Formerly The Scottish Screen Archive, the resource has a vast range of footage from documentaries to home videos. Using the search tool you can explore films made for public information, industry, and entertainment.

If conducting research you can call up particular films or use a keyword filter, and browse information on specific filmmakers and film productions. Alternatively, simply browse through genres, subject, place and decade to while away the hours!

Register free online to access the archive and even create a ‘My films’ list, request a copy of films or buy DVD compilations.

Whether the landscapes and architecture is familiar to you or not, this is something that everyone can appreciate having right at their fingertips.

Explore the NLS Moving Image Archive here.

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It contains classic and contemporary, hand-picked from our festivals, cultural programme and the BFI National Archive. The site works on desktops, android and apple devices with a downloadable app from iTunes.

You can choose from thousands of beautifully preserved films, documenting 120 years of Britain on Film all searchable on an interactive map. If you only have 5 minutes, why not watch footage from BFI’s Film Festival such as Director Peter Strickland and editor Nick Fenton’s Q&A on Björk: Biophilia Live, 2014. Alternatively if you’ve got a bit more time, try a more recent feature such as Appropriate Behaviour, 2015 by Director and star Desiree Akhavan which is a comedy about a bisexual Iranian-American woman.

With so many films to choose from, the BFI have helpfully created a Collections sub-menu which helps direct you to your perfect playlist. They include exclusive features about the films or the people who made them. Collections include Hitchock where you can view classics like The Birds or Psycho for £2.98 or watch Martin Scorsese discuss Vertigo for free.

Explore the BFI Player here but we warn you – you may just lose a few hours.

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I think you are using the word archive inaccurately is the new project by My Bookcase in collaboration with Market Gallery.

This summer the Market Gallery committee has decided to devote time to opening and examining the contents of its archive. My Bookcase has been invited to provide the platform for multiple perspectives concerning archival practices to convene.

During August, as part of the first phase of the project, My Bookcase founder, Cristina Garriga, is inviting individuals and organisations within Glasgow and Scotland to join Market Gallery for a series of informal conversations around archival practices. These conversations will be opened up to the public and together we will examine the tools that are used to make an archive, and consider the archive in relation to educational methodologies.

Conversations will revolve around key issues that the committee is facing:
-Who is the Archive for?
-The Archive as a physical space
-Ways of encountering knowledge
-The Archive as a network in contrast to an isolated resource
-The Digital Archive

Contributors and attendees are encouraged to bring along with them a publication/object/folder/print from their archive and/or archival practices, which could be lent to us for the duration of the summer as a way of opening up conversation and documenting this collaborative process.

The programme of informal conversations include contributions by: Jenny Brownrigg (GSA Exhibitions Director), Viviana Checcia (Public Engagement Curator at CCA), GENERATOR Projects, Sally Harrower (Manuscripts Curator at National Library of Scotland), artist Rachel Lowther, Nicola Maksymuik (archivist at Glasgow Women’s Library) and Francis McKee (director of CCA).

The summer programme will culminate in a one-day forum in Autumn 2015 (date tbc) at Market Gallery where speakers from the UK and Europe will be invited to open up the conversation to new influences and possibilities.

If you are interested in the project, would like to attend the programme of informal conversations or want to contribute by lending us an item from your personal archive, please send an email to: afterword@mybookcase.org.

More About My Bookcase:

My Bookcase is a social enterprise based in Glasgow dedicated to explore the book as a physical object of cultural, social and historical significance.

Founded in September 2014, the organisation’s main aim is the creation of an online platform that explores the concept of the library in the form of an innovative service through which members can catalogue the content of their own bookshelves, and arrange to meet and borrow books from each other in their locality.

To complement the new platform, My Bookcase engages with a number of satellite projects with the book at its heart. My Bookcase’s programme of public activities include the participation in exhibitions such as the major Alasdair Gray Season and The Making Room at Southblock, the delivery of workshops and talks such us the upcoming Printshop! at Tramway, the ongoing project of gathering book donations for the reconstruction of the lost Mackintosh Library and community projects such as My Bookcase @ The Whisky Bond.

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Bill Millett is a visual artist working in video and photography, occasionally indulging in sound. His works focus on the multiple levels of reality, its illusion and construction towards cognitive framing. The images drift towards the abstract and meditative. His works can be viewed on his website.

My Top Five

I have chosen have a human thread running through the works; as you progress the thread will become obvious. Hopefully the chosen works illustrate the importance of documentation that now seems lost as its submerged, in a digital tsunami.

Jessica Lloyd-Jones: Hidden Energies

Lloyd-Jones’ works illustrate the beauty and fragility of the human body through the use of manipulated materials and light to reveal new perspectives.

Thibaut Clamart: Genesis & Lady Jaye Breyer P-Orridge

I saw this during the festival, thought it the best show. It does what art should confront, and is poignant in relation to the recent global dynamics. I don’t think you will ever see GPO trending.

David Lyons: Eye for an Eye

A precise and empirical use of art and science, illustrating that artwork can be intentionally created to be experienced differently depending on the individual’s visual abilities, perception there is more than meets the eye.

Simon Norfolk: Afghanistan – Chronotopia

I remember seeing a documentary on Norfolk’s work and found it a powerful way of illustrating war in a media stream that has become sanitised. In his works we see a painting of a landscape from a distance. On closer inspection, you start to notice the objects of war. It’s not Stalingrad but just as effective.

Ian Hughes: Unearthed Tongues Set Free

The last is the work of Ian Hughes who recently passed away. This is a powerful illustration of dehumanisation.

This is the second in an ongoing series selecting films from SummerhallTV’s archive. See the first in the series by Dave Rushton here. For a chance to curate your very own SummerhallTV film selection, please email Central Station on hello@thisiscentralstation.com.

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David Rushton was a founder editor of Coventry-based Analytical Art in the 1960s and subsequently worked for Art & Language from 1972 to 1975, notably on the Art & Language Indexes.

Rushton was a key agent in student-led activism and print throughout the 1970s and co-edited Politics of Art Education, 1979. Since then he has divided his time between an analysis of ‘making art’ and local and community based communications. Throughout the 1990s he work on policies and legislation towards the introduction of a more locally accountable TV and with Edinburgh Television and Channel Six Dundee (2000-2002) introduced a browser TV service with programmes scheduled by the viewers using their phone’s key-pads. These channels featured local and international music videos and pioneered short local arts-news.

Rushton is the Founding Director of the Institute of Local Television launched in 1989. The Institute’s most recent arts-news sites include www.summerhall.tv, www.artinscotland.tv, www.writerstories.tv and in partnership with Craft Scotland, www.craftscotland.tv.

My Top Five

As the first Top Five I’ll let my selection start with the early days of making news-clips on Super 8 film. Many of these films are now accessible on the Archive pages of www.summerhall.tv and also form part of the National Library of Scotland film collection … in chronological order:-

So this is Christmas … 1980

A roughly edited film of a demonstration in Glasgow in 1980. As a single copy Super 8 film this had a maximum audience of fifty viewers when it was shown two weeks after filming at Red Star’s Cinema held at the Netherbow (now the Storytelling Centre) on Edinburgh’s High Street. In August 2014 it went viral and was watched almost 3000 times over a couple of weeks, as a digital clip from Red Star’s Super 8 films archived on www.summerhall.tv.

Gore Vidal : In Conversation

Another ‘sleeper’ clip, this time made by Robert Morgan for Edinburgh Television in 2001. It started to be more widely seen after we launched www.writerstories.tv in January 2014. One of several hundred short arts, political and community clips originally shot on standard definition mini DV for Edinburgh Television and Channel Six Dundee between 2000 and 2004. The author interviews continued throughout many of the Edinburgh International Book Festivals with clips now finding a home on our Vimeo sites.

Angelika Schnabel

Moving away from arts-news this film from 2004 opens-out an interview with artist Angelika Schnabel. Here the construction is more lyrical, a montage of picture and soundscape, affecting the quiet confidence of working in the enclosed slow-paced discipline of Angelika’s Buddhist tradition.

Phillipa Aitken : Gerhard Richter

Shot by Ben Grieve for www.artinscotland.tv this interview with Phillipa Aitken is a good example of our daily arts-news coverage of exhibitions and artists throughout Scotland. These are now filmed on a variety of HD camcorders and DSLR cameras. Published openly via social media arts-news, these clips fit the short-time span required of .tv and increase the ‘virtual footfall’ to Scotland’s artists, writers and performers by remote and international ‘visitors’.

Ellie Harrison : After the Revolution, Who Will Clean Up the Mess?

Luci Wallace’s clip of Ellie Harrison’s Referendum Canons was our most watched arts-news clip of 2014. Luci’s film explores an event that at the time of filming may or may not take place depending on the Referendum result. A sequel was filmed on the morning of the announcement [Ellie Harrison : Counterpoint]. While the project didn’t go off with a Bang, the metaphor proved resilient; the result not so much a whimper as a Bigger Bang postponed.

This is the first part of an ongoing series selecting films from SummerhallTV’s archive. For a chance to curate your very own SummerhallTV film selection, please email Central Station on hello@thisiscentralstation.com.

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This is Tomorrow is a magazine focused around creating a comprehensive archive of contemporary art. Divided by city, medium, and show, the goal is to provide a means for readers to visit exhibitions anywhere in the world.

Consisting of features, reviews, interviews, video content and live events, This is Tomorrow is an invaluable resource for anyone interested in keeping up on the latest in contemporary art.

To get you started, why not check out their review of Jeremy Deller’s exhibition at The Modern Institute here.

Find out more at This is Tomorrow here.

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British Pathé have released their entire 85,000 historic film archive to YouTube. The films span from 1896 to 1976 and feature celebrities, daredevils, disasters, strange inventions and footage which documents key moments in the 20th century. The archive is fully-searchable and features 3,500 hours of  content. Made up of newsreel footage and cinemagazines, these high resolution films allow full access into the Pathé Archive. The collection includes a large amount of content from Scotland including football matches, royal visits, footage of Glasgow’s last tram, coverage of the Edinburgh Festival  and more.

Explore the Pathé archive here.

Pop Art Exhibition (1969) – Hayward Gallery, London

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What:
Based in Manchester, Skyliner is an award-winning blog which shares stories about art, architecture and history with a view to encouraging residents to love the city they live in.

Every city is plentiful of interesting sights and stories that are at risk of being forgotten. There is public art which has been made within our lifetime which goes uncredited and will forever do so if no questions are asked about it. Skyliner aims to save these stories and archives.

Eventually, Skyliner aims to be a nationwide database of locations and stories from across the UK.

Why we like it:
Skyliner uncovers hidden architectural stories and helps its readers to engage with their cities and take on fresh, inspiring perspectives. Have a look here, you might be surprised with what you find.

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Image of Kirsty Logan © Jean Donaldson

To celebrate its 21st birthday, Glasgow Women’s Library commissioned 21 professional artists and writers (all female, all Scottish) to create new work inspired by items in the library archives. I’m a fiction writer and had never created visual art before, but something about the security of a commission and a brief made me feel able to branch out. I thought what the hell and decided to do something visual.

When I started poking around in the archives, I became fascinated by the women’s magazines of the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s. Along with the rest of the Western world I’d been watching Mad Men, and I’ve also long been a fan of Graham Rawle’s 2005 book Woman’s World. So, inspired by all of these, I photocopied pages from magazines and started to use them to create a cut-out story, in the style of a ransom note.

The problem, I soon discovered, was that the adverts did not have any verbs. Apparently, women in the 1930s-50s were only allowed to appear a certain way – they weren’t supposed to DO anything. In order to find some ‘doing words’, I had to go back to the library and photocopy girls’ annuals (the 1950s equivalent of Bunty) and recipe books of the period. Apparently, women were allowed to do things when they were young, as children; and when they were older, as housewives and matrons – but not in between.

This is Liberty by Kirsty Logan © Glasgow Women’s Library

After many days spent faffing around with glue sticks and tiny bits of paper, I was done. The final product is 4-page story, titled THIS IS LIBERTY, about a female prizefighter. The completed work will be on display, along with the other 20 pieces, at the Glasgow Women’s Library until September 2012.

Find out more about Kirsty:
Website | Blog | Goodreads | Facebook | Twitter

The exhibition of the 21 women artists (21 Revolutions) will take place in the Intermedia Gallery at the CCA from 22nd September (the launch is 6pm, 21st September). The 21 writers’ work, including ‘This Is Liberty’, will be shown at a parallel exhibition of the writers’ texts and their sources at the Glasgow Women’s Library from Saturday 22nd (launch from 2pm). The new work by the 21 writers will also be released as free audio podcasts from September.

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