Dr Claudy Op den Kamp, Principal Academic in Film at Bournemouth University and Deputy Director of CIPPM, spent summer 2024 at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. The placement was funded through the AHRC’s International Placement Scheme (IPS), and she has now been featured in the scheme’s Alumni Impact Stories.
Her question was how, and why, the first motion pictures were registered for copyright in the United States. Following her 2022 Kluge Fellowship, where she identified The Blacksmith Shop (1893) as the earliest film registered for copyright in the US, the placement gave her time to read the surrounding correspondence of the Copyright Office. It showed her that a registration was not a special event but a small part of the everyday business of an office dealing with a flood of applications.
It also changed how she reads archives. As she puts it: ‘The past was not hidden, exactly. It had been sorted, and the sorting determined which connections I could see.’
That insight now runs through her forthcoming book FIRSTS: Encounters That Set History in Motion, her documentary The Shadow Line (published in Copy/Rights and Early Cinema, Lever Press, 2026), and her video essay Evidence of Things Not Present, now published in Screenworks (Volume 17.1).
