ABSTRACT

The Miners’ Hymns (2010) is a collaborative evocation of the working lives and landscape of the Durham Coalfields. It was commissioned for the 30th anniversary of the 1984-1985 Miners’ Strike, the final act that marked the end of the coalfield and a traditional way of life. Through the use of archive and an evocative score, the film exposes key elements of that tradition and the role the archive plays in the telling of their story. Simon Popple explores the nature of the collaboration, the role of the archive, and the universality of its subject.

KEYWORDS

archive, community, history, memory

INTRODUCTION: THEMES AND CONTEXTS

‘You find nothing in the Archive but stories caught half way through: the middle of things; discontinuities’ (Steedman 2002, 45).

The film archive is a tomb, another place where the dead sleep. It is of the past. Memories are frozen in a discontinued flow, embalmed as, ‘a defence against the passage of time’ (Bazin 1960, 4). They are visited intermittently, at moments of anniversary and respectfully resurrected for public display. They are sacred, inviolable, and closely guarded. At least they used to be.

We have now learned their real value and have recognized that they belong in the here and now. They speak as much about the future as of an imagined past. They transcend the enforced reverence of the museum, the gallery, and historical documentary, and demand to be animated in exciting and challenging ways. They sidestep the temporal and teleological orthodoxy of the historical document. They are -- and should be -- sites of contestation and creative experimentation wherein history can be reclaimed and evidential traces resurrected, performed, and creatively re-imagined.