About an Archive - The East Anglian Film Archive 2011

It's not often that an online movie hooks me in for more than three minutes, but if I'm honest, it has happened when it's been shot on 8mm film.

So looking online for info about film preservation today, I was quickly sucked in by the East Anglican Film Archive's own 22-minute doco about itself. There are shots aplenty sourced from probably most film gauges that I can name, and all to publicise how they have about another 100 hours waiting to be discovered elsewhere on the same site.

Looking through this montage of English farmers, dancers and gatherings of people in gasmasks, the claim made by Roger Lloyd Pack's opening narration that it describes "like no other medium the minute detail of everyday life through the decades" was clearly borne out.

Even Bernard Cribbins shows up at one point with a role of ciné film that he shot while making a much bigger movie back in the day.

All this and a rare real life glimpse of Vision On's the Prof David Cleveland, or was it his nemesis? Either way, it made a change to see him using a machine that wasn't trying to chase him off into the sunset.

Afterwards I felt suitably inspired, so I at last got onto ripping some of my audio cassettes to aiff/wav files, key sections of which were recorded to synchronise with my own yesteryear filming on Super 8.

After all, like so much preserved by the EAFA, it only happened the once.

Available, with hundreds of extras, for free, here.