{"id":423,"date":"2026-06-16T13:40:28","date_gmt":"2026-06-16T13:40:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/longhaulmovingpros.com\/?p=423"},"modified":"2026-06-16T13:40:28","modified_gmt":"2026-06-16T13:40:28","slug":"the-british-film-institutes-new-online-video-archive-celebrates-memes-how-tos-and-a-head-of-lettuce","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/longhaulmovingpros.com\/?p=423","title":{"rendered":"The British Film Institute\u2019s New Online Video Archive Celebrates Memes, How-Tos, and a Head of Lettuce"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Last week, the British Film Institute\u2019s National Archive announced a new collection of some 430 online videos. The collection encompasses a whole spectrum of British-made viral video content, from cultural phenomena like Radiohead\u2019s \u201cScotch Mist\u201d online performance of In Rainbows <\/em>and Liz Truss\u2019s doomed battle with a head of lettuce to memes like dancing badgers and the immortal \u201cCharlie Bit My Finger\u201d clip. The collection sits in the wider context of the BFI National Archive\u2019s remit to preserve the moving image; as the Archive\u2019s Digital Curator Will Swinburne explains, the collection is \u201can attempt to capture what the world of the online moving image has brought to the wider story of filmmaking.\u201d<\/p>\n

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A selection of pieces from the very British<\/em> collection is available on the BFI\u2019s Replay site. (If you\u2019re outside the UK, you\u2019ll need a VPN to access it.) Gizmodo spoke to Swinburne about Shockwave Flash, blackout curtains, and what to do if the world ends.<\/p>\n

Gizmodo: If you\u2019re trying to pull together an archive of internet videos, you have a pretty much infinite number of pieces from which you could choose. What sort of criteria do you use to determine whether something is culturally significant, or more generally, just something you want to include?<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Will Swinburne: Our approach with film and television is often a completist kind of approach\u2014we acquire every film that gets a cinema release in the UK, we do offer a recording of all television, but that\u2019s not an approach you can take with the internet. So that leaves us with the need for a curatorial perspective.<\/p>\n

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We\u2019ve tried to map out some sense of video cultures that either exist specifically online or that are in some way allowed to exist because of the internet. That might be for technical reasons, like things that use short-form, platform-based video. It could also be a more techno-utopian idea of, well, there are no gatekeepers on the internet, so people from different backgrounds can make their own web series.<\/p>\n

So we were trying to tell a story about what the internet has given you, the viewer, like, what things existed there that didn\u2019t exist before? That guides us to a few places, one of them being points of innovation: who first thought to do some form of serial episodic television, but online? How did they manage to do that with the technical limitations of that time?<\/p>\n

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There are also whole genres of video where you\u2019re definitely picking one as an example\u2014so we have a video of someone showing you how to put up a blackout curtain, and that video on its own is not very well viewed or anything like that, but it\u2019s emblematic that a huge amount of the internet is how-to tutorials and stuff like that, you know?<\/p>\n

WikiHow sort of stuff, yeah.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Exactly. That video tells a story much bigger than itself, um, so that was definitely another guiding principle, yeah.<\/p>\n