The research project Research Film Provenance (RFP) proposes a new, uncharted way of conducting and publishing provenance research. By using up-to-date digital tools for video annotation, it tests a form of provenance research that fits the media characteristics of film, and especially films made for research purposes. Through annotating a selection of historical films from the collection of the former Swiss Tropical Institute (STI, now the Swiss TPH), the project strives to serve as an example for archives and scientific institutions that currently digitise and publish vast amounts of audiovisual material. RFP connects the history of science with media studies, practice-based digital humanities and colonial history in order to address four significant research gaps: firstly, provenance research on films; secondly, the history of research films at Swiss institutions; thirdly, the ties of Basel, its research institutions and its companies with colonialism; and fourthly, video annotation in the humanities.

Subject matter:
The STI’s film collection consisted of film material that it produced for research, teaching or documentation purposes, as well as films made by the Schweizerische Gesellschaft für Lehr- und Forschungsfilm (SGLF). The SGLF can be considered the most ambitious attempt since the Second World War to create a Switzerland-wide association for research film. Following various relocations, most of the film reels are now housed at the Staatsarchiv Basel-Stadt. This film collection is a promising yet entirely overlooked source of material for film, science and colonial history research. The Swiss TPH is interested in making parts of the collection available online, a process that it has already begun. With the launch of the Platform for African Research Collections (PARC), which will see Basel’s five largest African collections brought together into a single meta-catalogue this summer, the films will become more visible to a potentially global user community. However, such online availability comes with its challenges, not least because the internet’s circulation patterns create the risk that the material will become decontextualised. On the one hand, some of the films show experiments on humans and animals, as well as transgressive acts involving colonised subjects who probably did not consent to being documented. On the other hand, some of the films feature highly specialised research. More information and research are needed on their production and further uses to recontextualise the films and make them intelligible and understandable for researchers and the interested public alike. Further details on these films and a sensitive way of publishing this content are the prerequisites for a dialogue that includes non-European perspectives on how to engage with the film material and develop reparative strategies for the custodianship of this material.

Approach and methods:
RFP will research the provenance of a small selection of films from the STI and suggest a way of publishing this research by annotating the digitised films based on the following five intersecting work packages (WPs): (WP 1) The institutional history of the film collection will be researched (applicant with research assistant 1: historian). (WP 2) Four films will be selected (applicant/team). (WP 3) Based on various archival sources and publications, the people, practices and networks involved in producing and using the selected films will be researched and adapted for publication as annotations (applicant). (WP 4) The available video annotation tools in the humanities will be assessed (research assistant 2: designer). (WP 5) Three different expert groups will review the annotated films and share their viewing experiences (applicant/team/experts). RFP’s unconventional approach fulfils a demand that has been repeatedly raised within the communities of scholars working with images in recent years: to make the visual - that is, the arguments themselves that come into being visually - a means of research in itself.