Look what they've done to the NFT

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Underground films: the new entrance to the renamed BFI Southbank beneath Waterloo Bridge

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• Read Nick Curtis' film blog
• NFT reopens after £5million renovation

Sitting in a bright, quiet, sleek room designed by modernist maestro David Adjaye, I'm watching Audrey Hepburn overacting wildly in her first, silent screen test as a shopgirl in a couturier's.

With a click of the mouse attached to the articulated plasma TV in front of me, I can swap Audrey for countless other cinematic and televisual gems: footage of horse-drawn trams traversing Piccadilly Circus from 1903, an episode of Dad's Army, a 1950s public information film about nits or John Schlesinger's 1961 documentary, Terminus, about Waterloo Station.

This is the Mediatheque, which will give ordinary Londoners free access to the British Film Institute's unparalleled archive in the newly renamed BFI Southbank.

I've been given an exclusive preview of the venue formerly known as the National Film Theatre (it opens to the public on 14 March) which has now expanded into the husk of the Museum of the Moving Image, and which cleverly disguises the fact that I am sitting just a few feet beneath the buses thundering across Waterloo Bridge.

The £5 million refit provides the venue with a gorgeous new, light-drenched glass entrance and lobby opposite the National Theatre, a new studio cinema to go with the three existing NFT auditoria, and two art galleries.

In one of them, the opening show will be of the fascinating, if slightly creepy, moving sculptures of Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, which recreate scenes from movies such as Bonnie and Clyde in miniature, then broadcast them on the wall via several tiny cameras.

The other gallery will shortly house posters, stills, scripts and props from the films of Terence Davies. There is a spacious new café and a shop offering thousands of DVDs and books - every eminent visitor to the South Bank in the past 10 years, from Mile Leigh to Bernardo Bertolucci, bemoaned the closure of the old NFT store.

But it is the Mediatheque that is the jewel in the new building's crown. The BFI archive is, according to the institute's director, Amanda Neville, "the filmic equivalent of the collections of the British Museum, containing more material than the Library of Congress".

Although one recent film minister presumed it was stored in the basement of the BFI's Stephen Street headquarters, the collection of more than 250,000 international films and half a million television programmes occupies 37 acres in two storage sites outside London and Birmingham, and could previously only be accessed on request or at special screenings.

Currently only "a fraction" of the available material has been digitised for instant access via the Mediatheque: 300 hours, which will rise to 600-700 by the end of the year. But still you could sit in front of its sleek screens every day for a year and never get bored.

Curator Robin Baker has divided the first tranche of Mediatheque material into three strands: there are 100 films under the heading Essentially British; Exodus, a programme of documentaries marking the 200th anniversary of the passing of the anti-slave trade Act; and, most enticingly for Evening Standard readers, London Calling, featuring films in which the capital itself is the star, from RW Paul's 1896 depiction of rush hour on Blackfriars Bridge, right up to Saul Dibb's Bullet Boy and Peter Ackroyd's London in 2004.

Here there are classics - David Lean's Oliver Twist, Hitchcock's Blackmail (both the silent and talkie versions) and Humphrey Jennings's wartime documentary, Fires Were Started. But if these hook the attention, it is the ability to surf through reams of more obscure material that makes the Mediatheque such a fascinating resource.

I was captivated, for instance, by how much London has changed, and how much it has stayed the same. Here, amid the vanished Lyons tea houses and steam ferries, is Gordon's Wine Bar on Villiers Street, displaying in a 1930s documentary the same sign it bears today.

An exuberant colour documentary on cosmopolitan Soho in 1956 shows not only the Algerian Coffee Stores on Brewer Street, the York Minster pub (even then known as the French House) and Eros in his original position, aiming his arrow down Lower Regent Street.

Here, in a 1940s showreel exhorting Midlanders to visit the capital, is the Dominion Theatre, in its original incarnation as a cinema. Here is the Festival Hall in the 1950s, surrounded by all the other marvels of the Festival of Britain that were swept away by Winston Churchill's jealous government on its return to power. Here are forgotten scenes of children playing in the streets, of people promenading and chatting to their neighbours, in the days before television dragged us all inside.

There are wonderful curiosities: a piece of civic self-aggrandisement from the 1930s showing "some activities of Bermondsey council" (mostly providing chiropodists, it seems); The Fugitive Futurist, a silent fantasy from 1924 using pioneering montage techniques eerily to depict a future London flooded as if by the effects of global warming; a soundless portrait of an entirely Jewish East End street soon to disappear through slum clearances.

The full panoply of British film is represented. One minute you could be looking at black-and-white experimental works from director Lindsay Anderson and his cohorts in the Free Cinema movement, featuring Hattie Jacques and, weirdly in one case, the sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi as a deaf dock worker at Shad Thames. The next, you could find yourself watching London Town, an overblown Technicolor musical from 1948, starring Sid Field and Petula Clark, and never before screened at its staggering 180-minute full running time. Then a documentary on eel-and-pie shops might catch your eye ...

I could happily spend weeks exploring the layered, moving picture of the capital formerly buried in the archive, and now easily unearthed at the touch of a button.

Amanda Neville says the BFI's intention-was to make the Mediatheque a place where "16-year-olds with their mates, as well as 26- and 46-year-olds, would go by choice to surf this wonderful material" and in its design as well as its user-friendliness and the wealth of footage on offer, I'd say they've done it.

The Studio cinema will screen free programmes from the archive, and it must be said that the remodelled BFI Southbank has turned the old NFT, a somewhat hidden pleasure, into an airy and welcoming asset for London.

What's surprising, perhaps, is that it is only temporary, a stopgap, and an advertisement for what the BFI could do if and when it ever gets the proper, purposebuilt Film Centre it believes London needs.

"Theatre has the National Theatre, opera has the Royal Opera House - it's ridiculous that film has a temporary building buried under Waterloo Bridge," the BFI's chairman, director Anthony Minghella, has said. "We need a Film Centre as a home for the London Film Festival, for premieres, and to showcase our archive."

This is not just wishful thinking, either: the hard fact is that BFI Southbank's current premises will become untenable for film screenings of any kind in 2013, when trams are due to start running across Waterloo Bridge.

The Mayor will gain new planning powers next year that would enable him to give the go-ahead for the Film Centre, possibly on the South Bank's Hungerford car park.

Let's hope he does. To judge by what the BFI has done with £5 million and the most unpromising site, the Film Centre is not just something to be wished for, but a necessity.

• www.bfi.org.uk

 

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