their own bureau service and we decided that this would be something that IWM should encourage, and IWM actually gave the MDA office space at Duxford, which the Museum had recently acquired sort of in lieu of a subscription and we were able therefore to develop quite a good working relationship with them and we started to migrate the IWM’s film records, again still maintaining the separation between the technical records for preservation and the cataloguing records to the MDA’s system which was called GOS not as far as I know an acronym, just somebody with a fondness for Goshawks or Ken Loach films.
MW: G-O-double S or?
RS: Just GOS.
MW: [in background] General Operating System?
RS: But it wasn’t an operating system, just a bird name. And that is effectively where things stayed, again with various vagaries for data entry, which seem wonderfully quaint, and I still have in my possession as a souvenir one of those big old IWM – what were they, seven- or eight-inch floppy disks, just as a memory of the days when those were one of the methods for data entry.
We stayed with the MDA until the, well, basically, the laptop, sorry, the desktop computer revolution arrived and then we were able to start moving stuff more in-house and IWM went for a long time with a non-MDA system, called INMAGIC, whose later name is one of many names I’m sure this morning I won’t remember, but it will come back to me. Anyway, this was basically a system that had been developed for libraries but we were able to adapt it to work reasonably well for other Museum collections including the Film Collection and that was the point at which IWM computer cataloguing came in-house. So that’s the technological side of all that.
In terms of my personal career development, we need to backtrack and say that in 1976, so after I’d been at the Museum for six years David Penn, who had been my Head of Department in Information Retrieval, moved over to become the Museum’s Head of Exhibits Department – Exhibits and Firearms Department – and I became the Head of Information Retrieval, and later the Department of Information Systems, and that took me rather further away from direct hands-on involvement in film cataloguing because I was involved in all these other issues of computer cataloguing across the Museum as a whole.
15 mins
RS: Plus involvement with the MDA – I was on their Board and things like that for a while and in 1990 when Anne Fleming moved – she had by that time become Head of the Film Department – and she moved to become Deputy Curator at the National Film & Television Archive, and I took the opportunity to apply for and get the job of Head of the Department of Film as it then was, later Film & Television Archive myself so I became Head of the Film Archive in 1990, and stayed there until my retirement in 2010.
MW: Tell us a little more about some of the other characters who were in that hierarchy in the Film Department and so on. I mean I’m thinking in particular of Clive Coultass who was one of those leading figures for quite a long period of your time there.
RS: Yes.
MW: And so I’m sort of suggesting we wind back again until the point of your arrival interview for the job. I wondered who was on the Board at the time when they took you on because it may be that Clive was there at that time, I don’t know.
RS: I don’t actually remember Clive being on the Board. I guess because my job wasn’t directly in the Film Department, I think Clive would have been on the Board for Anne. To wind right back, the Director of the IWM at the time I joined it was a man called Dr Noble Frankland, who had been in RAF Bomber Command as a navigator during the war and had then gone back. He’d interrupted his academic career to fight. He went back to Oxford, and became one of the two official historians for the strategic bombing offensive, and the book that resulted from that was fairly controversial and he was then at either RUSI [Royal United Services Institute] or Chatham House, you need to fact-check that [in fact Chatham House DS] – and, again, was not totally happy there so he slightly surprised his academic colleagues by applying for and getting the Directorship of the IWM in the early 1960s, and IWM was a fairly moribund institution at that time and Dr Frankland brought it very much back to life. He changed the profile of the staff from a fairly standard issue ex-service profile to younger university graduate types and one of his early star recruits was Dr Christopher Roads who’d come from Cambridge. Usually most of Dr Frankland’s people were Oxford [which] tells you something about the time. And Dr Christopher Roads was one of those really bright people who had a dozen brilliant ideas before breakfast every morning, and ten of them are off-beat to the point of occasional danger and two of them are absolute genius, and the issue always with people like that is to recognise the two that are genius. He was a difficult but at times also inspiring person to work for and he’s still around doing exciting things with military museums in Oman which tells you he did all sorts of stuff, we can talk more about him later if you like but from the point of view of this interview, one of his major interests was to open up the IWM’s film collection and he was one of the leading lights behind the efforts to get the collection properly looked at and get a sound basis for cataloguing going. His interest in new technology explains all the stuff I was talking about previously.
He was also extremely concerned about the preservation side: he was alert to the dangers of nitrate film and one of the supposed reasons – and there is quite a lot of likelihood in this – for the disgruntlement between Ernest Lindgren … at the National Film Archive and the Imperial War Museum is that with heavy prodding from Christopher Roads, the government was actually at this stage giving more money into the IWM for film preservation than it was giving to the National Film Archive, and we were able to use that money at IWM to set up a good film preservation section.
20 mins
RS: Nitrate film at that time was stored down at a Public Records Office site in Hayes, Middlesex, and we set up a very competent laboratory for Alizarin red testing which I know is now itself controversial, but at the time was pretty hot stuff technically. So that was kind of on the cataloguing and preservation side. The third leg of the ‘tripod’ if you like for opening up the film collection was actually putting film in front of the public, visitors to The Museum and in front of actual scholars and again, Dr Roads and Noble Frankland converted what had been the old theatre in the Bedlam building where Imperial War Museum was based into a cinema with projection facilities capable of projecting nitrate film, also with a soundproof booth at the back of the auditorium where one of Dr Road’s schemes was that people would watch film in real time and dictate their reactions into a Dictaphone which somebody would then type up, and this might work as a kind of catalogue. In fact that wasn’t as great an idea as it sounds because it was very difficult to match a typescript to what you actually saw on screen because people’s reactions tend to be slow so they’d be talking about something that had been a few seconds or half a minute earlier, and so on.
But anyway a good cinema and a good cinema needs someone to programme it, so Clive Coultass was recruited to the IWM as Head of Film Programming, in I think ’68 or ’69, but Clive being Clive, another very bright spark, and definitely not public school and Oxbridge educated, so, again, quite a departure for IWM, decided that he was going to take this responsibility and run with it, and Clive became very involved with organisations like The Inter-University History Film Consortium, The Slade Film History Register and other names that I’m sure will resonate with other interviews you’ve been doing, and was instrumental in taking part in some of the initial Film History conferences and then making sure they were hosted in IWM’s new cinema: so, Clive’s job title became fairly rapidly Head of the Department of Film rather than just Film Programming, and Anne Fleming was recruited as I said in response to the same advertisement as me in 1970 as his Deputy, and Anne in fact became a kind of Deputy leaving Clive able to develop the relationships with film historians and so on.
The Film Department was also, and again, this pre-dates Anne and Clive a bit, but I guess it goes back to the BBC2 Great War series in the mid-sixties, that the Film Department was developing a reputation as a major source for archive film footage for history programming, and this was largely built on the back of our association with The Great War, where IWM was one of the co-producers and Noble Frankland was, I think, one of the historical advisors, and in the 1970s came along the Thames Television Great War series, which was kind of The Great War but more so because Jeremy Isaacs and his team working on the Great War wanted to learn from everything that was good about The Great War, but also put right some of the things that hadn’t been so great including the less than perfect use of archive film. So, Anne Fleming also became very much involved in the relationships with TV companies, the footage sales, but also the development of reciprocal deals with television companies. Where IWM would supply footage at advantageous rates to television companies that would deposit interview material and so on back with IWM. So: Anne Fleming and Clive, definitely two big names. I’m sure you’ve already spoken to Anne.
MW: Mm. [acknowledges].
25 mins
RS: Meanwhile in a separate department which caused a little friction, because I think Film thought they should be running Film Cataloguing as well. In the separate Department we had a succession of film cataloguers, some of whom themselves had careers of note, some within the IWM, both Robert Crawford our future Director-General of the IWM, and actually the first Director-General to get knighted, which must have really annoyed Noble Frankland, but that’s beside the point. He started life as a film cataloguer; a man called Jonathan Chadwick who was Secretary of the IWM also started in Information Retrieval, and then in my time we had James Barker, [who had a] subsequent life as a film researcher, and television producer and author. A gentleman called Dr Stephen Badsey who came to us with a PhD from Cambridge and basically catalogues the First World War film collection, then went on also into television history, and later taught at Sandhurst and also an author; and a rather shorter visit from Christopher Frayling, again, later, Professor Sir Christopher Frayling, and Head of Arts Council England, by way of the Royal College of Art; and Taylor Downing (BEHP Interview No 699) with later, Flashback Television and a stellar career in both history, television making, and now notable history author.
So, yes, film cataloguing is quite a good basis for a career in other things to do.
People who stayed at the IWM and it’s a place which attracts quite lengthy commitments, so you would have to include Kay Gladstone who started in Information Retrieval and as a film cataloguer and actually moved just ahead of me into The Film Department, to become Acquisitions and Documentation Officer, and Kay really developed, aside from continuing the Museum’s role as the repository for official British Government film, he was really keen to develop the IWM as a place for amateur film home movies to be deposited and he achieved a lot of really useful donations to IWM, but also participated in a variety of international forums: International Federation of Film Archives [FIAF] and others, to engage with other film archives and people who wanted to develop the field for collection.
Paul Sargeant I can claim no credit for because he was one of Anne’s recruits, but Paul was my deputy throughout my time as Head of the Film Department and Paul effectively ran the commercial side of the IWM Film Archive: he headed the Production Office with great success. He had really good relations with the film production community. He was the leading light in FOCAL, FOCAL International the Federation of International Audiovisual Libraries – that’s what it stands for – and he worked with a very talented team including Jane Fish and so on. On the non-commercial side of the Film Archive I should namecheck Brad King, who would start with – actually lets go back before Brad King… in addition to programming the cinema which is one strand we have talked about, the IWM also set up a loan scheme of copies of film from the Archive, initially on 16mm, later on video format, to mainly universities and colleges, because some of the films we were lending out were Nazi propaganda films, [so] we had to be careful about the context in which they would be screened, so a film loan scheme educational programme to supplement the public film programme within The Museum and various again really gifted people worked on the educational side: Steve Perry, left the IWM to work for the Metropolitan Police, followed by Brad King, who…worked in the Film Archive for quite a while then went to the IWM’s Photo Archive, then HMS Belfast and now runs a battleship exhibit in New England, America.
30 mins
RS: His position as Head of Non-Commercial Access was taken over by Toby Haggith who had been Brad’s Deputy, and Toby is another name we should certainly mention because Toby has been a major leading light in some of IWM’s more recent film restorations, including Battle of the Somme, Battle of Ancre and above all the German concentration camp film, which I can talk to you about a bit but which you really should plan an interview with Toby about specifically because it’s a really good story.
So, yes I’m sure there are people I will regret not mentioning, but a fairly stellar cast of characters.
MW: And which all shows that The Imperial War Museum with its major film collection is a very important locus for this sort of work, and has been for many, many, years, but it does seem to me that it is one of the few museums in Britain that had a large film collection attached to it. There may be one or two others but they would have much less a collection and it is interesting that it was established from the get-go in effect when film came into being in the armed forces, that it would seem to be the place to put-
RS: Well IWM used to like to claim that it was the oldest film archive with a continuous history, because when Imperial War Museum was created, and the idea actually dates back to 1917, which is a curious fact, before the war was even over, but really they were already collecting while the fighting was still going on, which is an interesting concept, but the early curators were determined that it wasn’t just going to be an army museum, it was going to be a museum about the experience of the nation at war, … to include allies and enemies and two of the aspects about this which were really novel in 1918/19 was … the very early emphasis placed on the role of women in the war, and they actually appointed two trustees, two women trustees to supervise the collecting of material relating to the role of women, which I think in this centenary year it is worth noting; and the other was a total willingness or enthusiasm to receive the Official Film that had been created as part of Britain’s war effort, going right back to the appointment of the first two official Kinematographers – with a ‘k’ – as they were designated - in the Autumn of 1915, so a man called Edward Foxen Cooper, whom David Walsh and I wrote an article about, was already concerned about what it would mean to look after a film archive for the nation in the very early 1920s. He was consulting with Kodak about what you should do to preserve nitrate film. He was the first person that I know of to come up with the idea of having separate preservation copies and access copies of films so that your best possible copies weren’t used too much. There were hiccups under later people that were basically the IWM had been looking after film collections since the very early 1920s, and one of my, one of the things that I tried to do during my time as Head of the Film Archive was to pick up the ball that Clive and Anne had carried to get IWM into FIAF [and] we might just wind back and talk about that in a minute, but also get recognition for IWM as a historically interesting film archive, as an archive with a collection of major interest; and actually to fly the flag within the International Federation of Film Archives and elsewhere for archives of factual film, because FIAF had largely been born out of a small coterie or club of feature film afficionados, people who had responded to the advent of sound and various other things by collecting film but their definition of ‘film of interest’ had been largely based around film as an art form, and one of the struggles that Clive, Christopher Roads, Clive and so on had initially had to fight was to get recognition of the fact that film archives could collect other material as well.
35 mins
RS: IWM had been banished or, yes, banished, effectively, to a sort of Associate membership role for a few years because that was as close as FIAF would allow them and Clive fought on to get us full membership, but I supported what were with some people within FIAF the very unpopular idea of a symposium on newsreel collections, which was held in Mo I Rana in 1993 and a symposium on amateur film which again was quite a radical idea, picking up on the sort of ideas that Kay had been educating me in, which was held at the FIAF Congress in Cartagena , in Columbia, so yes there was an interesting struggle to be fought to persuade the wider film archive community.
Part of that of course was the recognition of the role of regional film archives and specialist film archives, because again as originally constituted, FIAF had a rule in its membership definition that archives had to operate at a national level. Some debate about what that actually meant, and Janet McBain, for example, was able to bring the Scottish Film Archive in on the grounds that Scotland was a nation. But it was more of struggle to get recognition for somebody like the North West Film Archive and Maryann Gomes and so that’s part of the FIAF side of the story.
But IWM certainly felt that its constituency was certainly closer to some of these specialist and regional film archives than some of the more traditional cinematheques, and the distinction between cinematheques and archives is one of the battles that FIAF has engaged with throughout its career -throughout its life I guess you’d say.
MW: How unfortunate that there should be such tensions really. It’s hard to fully understand. So Imperial War Museum is established then in 1917 – was it already collecting film at that time?
RS: No.
MW: [It] came later]
RS: The film arrived, memory failure again, early 1920s. There was-
MW: [interrupts] Ahead of the British Film Institute.
RS: Ahead of the British Film Institute and actually Edward Foxen Cooper, the name I mentioned does write a couple of articles for The Times saying not only that IWM’s own collection should grow, because actually it wasn’t growing very much after the war. The Trustees got quite scared at the cost implications of managing an ever-growing film collection, but Foxen Cooper did say somebody should be doing something about feature films as well, you know. He was very much ahead of his game. It is virtually impossible to find out anything about him, he was the original back-room man. The only photograph I ever found of him was a tiny postage-stamp sized photograph that accompanied his obituary in the Evening News when he died in 1936. I never found a good photograph. But he is – the reason David and I wrote our article was that we felt he was the sort of unsung hero of early film archiving; and he also did establish some precedents for film screening, hampered by the fact that IWM didn’t have its own facilities so he was dependent on getting interest from commercial cinemas to screen films for Armistice Day and so on. He also had very, very, strict rules about the use of IWM films in feature films. He had his fingers quite badly burnt with a rather sensationalist Life of Lord Kitchener, which I think implied – I don’t remember exactly what was wrong with it but the fact IWM had released film for this was something he came to be rather ashamed of and the IWM Trustees said ‘No IWM film for feature films’ was a flat policy for quite a while after that.
MW: It seems to me that there are echoes of these battles still going on, not least worrying about the cost implications of starting a film archive in the 1920s or whenever. Compared with libraries, when looking across the sort of media piste, it seems to me the primacy of text which is a thing we’ve been battling around for a long time:
40 mins
MW: That we’ll collect books within five or six Copyright Libraries is part of the sort of DNA of British scholarship.
RS: Yup.
MW: But film for some reason always takes a back seat, and still remains to, and there is still no means of statutory deposit, or any care that films sometimes self-combust or get lost, when we would be very upset about losing all the copies of the Magna Carta, for instance, or whatever.
RS: Well, we would, we would, and people have compared nitrate film to The Mona Lisa or the Magna Carta in a desperate effort to resolve this battle.
I think there are several layers of this: one is that it was a major battle with academics to get them to accept that film had any interest at all when you could be reading a good book or better still an original document in The National Archives or something and that I think is one of the achievements of Clive and his associates in the early days of film history and the film conferences that they did manage to get some academics like Arthur Marwick at the Open University and Nicholas Pronay at Leeds and others to accept and speak in the academic community of the value of film, but there’s been the academics if you like who have taken the old class snobbery that used to exist about film as a kind of entertainment for the masses and not a real art form and I think that carried over into – well as you say, there never was a scheme for statutory deposit of film and television material, and even when IWM and NFA , as bodies designated under public records act legislation as repositories for official film, trying to engage with government departments including the Public Record Office, later The National Archive, themselves to get transfers of reasonable quantities of film in good condition we would often be met, Kay could give you a brilliant interview about some of his battles with people who either didn’t really realise that film mattered; thought that you could apply to films the same sort of ratio of weeding which is based particularly you only need to keep ten per-cent of any government records and even if you could battle through those two in themselves fairly major fronts, they then had absolutely no understanding of what it was that you need so they would tend to offer you a VHS cassette and say “well surely, this will do, it’s got the sound and picture on it.” And you’d have to say “No, actually the original camera negative or at the very least a decent copy of the film will last much longer and be much better quality, you know it’s like offering a photocopy or a microfilm of an original document.” Which was of course another battle going on at the same time, in the great scurrilous campaign to substitute microfilm newspapers for the originals, but that’s not my field so we won’t go there.
The equivalent battle now is the “well you don’t really need the originals because you can just digitise everything.” And that actually is a battle that is quite probably not being won to the extent that one would totally like. I think that at the IWM in the eight years since my departure, partly driven by government cuts and changing priorities, and of course responding to the enormous opportunities of the growth of digital capabilities, the notion that was absolutely sacrosanct throughout my working career, that the analogue original was what you had to take care of is fraying at the edges. I don’t think IWM has yet got around to saying … it’s all redundant, but IWM is contemplating asking the BFI to take over its nitrate film, which would have raised eyebrows in Clive and Anne’s time, and raises eyebrows with me as well;
45 mins
RS: And the definition of what is a necessary analogue master to be kept is being drawn more and more tightly I understand I’m not obviously directly involved any more but I think it’s a big risk because people of your and my age remember that when it was announced with huge pride way back in the 1970s that when Visnews were transferring their archive to video and encountered all sorts of problems including transferring silent film using sound film aperture gates on the video transfer machines but above all just that the video quality wasn’t going to be as good as the original analogue film quality had been and when Visnews and its successors needed to go back to re-digitise or re-copy to get higher quality they actually asked the archives, BFI and IWM, for access to the masters they had been only too glad to get rid of and you can trace a similar progression in the digital world. When digitisation started everyone was going “okay, digitisation all the detail you’ll ever need.” 4K digitisation is now being looked at as fairly adequate: I think the lesson of history is that you do hang on to your masters as long as you possibly can because the bottom line is that a reel of film will last – a digital file is in some circumstances, speaking as somebody who has just failed to transfer most of a year’s worth of photographs off one phone to another, a digital archive is vulnerable to human incompetence probably in my case, or electrical failure, and once it’s gone it’s completely gone because a scratched film you can do something with, a lost digital file you can do nothing with.
MW: The moving image media has this battle all the time, whereas the Lindisfarne Gospels can’t be thrown away after they did the page turning exercise at The British Library – it would be the wrong thing to do.
RS: Yes. The library community and the archive community have the realisation of that. Digitisation is a wonderful tool for access and you can see things probably better than you can squinting at the original with a microphone, sorry with a microscope but, you don’t get rid of the original just because you’ve achieved the digital copy. Absolutely not!
And film has never had this recognition. I mean, sorry jumping around in my career, this was one of the reasons I was very keen to get an IWM film, and I settled on Battle of the Somme for various symbolic reasons, recognised on the Unesco Memories of the World Register as a piece of internationally recognised heritage and what the Unesco Memory of the World Register does, a bit like sites of cultural significance. You do actually register the original items so in the case of Battle of the Somme the nitrate originals were long gone but we registered the duplicates that had been made in the 1930s as being the item that was registered and I hope, aside from raising the profile of IWM and it’s kind of film was that we would be putting down some kind of marker for the importance of recognising the original of an analogue master, and that listing which we achieved in [pause] 1995 I want to say – I may need to check that – [corrected later in the interview to 2005. DS] is I consider one of my more significant achievements. We were the first British document of any kind to be registered and we were I think the first non-fiction film of any kind to get registered on Memory of the World, and I thought ‘important landmarks in both categories.’
MW: Now, film very important. The media themselves in terms of what’s being recorded by the forces, and the amount of stuff they would produce and maybe which find its way to the Imperial War Museum, it seems to me that in many other specialist areas as one’s moved into the newer media of capturing moving images that less and less of that content-
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MW: -has found its way into archives, largely because its become more disposable and so on. I wonder if you could say something about for instance post-Falklands War presumably. I’m not taking that as a sort of bench-mark place but I mean there must have been more content that needed to come in from the forces and other places covering war and I wonder if you could reflect on how that’s affected the collection at the Imperial War Museum and the change in the media really.
RS: Well, the Falklands War was actually more of a catalyst in re-awakening the forces’ own interest in recording their own activities, because after the winding-up of the service film units in the late ‘40s and ‘50s there was very little filming done by the forces themselves and it was the rather mixed media experience of the Falklands War that stimulated the British Armed forces into that actually they needed to become more active and this is more true in moving-image material.
There was a bit more continuity in terms of stills, the IWM’s Photo Archive has better but the – everything you’re saying about the change of technology is absolutely true. I mean first of all we went through several generations of video technology with all the known problems of that, about the different lifespans of different formats of tape and more particularly different formats of video and the need for film archives to become ‘museums’ of obsolescent video technology if you like… and the other problem which started in the video age and then absolutely mushroomed in the digital age is just the sheer quantity of material that is generated, but also the potentially short life, the fact that you reuse the same media to over-write, if you assume that something is more important than whatever it was that happened a couple of years ago so trying to capture the material both in terms of its physical format – that is problem No 1, but problem No 2 is educating your constituency that it is In their interest as to think ‘posterity’ and actually one of the things that Kay Gladstone and his opposite number in the Stills Collection, Hilary Roberts, started doing was participating in the training courses for new MOD cameramen, photographers, media operators with a session in which they would show them the IWM archive and say “Here is stuff that is eighty, ninety, a hundred years old in the case of the First World War material [and] up to seventy years old in the case of Second World War material, we can still look after this, we can still make it available to students and to production companies but only because it was delivered to us in good condition soon after it was taken. And in some cases that works and in other cases it didn’t.
The other issue that affected all of that in these increasingly profit-centred days people would look at IWM and say “You make money when you sell this footage, if there is money to be made, surely we could be making that, and maybe therefore we should hang on to it.” And they would hang on to it and then there would be a change of personnel and there would be another cutback and the people who came in would go “What are all these digital files doing cluttering up our servers let’s get rid of them.” And they wouldn’t necessarily think that the right place to get rid of them would be to an archive. They would just get rid of them.
So, for a variety of reasons I sometimes fear that the First and Second World Wars will be better recorded for posterity than The Gulf War, but I hope that’s not true.
MW: I think this must be happening to so many archives across the board: that we are not receiving those electronic files which we should receive. With a physical thing you’ve got more chance.
RS: I’m sure that’s true and I really don’t know what film production companies are doing in terms of archiving their pre-production materials. You occasionally hear horror stories over restoration and preservation grapevine-
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RS: - of films that are less than twenty sometimes less than ten years old where they have had some kind of problem with some of the digital files, so who knows?
MW: Going back again!
RS: Yup. [laughs]
MW: In another part of your work, or the Imperial War Museum’s work in the Film Department, it’s supporting film producers, or television producers who’ve been making new works, I wonder if we could reflect on one or two of those sort of high spots of activity and of course on an everyday basis, the Imperial War Museum is being asked for content to go into this piece of news or a bit of reflective for a current affairs piece or something, but I’m thinking in particular of those series which focused on archive film which predominantly came from The Imperial War Museum. You mentioned The Great War; it was a landmark series technically I think as well because it used all sorts of techniques to make …silent film run at a reasonable rate so that it looked right on the screen, which was often [inaudible]
RS: Yes, I’m smiling slightly at that because often the technique of stretching silent film, which is effectively printing every second frame of the silent film twice so that you achieve a film that can be projected at 24 frames a second, was a technique that was known in the 1930s, but all credit to the BBC for saying that they discovered it in the 1960s.
MW: I think they could wind things technically where they could wind things up and down on their screen.
RS: Yes. They certainly progressed silent era film beyond. The common usage at that time was “Isn’t this quaint, it’s all jumpy.” And you put a sort of rinky-tink piano over it and you generally show Charlie Chaplin films or Buster Keaton films at the wrong speed and “isn’t it funny just because it looks wrong” and what The Great War achieved was to prove that silent film could look absolutely spot-on, and I wouldn’t want to take anything away from them for that. Having said that, the other great sin that they committed was that they routinely flipped film left to right, so that on the whole you would achieve a film where – or a television series - where the Allies move left to right across your television screen because that corresponds to West to East on the Western Front and the Germans moved East to West and if that means whole battalions of left-handed soldiers, then so be it! It’s one of the sort of things you laugh at now but it’s also that kind of thing that when you get on to The World at War in the 1970s that Jeremy Isaacs and Jerry Kuehl and people like that were determined that one of the absolute hallmarks of The World at War…should be meticulous use of archive film, and that was not only using it in a technically honest way, but also using it in a historically honest way, because the BBC series, largely because, given the structure of the 26 parts of The Great War were I think almost, certainly over a third of the series, very nearly half was given over to the period of the war before the official kinematographers had even been appointed, and even once they were there they were never more than two British kinematographers on the Western Front at a time. There really wasn’t all the film that you’d need to make a programme, so The Great War routinely used material anachronistically. I mean you can play ‘spot the steel helmet’ in 1914. There are all sorts of games that nerds can play if they want. They also used material from inter-war silent feature films, and the World at War team said that sort of thing was absolutely verboten, and if there were to be sequences used where they had any kinds of doubt then they would draw attention to that so that for example in some of the films from the Russian Front, the meeting up of the Russian troops encircling the German forces at Stalingrad is a sequence staged with troops running across snow to embrace each other whereas the actual link up had been armoured forces and so on, and the commentary will say something about the fact that this is a wonderful scene but it has actually been laid on for the camera. So, I think The World at War is kind of the gold standard of archive use that everybody should subsequently have aspired to.
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RS: The World at War of course had a very great luxury of quite a large budget, and a lot of lead time for detailed film research and in the contemporary environment, budgets and research time are cut to the bone and you are much more likely these days to get a researcher saying rather desperately “Well I think I saw something like what I need in…” and they will cite another programme rather than spending time that researchers of the vintage of The World at War and James Barker and Stephen Badsey when they went from the IWM over to the production side were still able to work in that tradition where they’d go “I want to see the stuff that other people haven’t used.” And “Show me that stuff.” And look for unusual things. It’s not at all the practice now, for production companies don’t have the time for that and it’s a shame, because the quality of television history does suffer as a result. But still in terms of programmes made in the spirt of the mid-seventies, you could mention…[thinks]
MW: Palestine?
RS: Palestine. The Troubles series, about Ireland. Struggles for Poland, and there have been some of the efforts to revisit the First World War. I guess because the First World War archive is somewhat more contained than the Second World War archive. It just is physically less of it. Some of the people – there was the Hugh Straughan series, made for Channel 4, [The First World War DS] and there was the PBS series called… The Great War: 1914-18 in England because they didn’t want it confused with the BBC series, and they tried- I don’t want to imply that nobody tries these days but there is a certain sense that for understandable budgetary reasons, but still regrettably, television history ‘ain’t what it used to be’.
MW: No. When we talked earlier, there was a film you mentioned, Overlord.
RS: Overlord, yes.
MW: And I wondered if you could say something about that, when it happened and of the involvement of The Imperial War Museum.
RS: Overlord ideally is one of the stories you should have asked Anne Fleming about because it was more her ‘baby’ than it was mine, but since I gather you didn’t ask, I will talk about it because I came in on the second act of Overlord. Overlord was a feature film made in – it was released in 1975, it was in production in 1974 and it is I think unique in the feature film history because the opening credits will say that it was presented by The Imperial War Museum, which I think is a fairly unique credit, and also about 30+ per-cent of the running time of the film is made up of archive film from The Imperial War Museum’s Film Archive, and the story behind Overlord was that in 1974, for the 30th anniversary of D-Day, and with reasonably fresh memories of the 900th anniversary of the Norman Conquest and the Bayeux Tapestry, a philanthropist called Lord Dulverton had the idea of commissioning a tapestry on Bayeux Tapestry scale, or an embroidery on Bayeux Tapestry scale to commemorate D-Day and The Royal College of Needlework implemented his design. The original concept was that the tapestry would come to IWM and IWM should make a documentary film to contextualise the embroidery, and one of the IWM’s trustees at the time was James Quinn who was a film producer. He ran the Minema for a while, [Paris Pullman, I think. He was also a former BFI director DS]as well as being a producer and he had the bright idea of bringing on board a young American film director called Stuart Cooper, who had just won a Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival in 1974 for his film version of the play Little Malcolm and his struggle against the Eunuchs. So, you have the embroidery, James Quinn and Stuart Cooper on board.
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RS: -and as Stuart Cooper embarked upon hugely expensive film research at IWM, and he was doing sort of nine to five, five day-a-week film research on the Steenbecks in the old cutting room, back in the main building at IWM looking at nitrate film, looking at all of it, he and James Quinn between them but actually I don’t know whose idea it was, could do something more imaginative than this and produce a feature film. And that’s what they ended up doing, so there are shot scenes intercut with the archive footage but the film was made in black and white, the cameraman was John Alcott, who was Stanley Kubrick’s cameraman and he did lot of work to make sure that the camera lenses and film stock he was using were appropriate to the look of the 1930s archive film. Once IWM was on board Noble Frankland was able to pull strings with the MOD so we got the use of a Guards barrack and some Guards for training scenes. We got the RAF’s last flying Lancaster to do some special flights along the South coast for some really beautiful twilight photography which is in the film, and the MOD also laid on a landing craft and some Royal Marines for the D-Day stage and then all of this stuff was put together by an editor called Jonathan Gili.
The film tells the story of a young soldier, played by an actor called Brian Stirner who gets his call-up papers, travels to his base camp through The Blitz, goes through training, has various premonitions of disaster, goes through the build-up to D-Day, gets onto the landing craft and – spoiler alert – is killed before he even hits the beach.
But the performances are great. You can see that they are using inappropriate landing craft if you are a nerd, never mind; but the truly extraordinary thing about the film is the way that Jonathan Gillie intercuts the especially shot film and the archive footage and there are times when you can look at the film and go “Wait a minute, is that something Stuart shot or was that archive?” The film premiered in 1975 and again Stuart got another Silver Bear for his collection from the Berlin Film Festival, but it sank like a stone in the States, and basically it got reasonable reviews in Europe and vanished in America, and that was it for the next twenty-odd years but then a cable television channel in California called the Z [zee] Channel picked up various quirky films and after the Z channel folded somebody made a sort of celebratory programme about it. I could give you the details, but I don’t remember it, but on the back of that, The Telluride Film Festival in 2004 screened Overlord at the festival and various critics, including [Roger] Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times said that this film, Overlord, this thirty-year old film was the find of the Telluride Film Festival, and on the back of that there was a whole explosion of interest, this time in the States with several more festival screenings and then it was picked up by Criterion for a theatrical release and a DVD release, and I came on board because Anne had by then left IWM because Stuart wanted to come back to IWM and reconnect. Good model: he had deposited his materials with IWM and he wanted access to some of what he’d deposited to do new prints and a new soundtrack for the for the new release, and I went along for Q & A’s at a couple of the festival screenings and we did a screening at ICA and a screening at IWM.
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RS: And also a screening at the National Film Theatre. Sorry, BFI Southbank it probably was by then. So, a fairly extraordinary story around the original film and then a rather quirky story about the rediscovery. Certainly should be on the record somewhere and it’s a film worth tracking down if you’ve never seen it.
MW: You mentioned Jonathan Gili, well I knew a guy called Jonathan Gili [soft ‘g’] I used to call him: it’s the same man.
RS: Same man, sorry.
MW: Well, no that’s fine. He died probably 15 years ago.
RS: He did, yeah.
MW: A really creative editor He did 40 Minutes with Eddie Mirzoeff [BEHP Interview No 492] and all that-
RS: He died unfortunately just before the rediscovery of Overlord,
MW: Did he really – how sad.
RS: - but his widow came along to some of his screenings.
MW: So it is one and the same man. Because he was a very clever man. Interesting.
Battle of the Somme we’ve touched on already. Very important film in all sorts of ways, and right now of course we are in the final year of the sort of re-celebration of, can we say celebration, or commemoration, let’s say of the First World War: I believe its about to be released again, if it hasn’t been already, because isn’t it the piece de resistance of the celebration or commemoration?
RS: Yes. We’ll come on to what’s happening this year in a moment. Certainly historically I would regard Battle of the Somme as being one of if not the jewel in the crown of the IWM Film Archive partly because of its huge symbolic experience in terms of the overall British experience of the First World War and then as a subset of that because of its importance to the IWM and its film archive. The film when it was released in 1916, just a couple of months after the events it captures was an extraordinary media phenomenon. It was seen by huge numbers of people including a lot of people we were talking earlier about class prejudice against cinema, including lots of good upper and middle class people who wouldn’t normally cross the threshold of a cinema and everybody, nearly everybody at the time who saw it felt that they were being given the opportunity, the experience to share the ‘real’- Real is a word that was used a lot in contemporary comment - the experience of the soldiers at the Front. That opens the way to a lot of hindsight interpretation as to how real what they were seeing actually was, but just to finish that off, it was also the first feature-length battle documentary. It runs for seventy something minutes. And, although there had been a few shorts coming back from the official kinematographers released in cinemas earlier in the year, this was the first in-depth exposure to what was meant to be the reality of the Front Line experience. And of course the Battle of the Somme has a huge place in British popular culture because of the vast casualties, the fact it was where the volunteers who had flocked to the colours in 1914, so many of them died in one day that, the greatest single-day’s losses in British army history, and all of that emotional surroundings that go with it, so a historically important film for British and world culture because the film also had a major role to play internationally both with Britain’s allies and neutrals and also in stimulating German counter-propaganda efforts so there are several things you can say about its place in history.
It's also become effectively the symbol for the historic role of the IWM Film Archive going back to the 1920s history that we were talking about because it was obviously one of the films that the IWM first looked at critically. The question of how much was real was assessed by a special viewing committee of the Trustees. It was one of the early films prioritised for nitrate film preservation within the limited technology of the ‘20s and ‘30s, and so on. We effectively kept the focus on that when it was the film that we chose to select for Memory of the World nomination under the Unesco scheme.
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RS: It was also a film that we wanted to do right by in time for the centenary of the war and as run-up for that we had been doing various earlier experiments with film restoration and the other things that go with presentation of archive film: the commissioning of music and we’d had an early run at the Battle of the Ancre, which is the first time we engaged with a composer called Laura Rossi who wrote music for a chamber orchestra to accompany a screening of Battle of the Ancre for us in – sorry can I look at my crib?
MW: By all means.
RS: Sorry. I need to get the dates right: it was the 22nd November 2002 which was actually the official end of the Battle of the Ancre so we were marking an anniversary. And we had also in the same sort of time frame done some work on a German U-boat film: our last effort really at pre-digital restoration, but that had also involved us with some attempts to do some colour tinting and toning restoration, and again with some music work, so as we were approaching the anniversary of the First World War and the anniversary of The Somme we were really determined to do that right, so we set up a digital film restoration and also in the same time frame we commissioned Laura again, Laura Rossi, to write a full orchestral work. The two enterprises slightly tripped over each other because Laura obviously had to have the finished film to work with which means that we had to go firm on what we considered the finished film before we tracked down some missing footage which is kind of annoying and means that on the DVD we had to do an extra [of] missing footage, but we were very fortunate with our partnership with Dragon Digital Intermediate who helped hugely above and beyond the call of duty with the digital restoration and the results for anyone who is familiar with what we had been screening as Battle of the Somme as part of the loan scheme I referred to earlier, particularly the video copies, the results are just magical aside from quality improvement, the main achievement if the digital restoration has been to give the film back the depth of field. There are backgrounds, and things going on in those backgrounds, that you kind of had the feeling that you’ never seen before.
We were very pleased with the restoration, we felt we’d got it about right, we were not going to hide the fact that it was an old film and, as is typical for films of that period, the more popular it was when originally issued the more clapped-out it was likely to be, because the only way you could make more copies was by printing from the original negative, so the negative became worn.
Sorry I will need to check my dates again – I’ve given you a wrong date earlier, I mean 2005 and not 1995 was when we got the Battle of the Somme inscribed on the Unesco Register: we screened the film at a gala screening in 2006. Actually timed for the London Film Festival rather than the anniversary of the battle, but not far off the anniversary of the centenary of the original screening, with a live performance of Laura Rossi’s orchestral score in 2006 and we released the video in 2008 and we were very pleased with the video as well actually because in addition to restoring the film and providing Laura Rossi’s contemporary orchestral accompaniment, Toby Haggith had done a lot of research work into identifying the music that would have been played in 1916. The film didn’t have an actually scored accompaniment.
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RS: What happened in those days was that the trade press would publish recommendations for the accompanists in cinemas across the land to play and a guy called [J] Morton Hutcheson had produced in The Bioscope a set of recommendations of music to accompany Battle of the Somme, and Toby Haggith had done a lot of work to track down this music, including sorting out copyright for things that were still in copyright and he and Nick Horne had then compiled a sort of playlist and put together a small group of musicians to play the contemporary accompaniment so if you watch the DVD you can see the 1916 film with either Laura Rossi’s brilliant score or Toby Haggith’s work to reconstitute the 1916 accompaniment and comparing and contrasting the two is a bizarre experience because Laura has responded as somebody of her generation does to the battle scenes in a very elegiac way because what she sees is a story of great loss, whereas the contemporary audience were seeing (and the battle is still raging) they are seeing this film in August, September 1916, the battle was a long way from over, this was a report from the Front it wasn’t a considered response and the general mood, although there are controversially dead bodies on screen is upbeat, so the infantry go forward over the top to a light cavalry march and so on.
It's a strange experience and we were very pleased to have achieved that and Toby has now gone on to mastermind a similar release of Battle of The Ancre, again with a recording of Laura Rossi’s chamber music, score and again a reconstruction of the 1917 film so audiences can again do their own work.
MW: For that restoration which appears on DVD, that is the restoration, there hasn’t been a subsequent additional piece of work for The Battle of the Somme? Pictures?
RS: For that, no.
MW: Right, okay. Because I believe there has been a sort of holdback at the moment. Is there going to be another re-release or something?
RS: Well the IWM has commissioned Peter Jackson, New Zealand film director, Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit etc., etc., to make a film which is to be IWM’s 2018 filmic statement on the First World War, and it’s going to be – it already is – a controversial production, because to judge from the footage that Peter Jackson has already released he is going to colourise the footage and this to put it mildly is not something that in my day we would have encouraged him to do.
There are arguments for colourisation which I have listened to including the fact contemporary audiences switch off black and white or indeed have apps on their phones that leap over black and white footage. It’s also said that the cameramen at the time would have used colour if they could which is arguable. There were colour technologies and there were techniques for adding colour to black and white film and Peter Jackson might have explored those with a little more historical authenticity. I think – my feeling is that it’s a little bit like taking a Dickens manuscript and typing it into a word processor and saying that the word-processed document is as good as the manuscript. But to revert to some of what we were saying earlier, the status of the original and IWM used to try and hold the line against colourisation in what were allegedly historical programmes unless the programme would make a major upfront statement about how these were images archived by the IWM as black and white images…
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RS: …To which the production has decided to add colour for effect. … I haven’t seen the Peter Jackson film. I don’t know. Of course it may be brilliant.
MW: Other productions? I was just – rattling around in my mind was Lutz Becker and his Lion of Judah, and I just wondered if that was part of an IWM supported initiative?
RS: Yes, well Lutz Becker had also been involved in the earlier pair of programmes, Swastika and Double-Headed Eagle which were an attempt to tell the story of the Nazis through use of archive film. Again, somewhat controversial because they attempted to lip-read the Eva Braun home movies- that I think was in Swastika, rather than Double-Headed Eagle. Double-Headed Eagle was Lutz’s project and back of that did have a certain amount of commercial success. Lutz went on to make a film about the Italian campaign in Ethiopia, called Lion of Judah which was of course one of the titles of Haile Selassie as Emperor of Ethiopia and you could I suppose say it was a little bit like The World at War being a step up from The Great War: Lutz was very determined to make a very serious historical documentary and he achieved that, and it’s a very good film but it didn’t have the commercial success that Swastika and …Double-Headed Eagle had had but yes, Lutz worked extensively with IWM on that and in Italy too of course, but we had some of the – after the Second World War, IWM had acquired quite a lot of Nazi and a rather smaller quantity of Italian fascist material. The Nazi film came in because of the occupational authorities concerns to de-Nazify Germany after the war which involved a fairly thorough weeding of German film history and a lot of material that was considered too Nazi in its sympathies was redacted as you might say and when the German Federal Republic was set up at the end of the occupation, the redacted film came back to the UK and was divided between the National Film Archive and The Imperial War Museum. It’s since been repatriated to Germany, but that’s how IWM came to acquire quite a lot of copies of ex-enemy material. Sorry, that’s a bit of a sidetrack but that’s how we came to have some of the material that Lutz needed.
MW: The question of international relationships in a sense throws up the role of FIAF and it seems to me that Imperial War Museum’s collection, terribly important in the UK context; you have other collections like Krasnogorsk [Russian State archive. DS] maybe and in Germany, and clearly well after the war there was some windfall stuff that went on wasn’t there. The Triumph of the Will and so on and some of that’s been repatriated as I understand it, so you had to have good relationships with other similar collections, around Europe at least if not the world and I wondered if you could reflect a little bit on that and then maybe say something about how your battle to get into FIAF maybe bore some fruit in that area: or maybe not.
RS: Right. Well the first thing to say about Krasnogorsk, which was the Soviet Union’s archive of nonfiction, non-feature film is absolutely no contact before the end of the Soviet Union, it was one of those places, its not absolutely true to say that they didn’t acknowledge that it existed but certainly nobody from outside got into it, and when researchers after the fall of the Soviet Union were able to get into it …it was apparent why because very honourably you’d have to say, the Soviets hadn’t disposed of any of the embarrassingly Stalinist material that you’d kind of imagined given the ‘evil empire’ image of the Soviet that they’d have totally destroyed all the material that they could.
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MW: They did expunge Khruschev I believe from for instance Stanley Forman’s small collection in North London. They tried to get rid of it and he hid it under the floorboards or something. [Stanley Forman, BEHP Interview No 255]
RS: Well, there was a certain amount of that around Europe but it’s worth saying that, because some of the co-operation before historic material was actually easier with satellite countries in the old Warsaw Pact. For example, going back again to The Great War you will find a lot of the Austro-Hungarian German material in The Great War was sourced from Budapest rather than from Berlin or Moscow, but yes, sorry to get back to your point there were one on one relationships with archives in both Germanys and some other countries, sometimes facilitated by FIAF, sometimes just bilateral and there were exchange programmes. Triumph of the Will specifically was a very long and complicated history because Leni Riefenstahl survived forever and was very, very, active in fighting for her rights as an individual auteur artiste, rather than a mere employee of the Nazi party and you had to be fairly careful with whom you were dealing and where you released it. IWM benefited from a piece of British legislation called The Enemy Property Act, which had quite simply said at the time of the bringing over of the Nazi film I referred back to, that copyright in Nazi propaganda material was voided. As far as British law was concerned it didn’t exist. So, we were able to say for British producers that Triumph of the Will was covered by the Enemy Property Act, but we had to warn them that if they wanted to release their film internationally, the legal position in Europe and elsewhere was different and they needed to take their own decisions about what to do there.
But there were other exchanges over the years to sort out and there were other films than Triumph of the Will that they were interested in back in the Bundesarchiv in West Germany, the DEFA in East Germany and we had a rather bizarre exchange with the archive in Prague where we exchanged some historic First World War material against a North Korean film which entered the IWM’s film archive and – that was another thing I had to catalogue at one point , that’s why I’m reminded of that. Anyway, yes, there were a number of bilateral deals.
FIAF was the obvious forum for this but was slightly hampered by the problem I alluded to earlier that as far as a large number of FIAF members were concerned, FIAF was primarily an organisation for cinematheques’ collections of feature film and some film archives, like the Bundesarchiv had got in on the grounds that they had substantial collections of feature film as well as non-fiction material but the alarm bells were rung by the admitting of the IWM which was almost exclusively factual film and as I said earlier we were banished to a form of associate membership for quite a number of years until Clive Coultass finally achieved full membership.
MW: Do you remember what date that was? I think I remember it only because of Clive being triumphant.
RS: It was late seventies – I think we’d had about three years I think. The other foothold that IWM got in the FIAF door was that building on it’s reputation that it had again, that I alluded to earlier, for experimental elements of cataloguing techniques…
1 hour 35 mins
RS: …and FIAF runs a number of specialist commissions and at the time there has always been a Preservation Commission, now …called a Technical Commission because there’s issues about digitisation as well as analogue preservation but there was a Documentation Commission and a Cataloguing Commission and IWM got invited to send representatives to the FIAF Cataloguing Commission from quite early so David Penn, my predecessor as the Head of the Information Retrieval Department was a member for a while and then I became a member and I think I was a member from 1979 until 1994 of the Cataloguing Commission and that if you like enabled us to get our feet under the table and we met with various people who came to appreciate that we didn’t have horns and a tail, that we could actually talk the archival talk about issues like preservation and cataloguing. For my first few years on the Cataloguing Commission, the Head of the Commission was Wolfgang Klaue from the East German Film Archive and he went on to become President of the whole Federation and was still President when I was elected to the Executive Committee so he as I say was sort of somebody who was able to take our part…where was I going with this? Once we had full FIAF membership life became easier because one of the things that FIAF is set up to do is to facilitate exchanges of material and that gave us a very sound footage and we were able to – I’m not saying we wouldn’t have been able to do this before- but it gave a very easy framework, which was also something we could quote back to our own bosses at IWM and say this isn’t just something we want to do, this is something we are supposed to do as FIAF members.
We did a lot of repatriation and exchange work with the archives in the so-called old Dominions, New Zealand, Australia and Canada, where in the first flush of Imperial enthusiasm in the 1920s, their film had ended up with IWM – it was after all the Imperial War Museum and they wanted it back under their own roof so we were able to arrange for that.
Equally we would sometimes find that film archives in other Commonwealth countries had better quality material or material that we had lost altogether and a very famous instance of that was one of the films featured in the BFI publication Missing Believed Lost which was a documentary made by Carol Reed, called The New Lot, which was a documentary so-called precursor to his feature film The Way Ahead which as I say featured by the BFI as a ‘lost’ film in a publication they did and a nitrate fine grain turned up in the National Film Archive of India in Pune. We were able to arrange for that to be repatriated and it wasn’t a story of a heroic restoration because it was a pristine nitrate fine grain [print]. It was just a matter of making our own printing material and IWM was able to invite Sir Peter Ustinov, who had been one of the scriptwriters and he and Eric Ambler were the scriptwriters. Peter Ustinov was also in the cast with Bernard Miles and all sort so other people – again, I’d need to look at my crib to remember the full cast list and [its] a genius little film about how – it was made at a time that the British Army was desperate for additional recruits and so they had to extend the conscription pool to people who were younger and older than had previously been conscripted and also taking people from what were previously reserved occupations, so the film is an early example of what is now the cliché genre of licking the squad into shape. The new recruits, so disparate, so disgruntled and they all go off as a band of brothers. If I say it, it’s a bit of a trope now…
1 hour 40mins
RS: … but it was a very, very entertaining little film made for the British Army but so good that they decided to develop it as a feature film when they remade it with David Niven as The Way Ahead as a feature film directed by Carol Reed.
Sorry that’s all a digression on the subject of useful relations with other archives and that’s one of the high points of my memory of that, the only downside of that was that the only date that Sir Peter Ustinov could manage for the screening was actually during the FIAF Congress, so I was in Jerusalem while all the fun was happening in Lambeth at IWM’s cinema, but that’s how things happen sometimes.
MW: Talking FIAF and conferences, one of the big ones it seems to me that is documented in the great book that you produced, or at least edited it, and has your name very much on it, This Film is Dangerous, about nitrate film, now wasn’t that a result of, partly of, a meeting in the year 2000, was it, but I can’t remember the exact date? Maybe you’ll have to look at your crib sheet.
RS: Well, what happened in 2000 was that the FIAF Congress came to London and it was very much Clyde Jeavons’s ‘baby’. The timing wasn’t great for Clyde and I suspect he will have said plenty about this in the interview you’ve done with him [BEHP Interview No 694] because the huge restructurings at the BFI were already under way by then, and his own position had been undermined and all of that but he had established and FIAF sets up its Congresses three or four years in advance, and he had booked the FIAF Congress for London in the year 2000 as the Millennium in London, as London was doing lots of Millennium stuff, it was going to be – it was- a huge and very good Congress.
The idea was also Clyde’s from very early on that the year 2000 would be The Last Nitrate Picture Show, and that was [a] slightly ironic tipping of the hat to the fact that back in the ‘70s and ‘80s film archives in the UK and around the world had run the ‘Nitrate won’t Wait’ campaign and a lot of them had fixed on year 2000 as being the year by which it would be too late to save any of the world’s nitrate that hadn’t been saved by then. Of course we learned a lot since and there is still perfectly viable nitrate in vaults in 2018, but leaving that aside the genesis of the book was slightly different, though the two did converge.
The genesis of the book was my fault and it’s a classic example of the ‘be careful what you wish for’ saying. Back in ’95-’96 when FIAF was doing it’s thing to celebrate the Centenary of Cinema, variously celebrated depending whether you were a Lumiere Brothers or a Kodak/George Eastman type: who am I trying to say? Sorry. [Roger has forgotten]
MW: Or even a Marey or a Muybridge person!
RS: Yes, all of that, but anyway all of these debates were going on in FIAF about what constituted cinema and who’d thought it up, and where it had first happened and when, and I said “Aren’t we forgetting as archivists that the one thing that really made cinema possible is this stuff: nitrate film, and shouldn’t we do something to celebrate that? How about a book? And what I had in mind was that I could just summon out of the air a couple of entertaining or interesting nitrate anecdotes, and I thought ‘well if all the film archives around the world do the same thing, we’ll have a book.’ And people said “That’s a great idea, why don’t you do it?” And I spent the next couple of years trying to get this going and not getting very far, but under the generous umbrella of Clyde Jeavons and the Last Nitrate Picture Show we decided to relaunch the idea.
1 hour 45 mins
RS: Initially as something where we might have had some kind of publication ready for 2000 but given that everybody was part-time and they had a Congress to organise, that didn’t happen so instead the Congress in 2000 became the really solid substantial launch pad for the idea and we were able to include in the book papers that were given at the Symposium. Papers that were offered to the Symposium that hadn’t taken off and some of what had come through as responses to my original idea so that there is - and if you look at the book, it is a doorstep of a thing: shall I pick it up and wave it around? [shows book to camera]
MW: Well worth having!
RS: There are chapters which are a kind of calendar of nitrate, major nitrate fires. There are compilations of archivists’ anecdotes about encounters with nitrate, there’s an interview with an anonymous collector, one of those people literally with nitrate under the bed, in the attic and all the places where it shouldn’t be. There are anecdotes about Nitrate Won’t Wait, about such campaigns around the world. There are few rather more thoroughly scientific things about the history of nitrate film, the history of the replacement of nitrate with acetate. What else? All sorts, there is something for everybody. There’s a very serious bibliography about films about nitrate film as a physical entity, which Elaine Burrows and other members of the FIAF Documentation Commission helped me put together. There’s a more light-hearted bibliography of books in which nitrate film usually in its inflammatory propensities plays a role in the plot, which I compiled because that’s the sort of thing that entertains me. There is a filmography, similarly, of films in which nitrate catches fire. I was too early for Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, but we got some other films in there.
So, it was finally published in 2002, just, and launched at the FIAF Congress in 2003, and as you’ve already said, copies are still available.
MW: And it won the Kraszna-Krausz award.
RS: It won the Kraszna-Krausz award and yes I have the certificate on my wall. [looks across]
MW: Ah yes. Indeed.
RS: Cathy Surowiec who deserves a very generous name check as my Associate Editor and really one of the people who deserves the phrase ‘But for whom…’ because she is the world’s greatest proof-reader and also did a lot of the work for some of the essays that appear under other peoples’ names including a couple where her name is above the credits so we had a certain amount of work to do with people whose contributions came in, fairly obviously, with English not as their first language, so with their permission, their agreement, we sub-edited quite a lot and Cathy was invaluable for that and many other things and she helped provide, generate, the index and the contents page so really she’s on virtually every page of the book.
MW: And a very good thing it is, too. It’s a lasting testament to your work and I would suggest it’s one of the big things against your name, along with promoting The Battle of the Somme. There may be other things that you’d like people to remember in the sense that well you feel you achieved in all that time at The Imperial War Museum.
RS: Well, I think in symbolic terms I think that The Battle of the Somme and its listing on the Unesco Memory of the World Register, so both the film and its restoration and seeing it through to a successful release, so that could stand as a symbol for taking care of the collection; This Film is Dangerous I think would stand for my pride in being a film archivist and my affection for the analogue world that is now receding. We could talk about that as well, but I won’t at this point.
1 hour 50 mins
RS: IWM, the actual Film Archive itself was honoured by the International Documentary Association in 2002 and was Focal Footage Library of the Year in 2004, so those were both on my watch and I’m proud of those, and I’m also proud to have got IWM sufficient prominence in FIAF, that FIAF tolerated having somebody from this erstwhile pariah organisation as its Secretary General for six years, 1995 to 2001, that was me, so I’m proud of that as well.
That was a fairly significant time, I can talk more about that with FIAF but we, the Executive Committee in those six years saw through a number of fairly important structural changes. We tried to modify the memberships and statutes to make the Federation more welcoming to a broader range of film archives to try to acknowledge the expansion of the field that we talked about already.
MW: Well Roger, since we stopped recording for a moment, we’ve been reminded that you’ve recently, you’ve received an award from FIAF I believe. I’d like you to say more about it if you could.
RS: Indeed. And how embarrassing to be reminded! I can only say in my defence it’s so recent I haven’t got used to it. Yes, FIAF has a category of Honorary Membership which it confers on people which it considers to have given the Federation, I guess, long service and good conduct, and this year’s Congress invited or nominated me for that honour so as I say I’m still getting used to it but I should have remembered it as one of my achievements because its certainly something I’m proud of.
MW: And in that status will you always be invited to Congresses in the future?
RS: I don’t know about always.
MW: No?
RS: The line is ‘the door is always open’ but I may have to pay my own way, but I’ve also been warned, by Christophe Dupin at the Secretariat in Brussels that they may want to consult me about certain things to do with statutes and rules again which harks back to my own time on the Executive Committee.
MW: Well you’ve become a very important person!
There was another thing we were reminded about or you reminded us about, having reminded yourself that you can claim to have been on a team that was undefeated on the University Challenge. Can you say more about that?
RS: [laughs] Oh yes! That was in 2006. It was one of the seasons that the University Challenge team during the students’ off-season during the Summer called University Challenge: The Professionals and I have to say that some of my colleagues at IWM weren’t convinced that it was a great idea to put a team forward but the rest thought it would be so shaming if we lost so lacked a little confidence in us, but we went ahead and we put together a team and had a very enjoyable day recording up in the Granada studios in Manchester, and we had a hard fought match against the RSPB, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, which we won. But, sadly, it wasn’t good enough for us to go through to the next round because the format of the season was that ten teams started, but only the four highest scoring winners went through to a semi-final and because it had been a close fought round, neither RSPB nor us made the cut, but we are the undefeated Imperial War Museum University Challenge Team.
MW: Oh, well done, it’s quite difficult going on one of those programmes, exposing yourself to someone like Jeremy Paxman.
RS: Well Jeremy Paxman is more gentle with oldies like us than he is with the students, but even so it was a bit nerve-wracking and in the dry run, before they turn the cameras on we failed to get a single starter question. We failed to react to the buzzer. Fortunately, in the real thing we got going, but it was fairly nerve-wracking.
MW: Well done though.
Couple of other topics we’d like to capture before we finally close. One I’m throwing in myself now, and that’s about the role of oral history within the Imperial War Museum’s collection. I know, strictly it’s not film, but it seemed to me that quite a lot of oral history, and some with moving pictures, where extended recordings are made, I believe of people who were involved in the Spanish Civil War for instance: Toby Haggith I think he did some of that work. I wondered if you’d reflect on some of that, and its importance or otherwise.
RS: Well Imperial War Museum – the Imperial War Museum’s Department of Sound Records later it’s Sound Archive, was the only collecting Department that was actually set up more recently…
1 hour 55 mins
RS: …than my joining the Museum so it’s the only Department that was kind of structured in anything approaching modern museum thinking from the start and my old department, Information Retrieval had a hand in setting up its cataloguing techniques and I was briefly on the Cataloguing Committee of the international Association of Sound Archives in parallel with my work for FIAF.
The IWM Sound Archive I’m really only able to talk about by hearsay. I was never directly involved. It was fairly unusual in its time because oral history, certainly in Britain, had a very ‘bottom-up’ appeal. It came out of…anthropological folklore studies at university departments and the main effort went into securing the interview and then looking after the transcript. IWM was unusually pioneering in feeling that it was also worth talking to the level of society that might have been considered capable of writing its own memoirs and also in earmarking the actual analogue recording for preservation. Almost all of IWM’s recording was done as sound only. I have to say that this was partly because of a slightly undignified turf war between Clive Coultass and the Head of the new Sound Department, David Lance, because Clive said “If you’re going to take moving pictures, it’s film!”, but of such things are historic decisions made, so the IWM Sound Archive is fairly exclusively a sound archive. I think the project that you referred to, Toby Haggith that name again, his involvement in interviews with Spanish Civil War veterans has a video component because of the involvement of BUFVC [British Universities Film & Video Council, now Learning on Screen.DS]as well as the IWM, so I’m not sure what is happening these days, I’m a bit out of touch but through pretty much all my period the Sound Archive meant exactly that. On the other hand, and because the Sound Archive was the newest collection, its also been very far up the queue in terms of digitisation and on-line access, so it’s not all been bad news in terms of getting at the collection.
MW: There’s another component that you held and that was long-form out-takes and interviews from The World at War.
RS: Yes.
MW: Which were in effect oral history, with pictures of many, many important people from World War Two, who are no longer with us.
RS: Indeed.
MW: And that must be an important collection.
RS: It was and the sound components of those interviews became part of what the Sound Archive was able to give access to and the result of that has been some joint programming as part of the BBC’s Radio Centenary programming over the last four years.
Before we leave oral history I should also complete the circle and say that another of Kay Gladstone and James Barker’s achievements, together with occasional participation from other Film Archive and Information Retrieval Department staff was a number of interviews with Second World War service film cameramen and then extending that project a bit to other people involved in Second World War official film making, and they were able, again you were saying, people sadly no longer with us, they were able to talk to a number of the movie cameramen, a couple of the other people involved within the work of the Army Film Unit as Sound Recordists, Editors and so on and some of the people involved in turning the raw footage procured by the Army and Air Force cameramen into documentaries so that’s quite a useful resource for some of the people who might be listening to this interview as well.
MW: Absolutely. Another thing which we didn’t talk about was the coverage of The Holocaust and the recent production of a feature film, and I wondered if you could say more about that, and how it worked with The Imperial War Museum.
RS: The story here really would be better told by Toby Haggith, so I hope at some point you get the opportunity to interview him and get the full story from him.
2 Hours
RS: As a fairly brief thumbnail sketch, the story here relates to a film conceived by Sidney Bernstein in the dying months of The Second World War, really after the advancing allied forces began to uncover some of the Nazi atrocities and above all after the liberation of Bergen-Belsen, and Sidney Bernstein had the feeling that a documentary film should be made to the highest possible forensic standards to be screened to the people of Europe but above all to the Germans so there would be no possibility of their being able to deny what the regime they had supported had done; and this film was to go into production as an Anglo-American co-production with a lot of production values, and it was to be a feature length five-reeler, six-reeler. It ran almost immediately into production troubles. You know, the war came to an end, resources were difficult, the Americans were a bit luke-warm about supporting a British project and in the end – I’m eliding history a bit – but in the end went off to produce their own much shorter documentary called Die Todesmuhlen or Death Mills.
The British production ground to a halt. It was officially shelved rather than abandoned, but somehow it was never picked up again. Before it was shelved it had picked up some fairly stellar names and the one that everybody focuses on is … Sidney Bernstein was great friends with Alfred Hitchcock, and asked Alfred Hitchcock to associate himself with this project, which has led to some slightly misguided effort to identify this film as a ‘lost’ Hitchcock film. IWM always fought against that, though were prepared to give Hitchcock credit as a special treatment advisor because he came on the scene after almost all the film was in the can because it was filmed by the combat cameraman as the atrocities were uncovered and he [Hitchcock] went back to Hollywood before the film could be finished so what he was able to contribute was some suggestions about how the film should be put together, and Toby thinks that it is possible to identify some examples in the finished film that show the Hitchcock touch but we wouldn’t call it a Hitchcock film.
So, film abandoned by the British and the occupational authorities, comes to the IWM in the 1950s as five of the six reels of the film are in fairly fine cut assembly form; there is a shot list for the proposed sixth reel, which was the one that was going to be – the first five reels had been largely British and American film – the sixth reel as well as being the climax was going use the Russian film from Majdanek and Auschwitz, but it was never put together, and that sits in IWM and is not greatly looked at, which is not to say of course that The Holocaust isn’t studied, because of course a lot of the work that went into The World at War in the ‘70s were episodes and a spin-off long documentary about The Holocaust, so another of the things about the film I’m talking about is that it’s abandonment meant The Holocaust wasn’t known about are not true. However in the 1970s Elizabeth Sussex wrote a biography of Sidney Bernstein and one of the things picked up by Sussex, Bernstein and the publishers as an interesting piece to hook publicity for the new biography on to, was the story of this film and the Hitchcock involvement and as a result of that IWM was asked “Where is this film, what have you got?” and the five reels of fine cut were screened at The Berlin Film Festival in 1974, and were subsequently put together as a documentary by WGBT in Boston, a PBS channel as a film called Memory of the Camps so rather confusingly -
2 hours 5 mins
RS: - both the five reels of fine cut and the PBS documentary were known as Memory of the Camps.
PBS also got Trevor Howard to record draft commentary that had been scripted, which matched the five reels, pretty well. So, sort of 25 years plus, of that’s where things stand, then in the early 2000s the film becomes of interest again and IWM realises that digital technology has now got to the point where we could do something fairly unique in film archive terms and raising some interesting archival issues that we probably don’t have time to go into here because in addition to doing a restoration of the fine-cut, in other word going back to better quality original materials, because after all what we had in the fine cut was basically just edited positive, and we were in a position to go back to archive-original materials, we were also in a position to use the shot-list to compile the missing sixth reel. So, Toby oversaw all of that and engaged with the issues of the ethics of what we were trying to do with the sixth reel, what we should do in terms of the sound for the film because we couldn’t say we were restoring the sound because there had never been a soundtrack to it. But also we were very torn because we had the feeling that sound in the 1940s would probably have been pretty crass (sic). In the nature of the material, we didn’t want that sort of sound anyway. As I say, I’m trying to be brief here.
We also worked out that what we were doing with this film was of itself of interest and a production company came on board, and made a film which was ultimately released on its own, called Night Will Fall, which is a line from the commentary of the 1940s film, which IWM was in the end, for various reasons, unable to remain completely in association with, but obviously did retain a partnership in, and that was released to quite a lot of critical notice. Meanwhile IWM continued work to complete – complete and restore – we never really came up with a single word to define what we were doing to the original 1940s film and were finally able to achieve very, very, limited DVD, sorry theatrical and DVD/Blu-Ray release last year. Some of the problems with the film are obviously that the content is pretty horrific. I mean by the standards of the 1940s, extremely horrific even fairly shattering by the standards of what you see now; and also the original draft commentary from the 1940s which we were anxious to preserve does include some factual errors: for example it gives an incorrect estimate of people killed in Auschwitz. These are appropriate to the time because they were thought to represent what was thought to be best knowledge when the script was written but they all say the sort of thing that holocaust deniers would fixate on now, and say “Well if you can’t trust that bit of the film, then what else can you trust?” So Toby had worked out that where possible the film should only be screened with someone present from IWM to introduce it and because it’s also an emotionally shattering experience we also felt the screenings should offer a kind of de-pressurisation opportunity to sit back and think and discuss the film afterwards; and the substitute for that on the DVD is a brief intro which does a bit of contextualising and effectively a brief outro where there various talking heads picking up on a number of the points made in the discussions we’ve had in the screenings after the film. That’s a very whistle-stop tour of what we now call German Concentration Camps Factual Survey because in so far as the film made it into the ledgers of the-
2 hours 10 mins
RS: - of the MOD Production Office. That’s what it was known as at the time so we’ve called it that to distinguish it from Memory of the Camps and Night Must Fall, but that’s as I say a quick tour of the story. Well worth exploring in more detail and some of the history is in the booklet that comes with the DVD of the released version.
MW: Very interesting and one of the more recent good things coming out of IWM.
RS: Yes. Yes.
MW: Thank you very much Roger for spending a little time with us.
RS: Okay.
MW: I’m sure we might want to come back to you for one thing or another.
RS: It will be a pleasure.
MW: You’ve done quite a marathon chat here today.
RS: Well, I’m sure we could find more but….
MW: Yeah! Thank You.
END OF INTERVIEW
Transcribed by David Sharp 2024.
