Brezhnev in Bratislava, 1968 © British Pathé
Footage from British Pathé turns up in some expected places. Watch kids’ movie Paddington 2 and, if you pay close attention, you will discover a few moments of old material from the company’s vaults alongside shots of the lovable, marmalade-eating bear from Peru.
“I licensed, I think 7 seconds,” says British Pathé’s Simon Witter. “It shot by in the blink of an eye. It was to do with luxury travel…colour footage on a luxury train and a luxury ship – and there was a bit of footage of a nun dancing.”
You’ll also find British Pathé images in Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast and in several other recent movies.
Witter is in Leipzig this week, attending the inaugural DOK Leipzig market. He’s there not just for networking and selling (“trying to reach as many people as possible” as he puts it) but to find out more about the launch of Grap e.V., the new German association for archive producers and researchers.
“I very much want to make contact with them and build relationships with them…the German [archive] research and production side which is, surprisingly, a relatively young business. [It] is formalising and getting its act together.”
The UK doesn’t yet have a similar organisation (although Focal International, the global association for archive professionals, is based in London).
Witter is coming to DOK Leipzig after what has been another record-breaking year for British Pathé, following what was already a bumper period during the pandemic. “We’ve been so incredibly busy of late. Our financial year ends on the 30th September and the year that just closed was the busiest we’ve ever had…We’re on a high at the moment.”
There is, though, pressure on profit margins. Expenses are rising but British Pathé hasn’t been ramping up its own prices. “We’ve kept them absolutely stable but it is true that all of our costs are going up. My boss always looks rather pained when he gets the bills for a variety of services we use, including storage and all sorts of other things.”
Witter acknowledges that “there is a limit on people’s budgets” and that archives could risk “pricing themselves out” if they charge too much.
Predictably, broadcasters and filmmakers have been drawing heavily on the company’s extensive materials about the British Royal Family. The Platinum Jubilee followed by the Queen Elizabeth II’s death in September heightened interest in the Windsors yet further.
“We renovated some of our films [about the Royal Family]. We have a 50-minute long colour film of her coronation which was broadcast first by Pathé in 1953,” Witter says of one famous item which was previously an “incredibly unsatisfactory digital print,” but has now been completely restored.
The Queen’s Funeral on 19th September was a busy time for Witter and his team. As he points out, though, the obituaries made by broadcasters and filmmakers had been prepared long in advance. “Although there was a bit of touching up around them, all the activity that would have happened around her death [had] been booked in ages ago,” Witter says. “There is a lot of foresight on that. It wasn’t as big a deal as it might have been.”
Sport has also been a growth area with documentaries being made to tie in with events like the World Cup. “There have been more requests for gender-based stuff as well, LGBT history, women in sport etc…there has been an uptick in that which has been noticeable.”
The UK remains the core market for Britsh Pathé but Witter reports sharp growth beyond UK borders. “Everywhere else…the rest of the world has been booming,” he says. India, Ireland and Israel have been licensing large amounts of material. Western Europe has also been a boom area.
The British Pathé exec can’t give a precise number of hours of material held by the company. “We’ve never calculated it that way.” However, he can point to the number of stories in the coffers – a whopping 220,000 items. “We’re looking to expand that. We are not remaining static. We are looking to add more content.” The hoard includes Gaumont Graphic, Empire News Bulletin British Paramount, Gaumont British, Visnews and Reuters historic footage which British Pathé has been representing since 2018.
As the demand for archive material has grown, more players have been coming into the market to compete alongside the long established outfits. Is the marketplace becoming overcrowded?
“Leipzig, from what I saw of the Archive Day, there are about four UK archives and a lot of German ones…but, yes, there are certainly a few I’ve not heard of, and in specialist areas. There seem to be several more in the personal film realm, not newsreel like us. But I suppose with the historical archives, there was a finite amount that was filmed at the time. The new players are [therefore] likely to be a ploughing different furrow,” Witter concludes.
