The Collection: Film & Video | Documents | Access: Commercial Users | Access: Private Users | DVDs for Sale

Introduction

As well as the collection of films, TV programmes and other moving image material, the NRFTA also preserves documentation which refers to and contextualises them. This material includes scripts, advertising and publicity materials, personal papers and correspondence, company records and technical documentation. This documentation can often give us information which we'd be unable to get from the films themselves: for example, identifying the town in which a home movie was shot, or the process being demonstrated in an industrial training film.

Here are some examples.

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Pavilion Theatre, Westgate Road, Newcastle (1930)

This architect's plan was probably prepared as part of a planning application, when this cinema in Westgate Road, Newcastle Upon Tyne, put up new signage announcing the installation of sound equipment. The first 'talkies' had only been shown in Britain just over a year previously, and the Pavilion was one of the first cinemas in Newcastle to be wired for sound.

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Film Cans, 1935 and 1973

These cardboard cartons were used by home movie enthusiasts to send their films for processing. When we receive these films for preservation, we always remove and recan the element itself - the original packaging is made from acidic paper, traps harmful gases and can also harbour mould growth. However, we never dispose of these containers without carefully noting all the information on them first, and we'll always keep them indefinitely if they could be needed in the future to research the film's provenance. For example, this one suggests that the film inside was shot shortly before the date on the postmark - 4 September 1935 - but only if the film which was in that box when we got it was the same one which was in the box when it came back from the lab.

Here is the film which came out of the box above, after conservation and recanning.

This film was deposited with us by a TV broadcasting company. The label suggests that it would never have actually been screened, except in an emergency.

Download high resolution photos of the two original containers (PDF, 262kb)

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Certficate Presented to the Mayor of Durham, from Members of the Cinematograph Exhibitors' Association (1937)

This certificate was presented to the Mayor of Durham by local members of the Cinematograph Exhibitors' Association (CEA) - the trade body which represents cinema owners and managers. It marked a ceremony in which the CEA handed over a print of the Gaumont-British newsreel 'to be preserved in the archives of the city in perpetuity'. The newsreel issue covered the coronation of George VI on 12 May 1937, and the print was handed over after it had finished its run at Durham's Regal Cinema. The event was essentially a publicity stunt (the film itself was just a copy, and would probably have been disposed of shortly after its run was complete), designed to emphasise the increasing social and cultural importance of cinemagoing in the 1930s and to reinforce the importance of cinema owners and managers in the local economy and political life.

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BBC Look North Film Log, 1-7 January 1969

This page is from a register kept by the BBC studio in Newcastle, listing the filmed location reports which were broadcast in each daily edition of the regional news programme Look North. The information has now been transcribed into our database along with other details about the films themselves, but the original document still offers a useful way to get an impression of the mix of items that went out in each evening's programme. Not all of the films themselves survive, sadly. Where material was considered unlikely to be needed for repeat transmissions or for use as stock shots, the film was often junked by BBC staff shortly after broadcast.

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Instruction Manual for Ampex VPR-2B Video Tape Recorder, 1981

This is a page from the installation and operation manual for a videotape recorder (VTR), of the sort that was used in TV studios to record and edit programmes for broadcast. The tape format it used, 1" 'C' (so-called because the tape, which came on open reels, was one inch wide), was in mainstream production use from its launch in 1977 until it was overtaken by the Betacam SP format in the early 1990s. The equipment needed to play these tapes is now obsolete. Spare parts and the expertise needed to maintain the machines are now very hard to find, but vital if we are to be able to preserve the hundreds of hours of programming which we hold on this format. Instruction manuals such as this one provide very important technical information which is needed to keep the VTRs running.

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Television Script: About Britain, tx. 10 August 1984

This is the first page of the continuity script from a 1984 broadcast in Tyne Tees' series About Britain, one of the many documentary and drama productions to have been shown nationwide during the regional broadcaster's heyday in the mid-1980s. From the time before videotape was used to preserve live broadcasts and pre-record most non-live current affairs and documentary productions, scripts such as these are often the only surviving evidence of the final form in which a programme was broadcast.

Download the full script (PDF, 378kb)

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