The British Film Institute is one of the largest film archives in the world, not only preserving a vast history of motion pictures but restoring them for future audiences. They’ve recovered Edwardian newsreels, Hitchcock’s earliest works and Ken Russell’s nudest. In a new initiative, the BFI will be collecting video from another notoriously inscrutable genre: internet memes.
“Curatorially, I suppose the objective of this project has been an attempt to capture what the world of online moving image has brought to the wider story of filmmaking,” says BFI archivist Will Swinburne in a video from the Institute. “So that might mean hugely important cultural moments, that might mean things everyone would recognize.”
Available through the BFI’s Replay portal, you can explore a growing selection of what the Institute deems essential, viral works. This ranges from Mr Weebl’s famed ‘Badgers’ cartoon loop, “Charlie bit my finger” and that gif of a nodding Robert Redford that everyone mistakes for Zach Galifianakis. Like a Criterion closet of memes, each entry includes supplemental commentary, either from art critics or the people responsible for these clips gurgling up online in the first place.
The BFI emphasize that it’s not merely a matter of preserving the most viral clips, but assembling a mosaic of the internet that unfurled into the one we have today. Cartoons, commentary, DIY tutorials, ASMR roleplays, music videos, machinimas and YouTube poops are all viable elements in the chemistry of the world wide web.
It’s also not as simple as making a YouTube playlist. The BFI is also seeking permission and involvement from the creators of these videos to submit the raw file. A dual challenge of finding some of these eclectic individuals and praying they’ve held on to a hard drive for 30 years.
“I wonder if in a hundred years someone’s going to be coming to this collection and viewing these mid-2000s grime videos or these Flash cartoons in the same way that we view the Edwardian crowd scenes of Mitchell and Kenyon,” says Swinburne. “Are they going to be discovering these long after YouTube has gone the way of Vine?”
It may seem like a fluffy initiative, but the truth is these pieces of media are not as permanent as we assume. Online institutions and platforms can be wiped out in an instant. When Adobe Flash was retired in 2020, it removed generations of video games and animation from the internet. In 2019, a server error on MySpace caused all music predating 2016 to be erased, millions of pop punk and emo tracks cindered like an inferno at a midwestern mall.
That’s not even addressing the biggest elephants in the room. Last year, YouTube rolled out a program to retroactively upscale videos with AI, regardless of permission, putting decades of uploads at risk of being tampered. And forget Vine, TikTok and its ownership have become a political football, making the short form video behemoth precarious despite its popularity. While it may not end up in the BFI’s preservation effort, erotica is constantly on the chopping block across all digital platforms due to pressure from payment processors, Tumblr’s most infamous blunder on an infinite loop.
