Culture, Creativity and Disappearing Celluloid
- Submitting institution
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Brunel University London
- Unit of assessment
- 33 - Music, Drama, Dance, Performing Arts, Film and Screen Studies
- Output identifier
- 025-119391-4221
- Type
- Q - Digital or visual media
- Publisher
- Audio-Visual Thinking; The Journal of Academic Videos
- Month
- January
- Year
- 2014
- URL
-
https://doi.org/10.17633/rd.brunel.13373348
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
-
1
- Research group(s)
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1 - Film & TV
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- The aim of this short video essay, edited to meet the specifications set out in a call for papers for a themed issue of Audiovisual Cultures, was to highlight the historical significance of the film laboratories: the processes that took place within them; the rich work cultures that they fostered; and the technological changes that finally rendered them obsolete.
Rooted in the intellectual traditions of the ‘new social history’, this submission draws upon a wide range of archival sources, footage of production processes shot in the Deluxe Film Laboratory, and extensive interviews with industry veterans, Originally conceived as a conventional piece of research that would take a written form, it evolved into something quite different, as it became apparent to the researchers that the history of the British film laboratories needed to be documented in a visual form that would be accessible to the men and women whose working lives it examines.
The essay documents in an audiovisual form the processes that took place in the film laboratories, foregrounding hierarchies of skill and gender and capturing the final days of a production facility that had been in continuous operation since the 1930s. More significantly, it provides the workers who earned their living in the film laboratories – a group whose role in the productive process has been largely ignored by film historians – a space in which to reflect upon the significance of the labour processes in which they were engaged and the work culture they created.
Published in Audiovisual Thinking: The Journal of Academic Videos, a pioneering journal founded in 2010 as a scholarly space where academics and educators can conceptualise and disseminate their research about audiovisuality and audio visual culture through the medium of video.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -