Snapshot of the 1960s: BFI Acquires Unseen Film Hoard for Preservation
The BFI National Archive has received a major donation of 387 filmed interviews with leading figures conducted by top television personality Bernard Braden in 1967/68.
In the films, never before seen in public since they were made, personalities such as Sean Connery, Vanessa Redgrave, Cilla Black, Sammy Davis Jr., Quentin Crisp, Tariq Ali, Ossie Clark, Huw Wheldon, Enoch Powell and many more were interviewed about their lives, their aspirations and their opinions of the big issues of the day.
This is an extraordinarily rich collection which offers an unparalleled insight into British life as seen by the movers and shakers of 40 years ago and it promises to be a huge educational resource for any student of the 1960s period.
Shot in colour on 16mm film in a London hotel, these actors, writers, politicians, pundits, journalists, filmmakers, sportsmen, bureaucrats, fashionistas speak frankly and openly about their hopes and dreams.
Bernard Braden had always intended to return to the project after an interval of five years to make a television programme with a working title of Now and Then. He died in 1993 with the project uncompleted.
Some 109 hours of interviews were conducted over a period of nine months (15th September 1967 – 28th June 1968).
Braden was a skilled television interviewer and journalist and he wanted to make a programme which revealed the rich texture of society at a moment of great social and political change.
Now the films will be preserved for future generations in the BFI National Archive, the world’s most significant collection of film and television.
People across Britain will catch their first glimpse of some of the interviews when a series of three 1 hour documentaries containing a vivid selection of this previously unseen archive footage is broadcast on Five in early December.
The programmes will also feature a number of the surviving subjects of the interviews face to face with themselves as they were 40 years ago.
Almost the entire Braden collection has been transferred to High Definition digital format and will be available to academics and researchers in a new online research tool to be launched by the BFI in 2009.
Selected items will also be included in the BFI Mediatheque collection so they can be accessed by the public for free at BFI Southbank and at QUAD in Derby.
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