That last blog post on the battle of Flodden has reminded of a list we used to maintain at the BFI’s National Film and Television Archive’s cataloguing department of memorable footage requests. Having a film collection that covered just about every subject on earth, you were bound to get some wide-ranging requests from footage researchers, academics or ordinary members of the public. Some of these demonstrated a hazy grasp of history, film history and/or logic. They were entertaining to collect, but also told you something about people’s understanding (if that’s the right word) of the relationship of film to life.
I have published this list before now, but many years ago now and it’s well worth sharing again. The requests all date from the 1980s/1990s; all are genuine. Some of them we could respond to. Some seem not unreasonable until you think about them for a bit. Others just left you open-mouthed.
So, the phone rings. Someone with a query is on the line.
“Hello, cataloguing department here, can I help you?”
“I hope you can. I’m looking for footage of…”
The Battle of Flodden
The Irish potato famine
Mata Hara dancing
Hitler in his bunker
The massacre at Amritsar
The opening of the Suez canal
Life
Ruth Ellis
Views from a window in a Mexican village
Existentialism and post-war events
The colour green (this was an advertising agency representing oil company BP)
A life-size mechanical elephant (we had this)
An ape climbing over a roof, for a thesis (we had this too)
Suburbia, transvestism and dianetics
Rats and urban chaos
The industrial revolution, preferably trains c1830s
The Wright brothers’ first flight
People with skin complaints being burned at the stake
Animals saving other animals from drowning
Transmission dates of 1890s advertising films
Mid-19th century views of the Tower of London
Egyptian squash players of the 1930s (especially their funerals)
People who experience miracles but only at Christmas
Dennis Potter’s The Laughing Policeman
A transition shot from 1968 to 1975
That Ingmar Bergman film where a vicar plays ludo with the Devil
Lewis Carroll reading his own work
Alan Turing code-breaking
and my personal favourite…
News footage of the first Lumière programme in Britain
and not forgetting the man who wanted to see the film that had reminded him he had been abducted by aliens, the woman who laughed so much that she gave birth during a Norman Wisdom film she now wanted to identify (but couldn’t remember the day), and the woman looking for a film on how to trap mice (which were disturbing her pet mice when they watched television).
Truly unforgettable
I can add one that stuck in my mind: our erstwhile colleague Peter, senior information officer in Library and Information was asked by a phone caller for actuality film of the Battle of Waterloo.
It’s a bit specialised, but I remember dealing with a quite angry academic who wanted to see film of the Battle of Adwa, in which Abyssinia defeated Italy. This took place on 1 March 1896. I did point out that, with film exhibition having only just started (and film production yet to begin in Italy), it simply wasn’t going to be feasible for someone to have gone out to a warfront in Africa and capture film of fighting. He said he would go elsewhere and get the answer he needed. Perhaps he is searching still.