Inside Chronically Online: a big-screen…

The British Film Institute was following a similar trail of hyperlinks. Kitty Robertson, an assistant curator at the BFI National Archive, has been part of a two-year heritage project supported by the BFI Screen Heritage Fund, which has acquired online moving image work at a major scale. ​“We’ve brought in over 400 online videos, covering work from the last 30 years produced in the UK, to the national collection to be preserved for future generations,” explains Robertson. ​“One of the guiding lines we had from the beginning came from our senior curator of non-fiction, Patrick Russell. He underlined that we’re now as far away from the beginnings of online moving image as we were from the beginnings of cinema when the BFI National Archive was founded in 1935. Think of all the works of early cinema that have been lost, and what we have preserved tells us about storytelling, ingenuity and ways of seeing the world. Works of online video have already been lost – the internet is not forever. We’d be doing ourselves a huge disservice if we didn’t try to capture this distinctive, diverse form of moving image.”

At a house party one night in London, Smith and Robertson crossed paths. ​“I talked with [Robertson] about her job, and she said, ​“Yeah, we’ve just acquired ​‘Charlie Bit My Finger’,” says Smith. ​“And I was like: ​“Wow, I was just watching that the other day – it’s cinematically interesting, because it’s slower than a lot of viral videos now – it takes time for the punchlines to pay off”. I found myself trying to break down why I find ​‘Charlie Bit My Finger’ so cinematic. We’re watching this stuff all the time, but we’re not stopping to give it the attention that you would a film. If you put something like that in a cinema, would it be boring?”.

That was the question that would evolve into a partnership between the CNFW and the BFI. The CNFW had been planning a programme of online video as part of their festival, and reframing online video aligned with how Robertson had been coming to understand it as ​“requiring its own collection and preservation paradigm”. The first Chronically Online programme at the Rio Cinema last June incorporated the BFI’s archive along with CNFW’s own picks, stringing together YouTube hits such as David Firth’s ​‘Salad Fingers’, Cyriak’s ​‘cows & cows & cows’, and longer videos such as an episode of mockumentary series HoodDocumentary.