Original Description
This is the original project description written for our live week on the boat in Norwich from 15th - 22nd of July 2000
Additional Footage is our project for Riverside - part of the annual East exhibition in Norwich. For the project we will be working 'live' in Norfolk for one week from the 15th - 22nd of July, from a boat moored on the River Wensum. We are using local press and TV in order to appeal for members of the public to share their memories of locally-filmed TV. Working from our studio cum boat on the river, we will then create films based on the response to these appeals, before donating them to the East Anglia Film Archive (EAFA) as a publicly accessible collection. It will be possible to access the EAFA on-line catalogue throughout Riverside to read the archivist's descriptions (or 'logs') of these new films.
To research this new work, we took on the ubiquitous role of the tourist, visiting attractions, taking boat tours, chatting to locals and documenting these encounters. One boat trip became particularly resonant when we realised we had unwittingly recorded one of the last narrated tours made by the skipper of the Wensum's longest-standing tourist boat. The status of this film immediately shifted from that of a tourist momento to an archive of vanished oral history. Whilst considering the significance of this film, we became aware of the East Anglia Film Archive (EAFA), an organisation dedicated to the archiving of amateur and professional films, videos and television that document East Anglian life.
Much of our initial research in addition to discovering the film archive led us back to a recurring theme our work - the mediation of rural places and experiences through TV and film. We became particularly keen to explore this area in light of the Norfolk tourist industry's promotion of the area through its history as a popular filming location, particularly of the mystery and thriller genres. The map of historical and fictitious narratives merged for us, fusing Norwich as the sinister 'location' of both Kett's Rebellion and Tales of the Unexpected.
We really 'discovered' the film archive through avidly browsing their on-line catalogue. Run from the library at the University of East Anglia details of their films can be accessed via telnet. Searches for local subjects bring up alluring textual descriptions of moments from home movies and short films by local cinema clubs. We became totally intrigued by these archive descriptions, in many ways just as seductive as the 8mm home movies they describe. This relationship between text and the moving image lead us to considering both the act of archiving as a kind of screen-writing in reverse, and also the possibility that the archive 'logs' and the films could begin a two way exchange over the production week, with the archivist's texts beginning to influence our film shoots. This reversal of the relationship between archive and filmmaker will of course be maintained by the paradox of producing films about film and TV, and making them especially for the purpose of archiving.
At the end of the production week our vacant studio boat will remain floating on the Wensum, installed with 'evidence' of our week's activities. It will be open to the public throughout Riverside which runs until the 26th of August. Descriptions of each our new films will be added to the EAFA online catalogue as the project develops, accessible via the WWW. Should you wish to view the 'actual' films, they will be available amongst the EAFA archive, at the University of East Anglia.
