Mastering the Moving Image Part 1 (Ben Walsh): How digital technology has opened up new access to film archive sources. In the UK, particularly England, considerable resource has gone into creating digital film archives. Just a small selection of these will include:
• British Pathe (
www.britishpathe.com)
• BBC Creative Licence, Class Clips etc (
http://creativearchive.bbc.co.uk/index.html)
• Film and Sound Archive (
www.filmandsound.ac.uk)
• British Film Institute Screenonline (
www.screenonline.org.uk)
There are many more worthy candidates for inclusion in addition to the above list. The Internet Archive (
www.archive.org) is a must for anyone teaching American history whether they want film or any other kind of archive source. Back in England again, the National Archives is gradually working away at its huge film collection. There are some gems in some of its mainstream resources such as The Art of War (
http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/theartofwar/films/) with films ranging from the stirringly patriotic to the somewhat surreal. The National Archives education site Learning Curve will soon be publishing Focus On Film, which will contain an archive of film with ‘biographical’ details about each clip, an online editing tool and a range of activities which combine film used as source material with other types of original sources. Thus, students will soon be able to play the role of WW2 censors. They will watch WW2 propaganda films, assess them against the British government’s own criteria for such films (provided in its original form) and decide whether or not the film will be fit to broadcast...
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Mastering the Moving Image Part 2 (Ben Walsh): How digital technology has opened up new opportunities to work with film in the history classroom.
So how does all of this fascinating and worthy information help us as teachers in the history classroom? I would contend that it faces the history teacher with a heavy burden which will nonetheless be a welcome one.
The burden is essentially that we need to make our students aware that film representations of historical events are not necessarily full and accurate accounts of events as they unfolded. In fact they rarely justify this description. Despite this, that is precisely what most young people (and older people) think film accounts are. In an age where the boundaries between media are becoming increasingly blurred, I believe that our commitment to educating our students makes it increasingly important that we attempt to instil a culture of critical awareness in all forms of media, not just the political cartoon and the source gobbet...