The Edinburgh Bureau has has been fending off the winter chill with a number of projects, mostly centered around the development of our open participatory workshop, Bring Your Own Archive. Travelling to Paisley, to situate the event within a day full of activities focused around Paisley history, it was a delight to meet and speak to members of the community and to share in the films that they had brought along- these included delightful 8mm reportage from local events and town parades in the 1950's and newsreel footage of Prince George's visit to Glasgow in the 1930's. Paisley has a strong history of local filmmaking groups, and it was a great pleasure to discover some of this great work, presently being archived by Richard Weeks, and together we watched the 16mm print of Falconer  (local teacher and filmmaker) Houston's Tannahill. Bandita friend, Shona Thomson, assembled an entertaining selection of Paisley archive films from the Scottish Screen Archive, and then convened a Q&A session in which the participants of the day spoke about our work and took questions from the lively audience.

 

In February, we also found ourselves assembling our pop up archive happening within the splendid surroundings of Edinburgh's Greyfriars Kirk. Each month, Greyfriars hosts NiteKirk, a live audiovisual happening where artists are invited to use the interior space of this fantastic church to showcase their work and encourage community gathering and engagement. We kept the films rolling and the gramophone wound and enjoyed a wonderful few hours of archival communion!

 

Other trips to places further afield have also provided inspiration: London Film Festival's EXPERIMENTA section was a rare treat (see my report on Blog Bandita), and archivist and film historian Mark Toscani offered a wonderful insight into the work and collection Academy Film Archive through three dazzling short form, 16mm programmes scoping the collection's experimental gems at Tampere Film Festival, Finland.