The Hidden Screen Industries

This is a proposal to establish an AHRC funded research network to develop a new framework for studying the UK's screen industries which includes sectors under-represented in scholarship and policy. The project will contribute to the AHRC Digital Transformations in the Arts and Humanities theme by exploring the curation and conservation of ephemeral digital screen industries and the question of identity and 'other' in culturally influential screen industries such as advertising. It also connects to the AHRC's Creative Industries Clusters' Programme and Creative Economy research, and has been designed to foster a new research agenda to contribute to these programmes of scholarship. The network would extend over a period of 12 months from November 2021.

The UK doesn't have a screen industry. It has many screen industries. Beyond the familiar worlds of the feature film and broadcast television sit many more sectors - the sectors that make music video, screen advertising, fashion film and branded content, those that produce corporate, government, NGO and medical video. These sectors are at least as creative artistically, and at least as productive economically, as those that produce more 'mainstream' media. Yet, compared to those, they are hidden screen industries. They may produce thousands of moving image works every year, playing every possible role (often through online distribution) in the personal, professional and cultural lives of viewers in Britain and abroad, but those who produce them are rarely if ever factored into either public policy for, or cultural appreciation of, Britain's creative industries. Moreover, their heritage is deep, arguably deeper than the less hidden sectors. Many of these forms of moving image content are deeply rooted in the earliest filmmaking, produced from the late 19th century, and the rich output of generations of brilliant filmmakers working across the 20th century in such fields as cinema and TV advertising, industrial documentary and public information film constitute a vast proportion of our moving image archives' holdings.

This ground-breaking network will begin the essential task of joining these dots, by bringing together contemporary creative practitioners and their trade bodies with academics and policy makers, historians and archivists in a series of focus groups at the British Film Institute and panel discussion at UWL to debate and dissect key questions about future research agendas, archival preservation and public engagement. Their discussions will collate expert knowledge of the industrial structures, economic drivers and impacts, and demographic makeup of these hidden screen industries and expose it to critical challenges and public-interest questions about curatorial preservation, de-colonialising the archives, ensuring democratic access, accountability and public scrutiny of these hidden sectors. Pooling these insights and preliminary answers to pressing questions, the network aims to identify priorities for future research on many of those individual sectors, flag up urgent actions to address diversity standards and regional representation on and off screen, and suggest potential programmes of action for a new network of curators working in these sectors. It is only once its hidden screen industries have ceased to be hidden that we will have a full and accurate grasp of what filmmaking in Britain was, is and will go on to be. By first synthesising current knowledge, then feeding much future research, this research network intends to have a profound impact on both screen studies and screen practice, one that may be felt for many years to come.