THE British Film Institute has started allowing the public online access to
films and TV programmes from its archives. Instead of having to wait weeks to
book a private viewing of a taped copy, film fans and researchers can now drop
into centres run by the BFI to search and view landmark footage, original
scripts and historical information.
The BFI Online Intranet digitises and compresses the film material so that it
can be streamed at 2 megabits per second to banks of computers at the National
Film Theatre on London鈥檚 South Bank and the Broadway Media Centre in Nottingham.
Northern Ireland will be getting a link next year, though the site has yet to be
announced. Decoded and viewed on a 300-megahertz PC running Microsoft鈥檚 Windows
NT, the picture and sound quality are excellent. The clips can鈥檛 be distributed
on the public Internet because of copyright restrictions.
The BFI says some material is ideal for split-screen display on a computer.
When Alfred Hitchcock made Blackmail in 1929, he shot it as a silent
movie, but then remade it with the then new synchronised sound system. The BFI
has digitised both versions, so scholars and researchers can play them at the
same time while following the scripts to see how the actors handled their parts
and lines. Other films digitised so far include The Red Shoes, Black Narcissus
and Zoltan Korda鈥檚 1939 version of The Four Feathers.
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Classic British TV material which has been digitised include the 1965 film
The War Game, current affairs series Weekend World and gameshow Blind Date. John
Woodward, director of the BFI, says one lady was quick to exploit the new
service: she settled down with her knitting to watch the first-ever episode of
the turn-of-the-century drama Upstairs Downstairs.