The cockerel crows again

The British Pathe Schools Licence

Marshall Mateer

(Link to a pdf version of this article.)

The Pathe cockerel crowed in cinemas throughout the British Isles for over 50 years. In Roman times the cockerel was the symbol of Mercury, the messenger, but today, in the Chinese year of the Cockerel, the sound can be heard again in schools throughout the UK. The British Pathe Archive (www.britishpathe.com) is a vast storehouse of news and documentary film made between 1895 and 1970. The 3,500 hours of film - covering events from the death of Queen Victoria until the birth of the Space Race - have been digitised and are now available free, in their high-resolution forms, to schools throughout the UK over the National Education Network (NEN). With over 30,000 file downloads we know teachers of History and a growing number of Primary school teachers are using the Archive; through itp we invite teachers of media and film courses to draw on this wonderful resource and to let us know how you are using it.

It’s really about today . . .
For media teachers in schools it’s a treasury of resources and genres; for students it’s a view of the second media age and a new light on the issues of today - war, famine, disasters, social relations, politics and lifestyles are brought to life, stimulating debate about the past, the present and, most importantly, the future. Recently we have found a whole series of Tsunami stories from the 1920s onwards to compare with coverage of last Christmas’s disaster (search ‘earthquake’ and ‘tidal wave’). Next up . . . General Election stories of the mid-20th century.

The Schools Licence
The Archive is available for use in schools through a special arrangement between British Pathe and the Regional Broadband Consortia (RBC). There are no charges or registration and secure access is made possible through the national broadband network (the NEN) - your school will be connected through its LEA or RBC. The address is www.britishpathe.com.

The Archive is huge - there are 85,000 items - but that’s the beauty; teacher and student can search and find their own little gems as well as digging out the great iconic events of history. As well as the famous newsreels, there are documentaries, compilations and lots of regional material. There are also tantalising items with little or no information and for some items there are the discarded out-takes. Teachers can download a range of items for students to work with. Teachers and students can access the Archive from home to identify materials in their low resolutions versions to prepare or follow-up lessons.

Creative Editing
The Schools Licence gives permission to download the media files in schools (you can choose QuickTime 6 or Windows Media 8 format to suit) and re-purpose them for use with data projectors and interactive whiteboards for whole-class work. Better still students and teachers can digitally edit the film to create e-essays and Powerpoint type presentations. There are some restrictions: the resources are strictly for education use in schools - they mustn’t be re-published or redistributed though you can work with other schools through the NEN.

To see what some primary schools have made of this opportunity go to the London Grid for Learning where there are eight case studies covering a range of curriculum areas. To see what a teacher has done see the film ‘Newsreel’ which uses original clips from the 1920s and the Spanish Civil War to illustrate C. Day Lewis’s poem of the same name. As we absorb news from Iraq through the medium of television the final verse of the poem still rings out loud and clear. (links to these examples are provided at www.shapesoftime.net)

Teacher Support
The Archive website is searchable by key words, date and film ID numbers and each of the items has a full text description to put you, so to speak, ‘in the picture’. There is also a Support website with additional resources on themes such as Football, the Great War and Housing and providing background information about Pathe and the newsreels. Shapes of Time (www.shapesoftime.net) is also free to schools - you can get your region’s passwords from your local RBCs.

Yesterday’s News
The Titanic story is one of the most popular downloads. But how did the newsreel tell the story . . . or should that be spin the myth? Download the clip and work through it sequence by sequence . . . what was the source of each element? Look at the resources in Shapes of Time and compare the film with the images on the two page-spread from the Boston Times of the following day. How did this develop into blockbuster movies of the same name? Listen to a survivor talking in an Australian news item from the 1960s. Compare the Titanic reports with, say, the news compilations of the death of Kennedy from 50 years later. Whose news is it anyway?

Marilyn or Norma Jean?
There are 12,000,000 jpeg stills in the Archive. Examine the changing face of the screen icon or politician. In how many films do they have the face that matches the iconic image? Who are Kennedy, Luther King, Ghandi, Hitler, Churchill, etc.? How do moving images compare with stills or with a sequence of stills? Use the news items of, for instance, Marilyn Monroe - do you see her just as Marilyn or by analysing the stills can you catch a glimpse of Norma Jean?

How we have changed
One of the most powerful narratives within the Archive is the story of people, and how people are viewed - the story of women’s emancipation in the newsreels; the representation of men (Arnie winning Mr Universe) and women (the Eve series) in the fun pieces; the on-going story of refugees and displacement in Europe; images of Africa and Asia from the late and post-Empire periods.

Let’s hear it for Charles Pathé
Charles Pathé distributed the news widely - from the great centres of population out to the smallest town cinemas throughout the British Isles. Now in the age of the Internet we, through the Schools Licence and the National Education Network, are able to return the film back to its original audience locations and we have the opportunity to value it again, to add our voices and to make the historical archive into a living one again.

Contacts
Marshall Mateer, Content Consultant the RBCs and the British Pathe Schools Licence Project. For further information, or to have your say, visit the support website www.shapesoftime.net or email rbcpathe@dial.pipex.com

The Archive is at www.britishpathe.com
To locate the films mentioned use the Advanced search option on the website and enter the film number in the ID box.
Your RBC contacts are listed at www.shapesoftime.net

Note for FE
Unfortunately the Schools Licence does not include Further Education Colleges. See www.shapesoftime.net for a fuller explanation.

Acknowledgement
Images are reproduced by permission of the British Pathe Archive and the RBC schools project.