A subject of scandal and concern
John Wyver writes: Tonight the Liszt Institute – the Hungarian Cultural Centre in London is screening Robert Vas’ film essay My Homeland. Made for BBC’s Omnibus strand in 1976, this draws on a century and more of Hungarian poetry, film, photography, music and graphics to weave a powerful, poetic and deeply personal response to the Soviet repression of the 1956 Revolution. (Above is framegrab illustrating also the film’s self-reflexivity.)
My Homeland is a film about memory and history and exile and landscape and resilience and friendship and hope and belonging and identity and the power of art — and apart from this showing it is almost impossible to see.
(The event is sold out, but there is a wait list; I been involved in organising the showing, and will be contributing to the post-screening discussion, as a last-minute replacement for Professor James Jordan.)
That My Homeland is not widely available to be celebrated and written about and taught is, simply and straightforwardly, a cultural scandal. Students of twentieth-century history and of film especially, but more generally all of us, are impoverished by the film’s inaccessibility.
But of course this is not just about Vas’ masterwork, or about the restrictions preventing exploration of this filmmaker’s extensive and immensely creative filmography. This is about all of us not being able to enjoy and to be enriched by so much of the drama and the documentary output and the features and the comedy and the performances and far more that has been produced for television since the early 1950s (which was when television recording began).
This situation makes me sad and it makes me angry, and I am desperately disappointed that, despite arguing and proselytising and campaigning for some fifty years for far more extensive access to the television archive, we can still see freely and without fuss so little of what has been produced with our licence fees and our exposure to advertising by the most consequential medium of our lives.
Of course things have improved considerably since my first encounters with the television archive. Fifty years ago (and yes, you read that right) I was thrilled when the BFI first negotiated limited agreements with Equity and the other guilds to permit a BFI Southbank season of classic television drama organised by curator Paul Madden. I wrote about archive television at Time Out in the late 1970s, and into the ’80s I was involved with lobbying group Wider Television Access (WTVA).
WTVA’s screenings of the The Avengers, The Prisoner and more at the Scala raised awareness of the riches of the vaults, and were one of the impetuses , along with cheapness, behind Channel 4 starting to re-run classic series. For the new channel Illuminations also did its bit with shows like The A-Z of TV, itself receiving a very rare screening at BFI Southbank just after Christmas, and TV Heaven.
More recently there have been archive DVD releases, notably from Network, and there is an ever-increasing presence of archive television on BBC Four, BBC iPlayer and Talking Pictures TV as well as BBC Archive snippets on socials, all legitimate, and often illegitimately, on Youtube and socials too. The BFI has the Mediatheque which offers an extensive catalogue for viewings, and arrangements through library-based BBC Replay too. All of which, and more, is very welcome.
But there are so, so many broadcasts that, like Robert Vas’ films, remain effectively invisible. Yes, there are rights issues and commercial interests that need to be addressed. But far more than these challenges is the deadening inertia, the near-total lack of interest and the simple absence of will that afflicts, in relation to this topic, so many broadcast executives.
If there was a true recognition of the cultural, social and political importance of historical television, and if there were executives who had the understanding and the belief about why this is so significant, then things could be different. We would not need to wait another fifty years for truly broad and deep access to the archives.
As it is, events like tonight’s screening, in addition to reminding me of both my anger and my sadness, make me want to return to this topic again and again. As I shall, again and again indeed, in coming posts…
Thank you. Glad you will be there after all. The occasional gem on 4 extra & BBC4 really amplifies your point- so much remarkable work is neglected and ignored.