"It's time to pull up a stool by the front door and tell the story before the historians arrive."
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Big Mama's Funeral
Film has transformed the way we understand history. A medium that is little over a century old, has left us a legacy which enables us to see the twentieth century differently from any previous one. Now, digitisation is opening up new ways of seeing and using archive film itself - not just as a resource for historians, but for all of us.
Looking at archive film, it's often the small moments that hold most meaning, what's happening in the background, something the filmmaker perhaps wasn't even intending to catch. We've sought out films which show everyday lives and that reveal aspects of the past that have traditionally been excluded from the history books. Many of the films here are by amateur filmmakers, capturing moments of their own work and family lives.
We want to explore what happens when you bring places and films together - for example, enabling people to watch films on mobile phones, in the exact places they were shot, (see our Locations section) or to add your own images and experiences of a place to those of the past.