Arts on Film Archive

A curated project based on the Arts Council’s collection of 460 films on the Arts: includes cataloguing and setting up a major digital resource, commissioning a published book, organising screenings and events. The Arts on Film Archive is a digital collection and research resource. It holds all 450 films (total 280 hours) produced by Arts Council England between 1953 and 1998 (the year it closed its film department). The online archive is a resource for research
into British and international post-war art and documentary filmmaking, containing primary source material for biographies, monographs, and many other forms of research in art history and documentary. The collection includes films on artists such as Bacon, Hockney, Hepworth, Moore, and Sherman as well as films that document particular art movements such as Surrealism, Dada, Futurism, Kinetic art, the ‘Independent Group’ and profiles of the first YBA. Other films address race, gender and post-colonialism.

Ten Brink initiated the project and acted as its director and curator. The curation involved tracking down and cataloguing the films, as well as substantial technological research, which led to the use of high resolution, full screen, on-line, video-on-demand streamed moving images. The films were also digitised for long-term preservation at the National Film Archive/ BFI. Ten Brink worked with and commissioned arts documentarist, John Wyver, to write Vision On, a monograph which critically examined the history of arts documentary (1953-1998). The book included a forward by ten Brink about the research aims and objectives of the archive.

The Arts on Film Archive was launched in October 2007 at Tate Modern by Sir Nicholas Serota, accompanied by a programme
of film screenings and on-stage discussions. In June 2008 the Arts on Film Archive collection will be launched in North America during the International Conference and Festival of Films of Arts, Montréal, Canada.

The archive was funded by an AHRC research grant (£320,000) and received further support from ACE and National Film Archive.