Light Hands

Activating audiovisual archives is one of the video essay’s greatest strengths. This piece by historian Lily Ford is a case in point. Ford delves into the Imperial War Museum’s captivating collection of archival footage showing women building airplanes during the First World War. This visual archive, comprising both film and photographs, holds particular significance given the scarcity of paper records documenting this vital female labor.

 

Lily Ford doesn’t merely present the footage as a visual testament to a forgotten chapter of history. Her video essay, published in MOVIE: A Journal of Film Criticism, also examines the conditions under which these images were created and what their production context implies for their reliability as historical evidence. She concludes that they “paint a partial picture.” This incompleteness motivates Ford to engage with the footage in a more creative and speculative manner.

 

She playfully pairs the historical footage with anachronistic music – at times to critique its sexism, at other times to infuse it with a feminist perspective. More subtle and poetic are the additions of footage Ford shot herself at the Farnborough Air Sciences Trust Museum. Her interactions with the objects on display (both physically and through the use of digital editing tolls) expand on the motif of the “light hands” in the title and, more importantly, visualize the affective dimension of her research. The result is an elegant and meticulously crafted piece. As she explains in the insightful and thoughtful author statement accompanying her video essay, even her decision to forgo voice-over narration was a deliberate and ethical choice.

 

Light Hands is an excellent example of how to revitalize archival footage through videographic techniques. Respect for the source material is essential, but artistic license and personal engagement can infuse archival images with fresh life and new meaning.