New film trails for archaeology and social history

Still from Wigber Low: Excavation of an Anglo-Saxon Burial Site. "Archaeology" film trail.

Still from Jane Brown Changes Her Job. "Factory Dreams and Nightmares: Social Structures and Industrialisation" film trail.

Two new film trails have been added to the Film & Sound Online service, entitled "Archaeology" and "Factory Dreams and Nightmares: Social Structures and Industrialisation".

The Archaeology trail includes material from the Anglia Television Library, Digital Himalaya, Imperial War Museum, IWF Knowledge & Media and Sheffield University Learning Media Unit collections, pairing archaeological material with appropriate or useful anthropological examples.

Some of the segments focus on the distant past, but archaeologists are also able to make a unique contribution to understanding of more recent events, through their study of themes such as burial, monuments and memory, as in the case of the First World War. Inevitably, as techniques and theories develop, so too do our ideas about the past: many of these films, dating from the 1970s and 1980s, are now "artefacts" themselves, laden with gender and class stereotypes, and out-dated ideas on past invasions. They are therefore valuable visual documents on the development of the discipline, and its relationship with the media, which should also prove fruitful for historians and ethnographers of archaeology.

The Factory Dreams and Nightmares trail uses video clips from the Amber Films, Educational and Television Films (ETV), Films of Scotland, Imperial War Museum, IWF Knowledge & Media and Royal Mail Film Classics collections. An interdisciplinary trail, it combines social history, economic systems, and historical and environmental catastrophes connected or reflected in the cultural landscape of the factory. It attempts to provide a critical understanding of living conditions within the factory as community or the opposite, an alienated mass.

In seeking a historical explanation for the factory, the trail shows how the passage from rural to industrial society over 150 years provoked cataclysmic changes in the West and the East. People changed. Working-class life became as fragmented as the Taylorian method of segmented factory production.

In addition to the new film trails, there are a couple of recent introductory videos to two of the Film & Sound Online collections: a Wellcome Film collection showreel and an Interactive Introduction to the GPO film unit with Derek Jacobi, which relates to the Royal Mail Film Classics collection.

Film & Sound Online is available by free subscription to all UK Further and Higher Education institutions.