The British Film Institute’s New Online Video Archive Celebrates Memes, How-Tos, and a Head of Lettuce

Last week, the British Film Institute’s National Archive announced a new collection of some 430 online videos. The collection encompasses a whole spectrum of British-made viral video content, from cultural phenomena like Radiohead’s “Scotch Mist” online performance of In Rainbows and Liz Truss’s doomed battle with a head of lettuce to memes like dancing badgers and the immortal “Charlie Bit My Finger” clip. The collection sits in the wider context of the BFI National Archive’s remit to preserve the moving image; as the Archive’s Digital Curator Will Swinburne explains, the collection is “an attempt to capture what the world of the online moving image has brought to the wider story of filmmaking.”

A selection of pieces from the very British collection is available on the BFI’s Replay site. (If you’re outside the UK, you’ll need a VPN to access it.) Gizmodo spoke to Swinburne about Shockwave Flash, blackout curtains, and what to do if the world ends.

Gizmodo: If you’re trying to pull together an archive of internet videos, you have a pretty much infinite number of pieces from which you could choose. What sort of criteria do you use to determine whether something is culturally significant, or more generally, just something you want to include?

Will Swinburne: Our approach with film and television is often a completist kind of approach—we acquire every film that gets a cinema release in the UK, we do offer a recording of all television, but that’s not an approach you can take with the internet. So that leaves us with the need for a curatorial perspective.

We’ve tried to map out some sense of video cultures that either exist specifically online or that are in some way allowed to exist because of the internet. That might be for technical reasons, like things that use short-form, platform-based video. It could also be a more techno-utopian idea of, well, there are no gatekeepers on the internet, so people from different backgrounds can make their own web series.

So we were trying to tell a story about what the internet has given you, the viewer, like, what things existed there that didn’t exist before? That guides us to a few places, one of them being points of innovation: who first thought to do some form of serial episodic television, but online? How did they manage to do that with the technical limitations of that time?

There are also whole genres of video where you’re definitely picking one as an example—so we have a video of someone showing you how to put up a blackout curtain, and that video on its own is not very well viewed or anything like that, but it’s emblematic that a huge amount of the internet is how-to tutorials and stuff like that, you know?

WikiHow sort of stuff, yeah.

Exactly. That video tells a story much bigger than itself, um, so that was definitely another guiding principle, yeah.

How did you go about sourcing some of this material? I guess newer stuff is obviously going to be on YouTube etc—but I imagine some of the older material might be quite difficult to get hold of?

It’s interesting. I mean, we… we’re a film archive, so we have archival practices, and one of them is that we try to go to the creator and ask them for an original file. So that would mean roughly, like, the file that they pressed “upload” on—to a platform, to a website, whatever.

It’s tricky, and we’ve actually found that it’s often people making videos right now [who] have no archival practice at all, you know? They treat the platform itself as an archive.

They just hit “upload,” and it’s gone.

Right. There’s obviously a huge variation—there are very professionalized setups, people who are basically like production studios, so they may have workflows and hard drives and stuff. People who make things on their phone, they don’t have any of that.

But a lot of the people who were making video in the 2000s, before YouTube… [that’s] quite a self-selecting group. They’re quite technical people. They were people who were into computers in early stages, into the internet, and so they often actually have quite good records and hard drives and … you know, they keep things.

Also, those [videos] have often been reproduced quite a few times now. So these early, early flash cartoons have a second life on YouTube as videos and so on and so forth.

The tricky thing is when someone stopped making videos or maybe just made one little thing that now, 20 years later, we see as maybe quite emblematic of something, but they don’t have a public-facing presence online.

They’ve gone on to be an accountant or something.

Yeah, exactly. So trying to track them down [can be hard]and maybe they’re like, “I barely remember that video.” So it varies hugely, and it’s not always the case that it’s just the older stuff that’s harder to find.

For things like Flash animations, would you be looking to source the original Shockwave Flash file that then you would convert into something you could upload to today’s internet?

No. We have to work within the scope of, like, our digital team’s established preservation workflows, and they don’t have a workflow for preserving an actual Shockwave file.

I see.

So [in those cases]we’ve acquired the video versions from the donor. We do a lot of extensive cataloguing, and with those works, what we’ve acquired is basically the YouTube version of the Flash cartoon—but in our cataloguing, we’ll make it very clear that this particular work has a history beyond YouTube, and has different origins. But we’re not working to preserve Flash as a technology.

No, we can let that go.

[laughs]

Was there a particular focus on British content?

Yeah, so the archive’s scope is that it collects UK works. That basically means work that’s produced in the UK or produced by a British person. It was also a project funded by the National Lottery, so that [also means] keeping a focus on UK stuff. So there were often videos suggested by the public or that came up in our discussions where… it’s not always clear who’s made something, you know, so  you track them down and finally find, “Oh, they’re from Texas.”

Curses.

Yeah.

You’ve collected something like 430 videos—is this project done, or is the archive something to which you’re going to continue to add on an ongoing basis?

So the initial project, the Lottery-funded part, was funded for an initial two years. That project is finished, and that completion is what we’re kind of marking and celebrating right now.

That project had two goals: the first was to collect 400 pieces, which we’ve done. The second was to figure out how to start collecting internet video as part of what we call “business as usual.” The archive has been collecting film and television for almost 100 years; how do we start including online video in our ongoing work? So that’s my role—I’m finding things to preserve, but also trying to support other curators who may have specializations in advertising or fiction film or whatever, and to help them understand areas of online video they might work with.

There are 60 videos online; what’s the plan as to what to do with the rest of the pieces you’ve collected?

They’re now part of the archive, so they’re woven into our general collection of film history. What’s quite exciting is that we can now start telling these moving image histories that stretch across film, television, and online video. So you could have a collection about, say, comedy series, and it could feature things from early television through to Netflix and web series.

The archive’s central purpose is preservation. So all the works we’ve collected [are] now preserved in our digital preservation infrastructure, and we’re committed to preserving [them] for… well, forever.

Until the world ends.

Until the world ends—and we even have some just-in-case scenarios for that.