East Anglian Film Archive and Film History

The East Anglian Film Archive (http://www.uea.ac.uk/eafa/) collects and preserves for the future, and where possible, makes available now, films and videos that show the life and work, people and places, and the changing history of the region.

The Archive covers the East of England region – Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire, Essex, Hertfordshire, Norfolk and Suffolk – and has many thousands of films and videos.

The Archive is the official public archive for moving images in the region.

Film archives, whether regional or national, are relatively new, especially when compared to libraries and museums. The first film archive, at the Imperial War Museum, undertook to preserve official film records of the First World War in 1917 and the National Film and Television Archive began collecting for ‘a repository of films of permanent value’ in 1935. The East Anglian Film Archive was the first ‘regional’ film archive, which began collecting in 1976 and now the whole country is served by a network of archives who work together under the auspices of the Film Archive Forum.

Moving images, or what we call films, began in the 1890s, when moving picture cameras and projectors first made their appearance.

The making of films has always been determined, to a large extent, by the technology of the time. Early cameras were heavy and immobile and may have needed several people to carry and work the machine. This would affect what you would film and how you filmed it. Fast changing and moving events were not easy to capture and keeping up with a football match, for instance, was near impossible.

Because of this, very early films can tend to look more rigid than those of today. When filming a topical event or ‘news’ story, it was best to make sure you placed your camera at the right point in the beginning and make sure the action happened in front of the lens, without having to move, recording what is known as a ‘tableau’. Sometimes, filmmakers even staged the action themselves or had actors re-enact an event, to make certain of a good image.

Films were very expensive to produce, until the 1950s and 1960s, when relatively cheap ‘home movie’ cameras became available. But professionally shot images have always been expensive to produce and this is another factor that would determine how and what was recorded for posterity.

To make a film at all around 1930, for instance, would have been beyond the reach of most ordinary people. Those making films had to be very wealthy, professional newsreel companies or feature film makers, advertisers or members of cine clubs and societies that would pool their resources in an attempt to produce a drama or documentary.

With a video camera, today, the filmmaker can press record, film a sequence and instantly play back the recording. This was not always the case. Films were (and in some instances still are) made on a clear plastic substance that once ‘cranked’ through the camera, often by turning a handle or winding up a clockwork mechanism, had to be sent to a laboratory to be ‘processed’. The film was pulled through tanks of chemicals and washes and only then returned to the film maker, days, possibly weeks later. The film was then either shown as it was or edited down to the right length and in a way to tell the right story.

Not only has filmmaking been technically difficult and expensive, it has also been extremely dangerous. The substance films were made on, until 1951, was Cellulose Nitrate. Nitrate film was capable of bursting into flames spontaneously and because it created its own oxygen and ignition, was impossible to extinguish. Great care had to be made not to allow the film to get too hot. Many people died in ‘nitrate fires’ at cinemas and the substance was the very influential on government policy making and the Cinematograph Act of 1909, which attempted to regulate the use of films in public places.