14/04/2003

The British Film Institute’s National Film and Television Archive (NFTA), one of the oldest and largest in the world, is in serious need of a financial, strategic and management review to avoid historical material being lost forever, according a report just published by the National Audit Office (NAO) and commissioned by the House of Commons.
The NFTA which costs £3.5m (Euros5.115m) a year in public subsidies, or 24 per cent of the Film Council’s grant to the BFI, houses 7.5 million items including 50,000 feature films, 100,000 non-fiction films, and 250,000 TV programmes. However only 46 per cent of the catalogued material is readily viewable condition. Furthermore there is a very real danger that large quantities of footage may even be lost forever before any preservation work can begin, because the BFI recently took on a backlog of preservation work that is greater than its available resources for inspection.
“The development of a clear strategy for the NFTA is a high priority, particularly to manage the risk that irreplaceable film might decay before today’s public and future generations have an opportunity to see it,” said Sir John Bourn, Head of the NAO. The NAO report entitled ‘Improving access to and education about the moving image through the British Film institute’, thus advises the Film Council to ‘oversee a fundamental review of the purpose of the Archive (budgeted at around £200,000 – Euros292,000) in conjunction with the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, making sure that the BFI has a firm costed strategy in place for addressing the backlogs.”

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The report also stressed that positive results varied quite considerably across the wide range of the BFI’s numerous activities: sales from BFI videos and DVDs rose by as much as 169 per cent in 2001-2002, and film attendances at BFI regional and independent venues increased by 59 per cent. (Figures that it is hoped the Film Council will take into account before deciding what cuts to implement in the BFI Regional Programming Unit). The National Film Theatre reported a 13 per cent rise in cinema attendance for 1997-98, although figures are lower than they were in the early 80s, and the BFI London Imax Cinema fell short of achieving its target audience by a significant 15 per cent.