 All right. Hello, everyone. I think we are about ready to get started with our second to last panel of the day, which is the use of textual records or film research. I should note that after this is our closing workshops on how to use the records of the National Archives for film research. I'm going to drop a couple of links in the chat so that we have a couple of YouTube videos that we'd like you to watch if you're going to that next session beforehand during the break and I will put those links in the chat during these presentations. So I'm Brian real I'm an assistant professor of information and library science at Southern Connecticut State University. I have an MLS and PhD and information studies from the University of Maryland, which is why I used to be right by National Archives College Park and where I started my research. We're, I'm going to be the last presenter on this panel today, but I want to give you a quick introduction to our other panelists. First up, we will have Nathaniel Brennan, who is a PhD candidate at NYU. His research focuses on the social cultural and intellectual histories of cinema in the United States during the first half of the 20th century. His dissertation, which is nearing completion explores the collaboration between the Museum of Modern Art Film Library and the federal government to derive useful intelligence from captured enemy cinema during World War Two. It also seems worth mentioning that Nate has a chapter in the wonderful edited volume cinemas military industrial complex, which also features several of our other presenters from this conference. Since it seems like the type of thing that would be of interest to our current audience. I'll drop a link in the chat momentarily. After Nate will have Charles Bucky Graham. Bucky is an independent film researcher with over 40 years of experience examining various facets of the motion picture industry, specializing in the silent era. His main areas of interest are related to early film preservation efforts, early government sponsored filmmaking, and currently he is working to document the lives and careers of camera men and camera women active during the silent era. Then we will have Jenny Horn, who is an associate professor of film and digital media at the University of California Santa Cruz specializing in American non theatrical film history. In particular, Dr. Horn's research concerns the use of film for the purposes of citizenship and the state. And she studies this in entities like the American Red Cross, the Department of Labor and the United States Information Agency. Her forthcoming book, Civic Cinema includes research on notions of film betterment improvement and uplift by women's clubs, service organizations, charity groups, government agencies, and public libraries in the early part of the 20th century. The last presentation will be by me Brian real I already introduced myself, but after that we will switch to a time for discussion where we will have Kate Brennan from the National Archives. Kate Brennan is the subject matter expert archivist for foreign affairs at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland. She holds a master's degree in history from the University of Maryland. And I should note that we did not intentionally put Nate Brennan and Kate Brennan on the same panel. So, if you have questions throughout, we will take them at the end. You just go to the q amp a box and drop them in there. And we'll get to it. So if everybody is ready, we will start the presentations. Thank you. Good afternoon and thank you for attending our session. My name is Nathaniel Brennan and I'm a doctoral candidate in cinema studies at NYU. Before I began, I want to express my thanks to the organizers, particularly Brian real for asking me to take part in this conference. The primary focus of my research is the history of film studies as an academic discipline. I'm particularly interested in the years leading up to and including American involvement in the Second World War. To define film studies broadly, the history of film studies involves more than just the use and study of cinema in the classroom. Early interest in cinema developed in the social sciences, much of it funded by philanthropies like the Rockefeller Foundation. The interests of social scientists were not so much with the aesthetic qualities of film, but in understanding how film as a media affected its audience and how these effects, both positive and negative, could be harnessed. Film studies was also at this stage subsumed under the umbrella of communications research, where the most productive work revolved around education and propaganda. Given the various crises of the 1930s, it is understandable that propaganda and communication research would be of greater urgency in the years leading up to World War II. This was a crucible moment for film and media studies, and there are many avenues of fruitful research to explore, but what I will be talking about today has to do with one of the most common challenges faced by anyone coming to study film, access. Film studies, of course, needs actual films to study. Generations of scholars have bemoaned lack of access to most of the field's history, either because of censorship, copyright, neglect, or absence. But for one particular phase of propaganda research during World War II, the challenge was the opposite of this. There were too many films, nowhere to store them, and limited professional knowledge about how best to store and retrieve them. Given that the purpose of this conference is to highlight the vast and relatively untapped motion picture resources of the National Archives, I'll be discussing a moment when the challenges of film research were met in a learn-as-you-go manner. With this most plainly, while most officials in the federal government recognized the propaganda and intelligence value of motion pictures, they needed to improvise practical solutions to make that work possible. What they ended up with was a collection of foreign films, some three million feet of it, suddenly under federal jurisdiction, the remnants and duplicates of which are today kept by the Library of Congress and the National Archives. The Library of Congress refers to this collection as its captured foreign collection of German, Italian, and Japanese cinema. Before moving on, we would do well to remember that the apparatus of cinema is rather clumsy. Unlike radio or print, which needs only to be heard or seen, encountered, as it were, in the wild, cinema requires a certain amount of local infrastructure. Putting aside the basic requirements of exhibition, reels of film take up space, they are heavy, they get in the way. And when you have more than two canisters of film, they start to add up. Where did these films come from? Although it is not often remarked in most histories of American film culture, the film shown in the United States between the two World Wars were a heterogeneous mixture. It is true that most of these came from the American film industry, but there also existed a network of distributors who specialized in importing films from abroad. Most of Hollywood's major European competitors maintained distribution and publicity offices in New York. By 1940, many of these distributors, both those connected with major concerns and those working independently, maintained warehouses of films imported from abroad. The market for foreign films was a vanishingly small part of the American film market, but foreign films found success among marginalized minority audiences. Films from Sweden appealed to Swedish-American communities in the Midwest. Soviet films played at workers' forums in big cities. Smaller concerns targeted audiences in local ethnic enclaves. Of all the different kinds of international films that slowly but steadily flowed into the United States from the mid-1920s to the late 1930s, German cinema was a breed apart. For one thing, German cinema was typically higher quality and had some crossover appeal with art cinema audiences. For this reason, as is well known, Hollywood regularly poached the German film industry's talent. For another, imported German films were popular in German-American neighborhoods where in some cases theaters could survive solely on German feature films, newsreels, and shorts. Furthermore, well before the Nazis nationalized the film industry in the mid-1930s, German companies like Ufa and Tobus had established offices in America. In the early 1930s, both of these concerns even had enough capital to try their hand at establishing their own theater chains. So in the late summer of 1941, when the federal government very belatedly froze the bank accounts of businesses operating in the U.S. with direct ties to the Axis powers, they did so after a period of more than a dozen years during which distributors brought hundreds of film prints over to the American market. Shortly after the United States officially entered the war on December 8th, the assets of these companies were seized and liquidated by federal agents from the Treasury and Justice Department. This is where our story begins. Tracking the history of this collection is complicated by the number of agencies involved. First, German, Italian, and Japanese assets were seized beginning in late 1941. This task was carried out by the Customs Bureau and Foreign Funds Control of the Treasury Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The administration of frozen foreign assets is itself a complicated matter, but for our purposes it was suffice to say that in the case of film companies, the physical assets, including the films, were taken over by the Treasury, while the FBI, tasked with building conspiracy, sedition, and espionage cases, was interested in corporate filings and correspondence. So immediately the material that was seized went in two separate directions. One aspect of modern bureaucratic organization that remains as true today as it did in 1942 is that agencies ostensibly on the same side often work counter to one another. They reproduce each other's work and sometimes they nurse rivalries. This was particularly true in the case of the Treasury and Justice Department and was made more apparent when Roosevelt reactivated a First World War-era agency known as the Alien Property Custodian, the sole purpose of which was maintaining enemy assets, that is patents, trademarks, copyright, and property. Henceforth the Office of the APC drafted long lists of these assets that fell under its jurisdiction, known as vesting orders. So far, as I have been able to determine, the first vesting order seen here for enemy-owned motion pictures appeared in February 1943. To oversimplify things, the APC cleared the way legally for the use of vested enemy property by other federal agencies with some exceptions for resale to American business. To quickly run through a list of the war agencies interested in this collection, from the civilian side there was Nelson Rockefeller's Office of Inter-American Affairs, the purpose of which was to strengthen diplomatic ties between the Americas. There was also the Office of War Information tasked with performing many of the same tasks in the name of domestic morale. In the intelligence community, the RNA division of the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the modern CIA, wrote confidential memoranda on the strategies of Nazi newsreels and radio propaganda in order to make American propaganda and psychological warfare more effective. But it was the War Department, particularly the Signal Corps, which actually commandeered most of the films from the APC, and seemingly had right of first refusal. This was because the Signal Corps had enlisted Frank Capra to produce a series of orientation films from new soldiers that explained the background of the war known as the Why We Fight series. For this purpose, Capra wanted to use actual films produced by the enemy, and so he got them. So now we have supply and demand, but not the infrastructure necessary to provide one to the other. The alien property custodian was essentially a legal office. Storage and maintenance of physical assets had to be outsourced. I don't want to suggest that the government had not, prior to this point, engaged in the handling and storage of motion pictures, but it was under-equipped for the task during the war. Naturally, the APC turned to the Library of Congress, which already had working relationships with organizations in the private sector, the most important of which was the Museum of Modern Art Film Library. The Film Library staff had a level of expertise that the APC and Library of Congress could not match, and so the Film Library became a third partner in developing strategies to catalog and store the captured films. Over the next three years, innumerable containers of film reels, shipping invoices, and vesting orders circulated among these agencies. The films, when not being used by Capra, first in Washington DC and later in Los Angeles, were stored at the Museum of Modern Art in the United States and in spaces provided by the National Archives at Fort Hunt, Virginia. If I could emphasize anything that these operations, it would be how complex and frequently chaotic they were. The films themselves, some of which had been in deep storage well before the war, were in various stages of disrepair, which we can see in the following photograph taken in the early 1950s. To make matters worse, Library of Congress staff soon discovered that much of their vault space was inadequate for film storage, and there was the problem of new accessions. To give you an impression of these challenges, I quote from an exasperated memorandum from the Library of Congress's Keeper of the Collection, dated September 16, 1944, concerning an unexpected arrival the previous day of a truck loaded with nitrate films. I quote, it seems that Mr. Howard Walz had been advised the day before by APC that the Library would use the facilities of the War College Film Laboratory for inventory purposes. I had had no such knowledge of this arrangement. When Mr. Walz arrived at the Army War College sometime in the afternoon, the said laboratory was found to be on the third floor without elevator facilities, and the cases of films were too heavy to be carried up three flights of stairs, at least so late in the day. Furthermore, I understood that the War College authorities were rather surprised that we were to undertake such operations on a large scale, unquote. I will end my historical sketch here. There is, of course, much more to the story that future research may illuminate. I hope that one outcome of this conference will be a greater appreciation of the relationship between textual and motion picture records illuminating, in particular, how the moving image collections of the Library of Congress and the National Archives came to be in the first place. Thank you. Good day. My name is Bucky Grimm, I'm an independent researcher who looks into various facets of early motion picture history, specifically the silent era. My current area of research is related to cinematographers during this period. This leads directly into the subject I'm going to talk to you about today, the Signal Core School of Photography during World War I. There's a wealth of material used in my ongoing research which comes from National Archives, both in motion pictures and still photos, some of which you will see today. Some of this material is from Record Group 111-H, which are historical films, many shot by the Signal Core personnel. There are other 400 reels which have been digitized and are available for you to view online at the National Archives website. Also, many of the still images you will see come from Record Group 111-SC. Many of these are online as well. These images provide a unique glimpse into the activities and training of the Signal Core personnel, as well as capturing many other Signal Core activities at the time. The school itself was established on January 1, 1918, after a meeting of the Army War College. The Army felt it was very important to be able to document the activities of soldiers both in training and in combat. Once the decision was made to develop the photographic unit, the Army mobilized quickly to get this school underway. One of the first orders of business was to find a location for training. Captain J.D. Sears, who was head of the Army photographic unit, approached Columbia University in New York about conducting the training there. Arrangements were confirmed and the school was ready for the onslaught of recruits. Also, current facilities had to be converted and ready for areas of film developing, storage, and also housing recruits. It was decided to use Havermayer Hall as the area for instruction, as it was the chemical building for the university and as such was already partly outfitted for the needs of the Signal Core School. The presentation that follows will provide a brief overview of some of these activities of the Signal Core School. This presentation is entitled The Signal Core School of Photography by Bucky Grimm. This will be a short history on the Signal Core School and this is based upon research that I have done as a part of a larger project on documenting lives and careers of cinematographers during the silent era. Pioneering cinematographer Carl Gregory was commissioned and assigned the role as one of the lead instructors for the school. He had been editor of a column on cinematography for Moving Picture World since 1915 and made mention of the role of the school in his column. At this point, Gregory mentioned that the Signal Core was interested and recruit to some experience in the field. Gregory was the most interesting character as he was the first cameraman to film Under the Sea in 1914. The first cameraman for Tectocolor in 1916 and as his life went full circle, he was the motion picture engineer at National Archives from 1939 to 1949. As such, was responsible for much of the policy and procedures for the division developed during that period. This is a portion of a brochure created by Carl Gregory to publicize the work and scope of the school. Some well-known names are involved in the school as either students or instructors. One of the more notable was Victor Fleming who early in his career was a cameraman for Douglas Fairbanks and he later became a director of such films as The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind. You can see at the time it was called the School of Military Cinematography. As they branched out to include the still photo unit they felt the name change was in order to reflect this. Training for the recruits as previously mentioned was held at Columbia University in New York. Here you see views of some of the buildings used and were transitioned for barracks for the recruits. This image gives us a quick look at the room that was renovated into a still negative drying room for use by the school. There were instructors for all facets of the training from motion picture camera operation, film processing, still photography and editing. Shown here are some of the instructors and staff of the school. Here you see a couple of views of some of the recruits received in training in the operation of a moving picture camera. They were required to learn all points of operation for the camera from how the lens is operated to the internal unit of the camera so they could break it down and rebuild it out in the field if necessary. The views here show recruits getting ready to travel to do some location shooting. They put their training to good use while still in the states and they filmed many local events such as victory parades and military training exercises. Here is a short video clip. It's about a minute and a half long which shows some of the signal core unit performing some of the typical film-related tasks that they learned at Columbia. This is footage from Nara College Park out of the CBS collection. The original footage looks to have been called from some original signal core material that also seems to have been used in some type of compilation. As these images show, the recruits were soldiers first, even though the primary focus was their training as part of the photographic unit, they were still required to perform the everyday duties of the soldier. At the beginning of the training for the signal core recruits, they are also responsible for aerial photography. Later, that was moved to a different location. Here are a couple of interesting photos out of the collection that show instructor Carl Gregory getting ready to go up in a plane to shoot some footage on Long Island. To summarize, the school was established on January 1, 1918 by the Army War College. Training took place at Columbia University in New York. The training consisted of a six-week course covering still motion picture, film processing, and editing. Student capacity was 200 recruits. Upon completion of their training, soldiers were shipped as part of a divisional unit overseas to document war activities there. The divisional unit consisted of one officer and two enlisted men, and the school sent 38 divisional units overseas from completion of first training until the armistice was signed. Hi, this is Jennifer Horn. I'm a professor of film and digital media at the University of California Santa Cruz. I want to thank the organizers for this opportunity to talk today about textual records and government film. It's a really vital topic for scholars of non-commercial film history, and I hope to give shape to this conversation in a couple of ways. My contribution to this panel comes from a larger, very long-simmering project on what I call Civic Cinema, where commercial association or agency-based motion pictures engaged in any citizen defining or citizen excluding discourses of the administrative state, particularly where the management of biopolitics is concerned. As a starting place, though, I want to encourage us to think about the ubiquitous genres and subgenres of secretarial communication that reside in the folders and files we draw upon in our studies. As Lisa Gillman shows in her masterful paper knowledge, documentary evidence of bureaucratic discourse hides in plain sight, seeing what it is that yolks together film viewing, ideas of civic improvement, and secretarial labor requires us to recognize the structure of job-printed modern documents. And as the anthropologist, Matthew Hull, expertly explains in his study of the state records of Pakistani bureaucracy, scholars following Max Faber's description of bureaucracy have tended to flatly equate the writing that bureaucrats produce with the reality of institutions when really the very form of the documents and their graphic qualities also shaped the associations that constructed the inside and outside of state offices. In that way, textual records and manuscript collections aren't just a paper trail for publication of useful filmmaking, and neither do they provide us with the cultural context for American civic film practices. More than just how documents structure the labor of government workers, we are going to benefit from a more nuanced analysis of how the writing in these documents is fraught by what can or can't be said in a letter, on a spreadsheet, on an index card, or through a business form. Now, almost all government documents exist in a simultaneously rarefied and debased territory of print history, and no more so than the information pamphlet. And yet, as the material elements of civic instruction or health information campaigns, as we are very well aware right now in this pandemic, there are value increases in ways that exceed their historical ephemerality. As the material evidence of a democratic life often handed out or made available in the realm of civic offices free of charge or deposited in federally mandated libraries for future reference, pamphlets are freighted with expressing the work of entire agencies. There's a connection here to unravel at a later time regarding legislation and funding of the government printing office during this period, which oversaw massive new printing requests and supermilling and how the GPO centralized printers and oversaw the standardization of prints and office forms that regulated government communication. But my purpose here is to initiate a bibliographic understanding for motion picture documents that served to hybridize readership and spectatorship, placing pamphlet films within the context of other U.S. designed iterative visual displays and printed material campaigns will in turn reveal the format-specific properties of civic address, linking the film to contemporary information gathering and to the simulacra of better civic life communicated by the printed government pamphlets format. As examples of what I'm calling pamphlet films and to explain why I see these films as a distinct subgenre of institutional filmmaking, I'd like to describe briefly the institutional context of four neonatal and postnatal hygiene films made for the U.S. Department of Labor between 1919 and 1926, our children, well-born, the best fed baby, and son babies. Each of these films was conceived of as part of the dissemination of Children's Bureau print, brochure, and media displays. But I'll focus here on our children, a two real film that demonstrates to viewers how to organize and participate in a national campaign for birth certification. All four of these films, I should say, were produced by the filmmaker Carlisle Ellis, who had a long history working with health organizations and making health information films. Our children, shot mostly in Gadsden, Alabama during one of the Bureau's birth certification public clinics, enact aspects of public health activities that include physical examinations and also anticipates the need for women's club members to confront local male political leadership over resistance, presumably for reasons related to how race figured in the push for birth certification and the highly racialized discourse around infant survival rates, which is also shown in the film. The film's production was very much tied to the anticipated passage of the Shepherd Towner Bill of 1921, which addressed maternity care and sought to increase infant survival rates by providing governmental authorization of the types of massive public health campaign that the Children's Bureau had been working to introduce under the leadership of the celebrated Hall House alumni, Julia Lathrop. Our children reflected a new sentimentality around the bureaucratization of women's labor and sought to lend credibility to the communitarian claim that 11 million women participated in the national movement to improve children's health during wartime. The maternal and child health programs created by the Bureau were disseminated widely to state boards of health and loaned to clubs and community groups. The pamphlets, exhibits, displays and films were created to support the agency's mission to evangelize its public about modern scientific child rearing, what was called child saving in the first quarter of the 20th century. Although the Children's Bureau had only completed its first civil service examinations to hire its employees in late 1914, already by spring of 1915 the agency was distributing infant health slide lectures and a short film timed for the release of the Panama Pacific International Exposition. Continuity sheets for the leaders for that first visual project called A Day in Baby's Life suggested it begin with the title the most loving act of a mother is to nurse her baby. This was consistent with the agency's postnatal and maternal health brochures that were disseminated at the time. After the success of this project and newly flushed with defense funding and allies in the White House the emboldened U.S. Department of Labor agency was contemplating whether to add motion pictures to its next major campaign pushes for birth certification and to address the prevention of avoidable childhood diseases in high poverty areas. The year-long celebration of child health awareness in 1919 was called Children's Year with a multi-platform publication plan. The agency would distribute printed leaflets and pamphlets about measuring and weighing children, generate highly placed articles in women's magazines showing techniques of birthing and send specially equipped American agit-prop style trucks to deliver a spectacular baby special message to rural areas of the country and our children the film captures a lot of that public information campaigning. The Children's Bureau under Julia Lathrop was engaged in welfare programs on multiple fronts then but it established its relevance on the national scene undertaking large-scale and ground-baking surveys of rates of morbidity among infants in the U.S. and its territories. Two early publications, prenatal care and infant care epitomized the Bureau's approach to scientific motherhood. They set an advice manual tone between the agency and its aspirational public translating horrifying statistics on for instance, incidents of disability due to poor understandings of milk contamination into how to format for the multi-lingual audiences of parents and child care workers. These materials were the model for the films the agency produced and were the basis for critiques and admonishments handed over to Carlisle Ellis over the course of making the final cuts of these films and what you saw in a loop here was just a minute from BestFedBaby. So in closing I just want to add that although it's very tempting to want to group instances of federal filmmaking even from the Women's Bureau which was and still is a part of the Department of Labor, I think the media archeological lens allows us to see these films as different and I hope we'll have more time to talk about this. In closing I just want to say that not only do we see in the Children's Bureau films a unique instance of government bureau filmmaking before the heyday of state documentary but it also represented a distinctly trans-media approach to public information and furthermore as an instance of civic film production one that was particularly attuned to the interests of women's clubs and community and professional organizations. The films made by the Children's Bureau speak to the uniqueness of the considerations of gendered knowledge in the public interest and government dissemination of films at the dawn of the information age. Hi there. Today I am sharing some research from an article I have coming out in the near future on a three-screen film that was made for and shown at the United States Pavilion at Expo 67. This is the United States Pavilion from the 1967 International and Universal Exposition better known as the Montreal World's Fair or just Expo 67. The dome created by R. Buckminster Fuller is considered to be an architectural masterpiece and remains a symbol of its host city through the present day. The United States Information Agency or USIA was in charge of the American presence at Expo 67. In the center we have Jack Macy who is a career diplomat and who served as chief of design for Expo 67 overseeing the design and operation of the American Pavilion. I am cutting out his fascinating backstory for time but the success of the American presence at Expo 67 was largely due to his genius. He was responsible for hiring the other two people in the picture. On the right you can see Bucky Fuller in front of the entrance of the pavilion he designed. The person on the left is Ivan Chermayev who was a member of design firm Cambridge 7 Associates which was accompanied by the USIA contracted with to oversee the creation of the exhibit inside the pavilion. The title of the film that was originally meant to be the centerpiece of the pavilion was a time to play. The director of the film is Art King who was a renowned fashion and music photographer in the 1960s. I learned about the film quite by accident while looking through finding aids for paper based records at the National Archives for something else related to the United States Information Agency. I requested the relevant boxes on a whim and while looking through some of the folders I discovered that the USIA had produced a three screen film for Expo 67. A quick online search revealed little information about it and I wondered how it could have been effectively forgotten. After I tracked down a couple of contemporary reviews and dug deeper into the archival records I found an answer. The film just wasn't much of a hit. Expo 67 had a wealth of innovative multi-screen films at its various pavilions. Many of these are documented in the brilliant book Reimagining Cinema film at Expo 67 edited by Monica Ken Gagnon and Janine Martisol. In the end though a time to play felt far weaker than these other works and was ultimately overshadowed and forgotten. But the backstory of how this happened is intriguing. The film itself and all of the documents that follow are from the collections of the National Archives unless otherwise noted. Jack Macy was assigned to oversee the US Pavilion at Expo 67 in 1964. The 1964 1965 New York World's Fair was active at the time even though the USIA was not involved with this. One of the hits of the New York fair was the multi-screen film To Be Alive by Francis Thompson and Alexander Hamid. Multi-screen films had been hits at prior world's fairs. So having one as part of the American pavilion at Expo 67 seemed like an easy decision. And hiring Thompson and Hamid straight off of a recent similar project was an obvious choice. Macy and his staff initiated conversations in October 1964. Thompson showed outright enthusiasm for this project and submitted several treatments about creative arts and artists in America. But as you can see from this memo for file by Macy a few months later Thompson also agreed to do a film for Canadian Pacific Railways. The USIA's contract had an exclusivity clause since Macy wanted a unique work, not one of two films by a director. Canadian Pacific Railways offered a much larger budget so Thompson and Hamid went with them, ultimately creating the hit multi-screen film We Are Young. A few days later Macy was searching for a new director. He wrote a memo to his colleague and head of the motion picture division, George Stevens Jr. It simply read a cookie thought what do you think of the idea of getting Stanley Kubrick to do the great American documentary for the US Pavilion at Montreal in 1967. Let's discuss when you have a minute. So ok, it's easy to laugh at this. However Macy was sending this note to the son of one of the other most famous directors in Hollywood history. Most of the major Hollywood studios were already cooperating with Macy's team on the American Cinema exhibit for the Pavilion as well. Many major artists, including Andy Warhol, would contribute works of art for display at the Pavilion. The Kubrick idea didn't go anywhere, but it isn't as far fetched as one might think. On a similar note, Macy also wrote a memo for file with an idea for having five foreign directors, each to a short documentary with an outside view of what America is. The names he floated included Satyajit Ray, Federico Fellini, and the Kira Kurosawa. The last line was, P.S., funding for the above project would need to come from private sources. This remained a memo for file and resulted in no action. Soon after this, Macy ran across an article in the April 1965 issue of Harper's Bazaar about underground filmmakers. Looking for a filmmaker to deliver something truly cutting edge and unique, he contacted the Museum of Modern Art so that he and Ivan Chermayev could spend April 19th and April 26th watching works by the filmmakers mentioned in the article, along with some others suggested by staff from the USIA film division and MoMA. This is one of several sheets documenting what they watched, but the last column, with comments ranging from good cinematography to just dull, are transcriptions of Macy's originally handwritten notes. Chermayev requested prints of most of the films from the filmmakers cooperative in New York. Kenneth Anger actually included a two page letter outlining his experience and expressing how eager he would be to make a film for the United States government's official pavilion at Expo 67. The fact that this was sent along with his queer classic Scorpio Rising seems surprising enough, but then when Macy requested that certain prints be sent to Washington DC to be screened for USIA staff as they discussed possible candidates, Anger made the final cut. The documentation ends there and apparently the DC screening was the end of any discussion about Kenneth Anger. However, Jack Macy had been impressed by a film by photographer and filmmaker William Klein, who became the frontrunner. Macy's team reached out to Klein, who was unavailable. It seems worth noting that a few years later Klein would direct his superhero satire of American imperialism, Mr. Freedom. Although his films weren't part of the MoMA screenings, Macy had recently seen Richard Lester's British comedy film The Knack or How to Get It. Lester was an American, but had developed his career in England. Having directed A Hard Day's Night the prior year, he seemed like a perfect choice for the culture of the time. However, he was preparing for his next Beatles film, Help. The backup plan was a little known documentary filmmaker named William Friedkin. Although his documentaries are not particularly well remembered today, Friedkin would go on to become one of the defining directors of the 1970s, helming the French connection and the exorcist. Friedkin agreed to the project and began working on a treatment. The proposal mirrored what Francis Thompson had suggested, using the pavilion's broad theme of creative America to focus on different artists. Keep in mind that this proposal was completed in December 1965, 14 months after Macy's team had initiated conversations with Francis Thompson. Jack Macy had near complete control over the American presence at Expo 67, but the one thing he could not fully influence was the budget. To not make bureaucrats above him understand why the film should cost so much and, as such, he could not get a contract for Friedkin to sign, thus delaying shooting. William Friedkin walked away in April 1966, opting instead to direct his first feature film, The Sunny and Cher Vehicle Good Times. With time running short, Jack had an inspired idea. He reached out to photographer Art Cain, whom he had served in World War II, to make his first film. Cain suggested several ambitious ideas, but he was suggesting these with a short production lead time. The one that seemed to stick was Games, later retitled A Time to Play. In the original treatment, the games in question were meant to show children playing as allegories for adult behavior and problems of modern society. The proposal suggested that, in a spiritual sense, we will see side-by-side the sense of hope and faith in our children and the feelings of despair and apathy in our adult society. As an example of these metaphors, the original treatment said that the game King of the Hill involves cunning, surprise and strength, and can be likened to the assassination of Kennedy, the hanging of Mussolini, etc., or jumping robe provides a sense of personal exhilaration that few games can offer. This would contrast to sorrows of man and man's inhumanity to man, visually jumping rope, relates to the calisthenics of fascist youth groups, and this might be incorporated. I can assure you that these subversive metaphors did not make the final cut. Although Macy had initially wanted something more edgy, my senses the short production window that came from multiple directors backing out made it so that he primarily just wanted something that was done. And cutting out the controversial contrast before even the first shot was captured on film made that possible. In the end, the short production window resulted in a competent but rushed product. Jack Macy and Art Cain made what was simply a short film of children playing simple games, spread across three screens. Again, I go into far more detail about this troubled production in my upcoming article. At the end of the day, Macy's work on the United States Pavilion was a massive success, but the film that was supposed to be its centerpiece made little impact, receiving not much enthusiasm or disdain. The documents about its production tell a far more interesting story of what could have been, as Jack Macy spent years trying to make a powerful and subversive work that would have defied much of our framework that the government film can be. Thank you. I think that we are ready for discussion. If anybody have questions, please drop them into the Q&A window and do we have everybody back on screen? Just a quick note so all of our panelists from the last few presentations are here as well as Kate Brennan from the National Archives. If you have questions for any of us, drop them in the box. I do have a couple that came in by text message rather than the regular channel so I want to bring that up real quick. One comment that we have is just a piece of trivia. During the war, the National Archives moved all the film or during World War II the National Archives moved all of its film to Fort Hunt because it was mostly nitrate and therefore it seems safer not to have it in the same building with our paper records in case the capital came under attack. One very short question that I have Bucky, would you mind talking a bit more about Carl Lewis Gregory and his connection to the National Archives? Sure. Gregory was originally actually started out working for government with the U.S. Geological Society making lantern slides learning how to photograph become a cameraman. He later went to Edison Studios as a mainly handled special effects and a lot of films and directed a lot and then Tan Hauser. Around the mid-20s he started working more doing patent research developing cameras, developing optical printers and things of that nature. And probably in the 30s when archives was first starting up Gregory was hired as a consultant on the survey of federal archives and he helped survey all the motion picture materials and still images. As they developed the division he got an early job as a motion picture engineer and helped set up their motion picture division and helped out a lot at the Department of Agriculture in the 40s. He was actually the first person to successfully copy Library of Congress paper prints. They were originally done over at National Archives. All right. Great to know. So a question that I have for Jenny in some of the films that you have encountered about child rearing have you noticed a considerable difference between films for white audiences and for black audiences? Thanks for that question, Brian. I haven't found in the case of the Children's Bureau that they made films for separate audiences but in all of those four films that I was talking about race is definitely a very tangible and important way for those films to address their audience and segregating the groups that are being addressed by those audiences within the films takes place in various ways. One of the things that I didn't get a chance to talk about in my presentation has to do with the kind of outreach and the film the recovery of data around how audiences understood those films. The Children's Bureau sent out a number of employees on excursions around the American south and then up a little bit into Maine even to do sort of field research on what people saw in the films and those trip reports exist in that record group and document different communities' responses to the films where race is definitely a factor and they talk about that in the trip reports. So it's kind of integrated and I guess this is relevant to my overall point about how paper is a component of how these films are made useful. The trip reports also set up a set of questions that then get fed back to the agency and yeah, I mean, race and the way that birth registration in particular is or isn't being embraced by various communities or is an obstacle for the agency in various ways is, you know, so it's definitely legible in the documentation that exists in the record group of the Children's Bureau. Excellent. So I'm sticking with you for a moment, Jenny. A few questions have rolled in and a few of them seem to overlap. There seems to be demand for you to elaborate on your fascinating concept of the pamphlet film and more of that definition and something kind of for everyone too of thinking of ways that film has parallels to other paper-based formats or two paper-based formats rather. Well, that's great. So I am innovating a little bit with that term as a neologism and if it's something that people want to discuss in different ways, I've gone back and forth on whether I think these really are pamphlet films or whether they just reflect the way that the we had started to use the structure of the pamphlet as a government document. But for me, the fact that those pamphlets are shown in the films, people are shown reading the pamphlets and then even more important, the production documents that exist show that there was a lot of conversation and back and forth between Carlisle Ellis and the employees of the Children's Bureau who most of them were women who had expertise in nursing or in public health or social work in general. They were working really hard to help Carlisle Ellis understand what kinds of intertitles those films would need and they really wanted that language to come directly out of these brochures. This is why I think there's more there than just a sponsored film that is made for an agency and there's a need for us to really think hard about how the paper document kind of comes to life in those films and I don't know if that helps a little bit and I would love to hear from other people about whether they see in films that they've been looking at this kind of relationship between print and the structure of films. But you know it's a very enticing idea for me and especially in these films that are silent because so much of the film has to be communicated via text and so it's logical to think about the way in which text structures the film and so forth. Right and of course thinking about how some of these materials are, some of these films are related to textual materials I've come across several educational films that have study guides, discussion guides and so forth and that's come up in some of the other panels that we've had so far. Does anybody, yeah, Kate please. Yeah I just wanted to add in there Jenny I think that your research is fascinating and I think that we see in the textual records for some of these agencies and also for some of the State Department agencies like QSIA in later periods where they're going through trying to decide which films that they're going to use and the discussions that we see in those documents about what would this look like to an outside audience what would this look like to a domestic audience I think that there are a lot of big questions there and the way that you're using Women's Bureau and Children's Bureau films there is really fascinating. Jenny do you have anything else to add to that or? Well No, not at the moment. And thank you Kate. Yeah, so I have a question here for Nate. Could you talk about what if any links there were between the collection of films you discussed today and the films that the western allies requisitioned during European operations in 1944 and 1945. That's a good question. I don't have a direct answer to that one of the problems being that as I mentioned in the presentation films kept coming in to the Library of Congress but some of them shipped back from Europe. But I think that what was happening in Europe was almost completely separate from what was happening in the United States. So from my understanding what was going on was primarily a circulation of these films within the continental United States if they were going to end up in Europe they would have gone to Hollywood to Capra's unit to be spliced up and used in orientation and training films. But that's my understanding of it. I should also note that this research is really somewhat open-ended in that I kind of stumbled across this information and I think about a decade ago most of it the Library of Congress so there are a lot of loose ends so I can't really speak definitively to a lot of very specific questions because as I mentioned one of the the theme of this conference kind of illustrates the bureaucracy produces a lot of paperwork and that paperwork exists in collections, across collections and just even trying to get all of it or what you can find in order is kind of a massive task which I think everyone here will agree with. So Yeah and something to kind of focus on complicating the idea of government as a straight line. I have a question here. There seems to be an important pattern across all four papers about government collaboration with other non-governmental institutions and organizations. I'm wondering if the panelists would like to say more about how to sort through the interface between governments and these other kinds of organizations. Or were they more contested and complex? Well I know early on when the government was starting to get involved in some filmmaking enterprises, the first film unit for the government was Department of Agriculture back in the earlier teens. Prior to that for a lot of that work they contracted out to various studios and I think one of the driving forces for them to get involved in that is and there was a bit of a times contentious relationship between them and the studios for the end product. Not only cost being higher but having more control over subject matter and results so I think that helped drive that a little bit. Absolutely. Does anybody else have it? Jenny? Yeah I can add just a little bit to this question which is a really important question for us about competition and actually what government is at that moment in the case of the Children's Bureau what I observed in my analysis of their correspondence at the agency and really this is 1914-15-16 the heads of the units in charge of public exhibiting and displays become very engaged in sorting through all of the various enterprises of film distribution and they're receiving correspondence or letters of interest and questions about film rental from a vast array of community volunteer groups clubs and public health departments across the United States and so what you see back and forth I would characterize more as sharing and collaborating as opposed to being in competition with one another but New York State seems to be very already on it in terms of how they want to utilize the spaces of film exhibition for the purposes of health education and community engagement so anyone who is interested in looking at this landscape these early documents are a plethora of letterhead that you could use to retrace these connections between what is officially government and what is governing outside of the realm of government at that time and so yeah, I mean I think these kinds of networks are collaborating at this point more than that later in the agencies just a footnote later in the period of Carlisle Ellis's engagement with the Children's Bureau it does become competitive and he does start writing to them and saying can I have my negatives back and you know I want to know how many times my films have shown for you with regards to the intellectual property and so forth but early on I think it's just open sharing of resources around film absolutely yeah and something that comes I try to convey in my research on the USIA is a lot of people look at the government as a sort of homogenous thing with one main message one force like it's going to be highly organized and so forth and that's not really true as you go through the paper records especially you can see the influence of a lot of individuals you know a lot of bureaucrats along the line who are making personalized decisions who are just going with a lot of things based on instinct and so on and then it gets further complicated when you have different government offices having certain influences in culture with the USIA you have them contracting with individual filmmakers largely because they know that the filmmakers are going to go a little bit off of the intended project and come up with something of their own thing but stick to kind of a core message that going through the different records and looking at these collaborations you can see a lot of variants are done what could have happened different directions that projects could have taken any more thoughts any more comments before we move off of those thoughts I can add a little bit there one of the interesting things about the period that I'm looking at which is about mid 1930s to the end of the 1940s is that at pretty much all levels I'm both in terms of the government philanthropic organizations private organizations filmmakers film distributors film exhibitors is that it's actually a very small community even though it's spread across you know it's worldwide but there is a sense that everybody kind of bumps into everyone else and so for example one of the things that kind of smooth relationships or kind of smooth the way for relationships between the federal government and the Museum of Modern Art was of course that Nelson Rockefeller was the head of the Office of Inter-American Affairs the Coordinated Inter-American Affairs Archibald McLeish the Library of Congress was also a trustee of MoMA so there are all these kinds of and also what you see is that when you get to sort of the managerial level you see them reaching out to a higher level to kind of bridge these institutional divides and I've kind of I've struggled with what to refer this as because in some in a sense it's sort of a local community because so many of these people are based in New York and if we go to the history of film studies we look at Dana Poland's book on the early years of film studies is that he says that everything that we see there is kind of these kinds of isolated instances of film studies that doesn't kind of coalesce into a discipline in which there's a sort of network of scholars but what's interesting is that looking at what's happening in New York and then what's happening in Los Angeles and in DC is that there's this kind of emerging well it's not emerging because it's been there it's been there since the 20s of people really kind of taking on multiple multiple roles so for example in another context I've written about an exhibitor in New York named Arthur Mayer so Mayer on one level was a film owner a theater owner and kind of a theater impresario but he was also deeply invested in the funding of documentary films and during the war he went into government service so when you're going through these various collections you'll see people pop up from it's almost like you see people pop up and it sort of came in from another story so all of a sudden it's like there's something from Arthur Mayer or another good example is Tom Brandon who Tanya is writing about Tom Brandon shows up a lot so this is really kind of a very a loose community and I don't want to say the film community because that sort of connotes Hollywood but it's more like the film professional community which kind of goes across the spectrum from like technical professionals to critics to scholars to like administrators so it's it's something that's worth kind of thinking about how to kind of encapsulate that yeah and sticking with you for a second Nate I have a question that's come in that I think would bounce off that well a key variable in your paper is the influence of war for government interfaces with cultural institutions in the public a lot changes because of that can you say more about war as a catalyst for these kinds of programs or for catalyst disease kinds of programs well you know it's I guess to kind of reverse engineer and go back to the you know the Rockefeller foundations like role in in kind of providing the lion's share of money for the establishment of the film library the Museum of Modern Art there's multiple kind of multiple mandates going on in 1935 when MoMA is established so on one hand it has to do with like Heidi Wasson's research has shown about the mass museology of kind of bringing democratizing art for for the public making art accessible making it making it or establishing especially in terms of cinema something that is that can be that can be studied that can be collected but on the other hand there's also the emergence of kind of critical communication studies that the Rockefeller foundation is also funding at the same time so they are kind of it's sort of an economy of effort so MoMA sort of its primary mission is the public mission sort of museum mission its secondary mission is to provide a base for film research that connects with radio research newspaper research print research readership research that's actually going on in several other kind of institutional contexts so and that and the impulse to for communications research has a kind of has both a dimension to it where it's about sort of making making the American public better consumers of the media but also as a way of of spearheading communications research particularly having to do with propaganda so trying to understand how the United States will be part of the next war at some point and it's better to be prepared even before even before war has been declared so a lot of that sort of baked into the early history of the museum and so what you see especially in terms of them trying to collect films trying to figure out where to put them that all kind of originates with the founding of MoMA so there's a certain amount of sort of taking imitation taking inspiration from the context of MoMA absolutely and Jenny you have something to bounce off that yeah I just want to ask me if you can talk a little bit about since we're talking about textual records textual records and you spoke about customs documents is anything kind of changing for you as a film researcher as you start to work with these bureaucratic forms and how they're filed and I know much of what you talked about had also to do with the institutional cataloging of the films but I'm particularly interested in the the way in which a customs document which is not the typical way that a film scholar begins to look at film circulation can you talk a little bit about that form and what it's kind of done for you helping you rethink the research you're doing yeah specifically the vesting form that I posted one of the things too is that when you're in the archive and you're doing research and you just have sort of a lead in terms of a box and you open it up and you start looking through it and you say well this is interesting I have no idea what this is that's a lot of the alien property custodian stuff is like that I mean it's as I mentioned sort of like alien property custodian was more of a legal office so one of the things that you can't see in the vesting order which is actually three pages long is that you have to kind of learn learn what they're doing but because it's so sort of ingrained in them there's no there's no manual the vesting order is essentially it's not that they are do they have like investigators in the field going to these warehouses and cataloging films they're just pulling down the most recent issue of the film daily yearbook opening it to German distributors and just basically making a blanket legal document that says everything that's described here if it's in the United States it's ours now so it's not it's a very blunt instrument and so that I think kind of helps to contribute to the sort of confusion about what existed in these collections versus you know it's like what did one office say it had versus what actually was there versus what the workers at the National Archives and the Library of Congress actually found when they pride opened these boxes of film they're like two or three completely different ideas about what they are so I think that for myself the challenge in this particular like dealing with the bureaucratic aspect has to do with the sort of you know seeing a lot of documents and then trying to abstract you know say like this document like this document this document so you know it's and then also seeing how the sort of the rhetoric changes from office to office and you know as as everyone knows it's an ongoing process so but it's sort of I guess it sort of teaches you to learn on your feet when you're actually in the reading room all right sounds great so a question came in for me you noted some of the critical response to a time to play was the film discussed in comparison to the Canadian multi-screen films at Expo 67 which as you know were a watershed moment for the development of what would come to be known as IMAX yeah so these other pavilion films at Expo 67 like I said there's this wonderful book on all these different multi-screen films and some of the experiments and so on and the US their plan was for this film to be the absolute centerpiece of this pavilion it just happened that everything else at the pavilion worked well enough that the film kind of flopping didn't really affect anything they had a beautiful pavilion they had wonderful displays of modern art moon landing stuff and so on so nobody really noticed that the film flopped but there was a review of all the different multi-screen films at Expo 67 that was written by Judith Shatnoff for Film Quarterly 67 and I have this sentence for it she was left with quote the impression that a time to play should be advertising something perhaps milk it had that glossy commercial quality there were more interesting explorations of multi-screen to be seen at Expo for instance we are young and then she goes on absolutely rave about we are young which of course was made by Francis Thompson and Alexander Hamid who had a contract with or I think they had a contract that wasn't signed yet with the USIA to make a film for them and then Canadian Pacific railroads offered considerably more money that Jack Macy he kept trying to fight for an actual decent budget and all these fights it just left him not being able to get a filmmaker in place it's why William Friedkin walked away and we almost had a World's Fair film by the director of the Exorcist but in the end he got his photographer buddy who he could grab and said let's make something but just with the lead time they weren't really able to do that much to innovate and it was just kind of there so I want to take a second we've talked a lot about digging into paper records and I'd like to ask Kate if you could talk a bit about starting research into some of the paper records at the National Archives sure yeah well listening to all of your presentations was really interesting and I did think that there were lots of places where researchers can start doing research like this USIA obviously has one of the strongest collections on movies, on film anything that they wanted to broadcast to the world there's almost a file on so we have researchers who write in looking for films that black and white films that we might think about as pop culture and I'll be like there really be a file on this of course there's a file on it because how would this test to the world but when I was going through all of your thinking about all of these presentations we have FBI and justice records that have case files talking about people who were involved in making films and involved in the film industry at times when things became more sensitive so lots of filmmakers are going to be in these records the German captured records obviously we have the films that Nate talked about but there's also a ton in RG 131 someone dropped into the comments one of the links to the besting orders for the alien property case files and I think that those are a great place to start there's also a collection of German and American vocational league boon films that are the textual records that go behind the things that the Bund was working on and I think a lot of researchers find a lot of useful material there Signal Core came up in several of these Signal Core was just so incredibly invested and involved in both the photography and the motion picture side of this I can drop some links into the chat on places to start because obviously if they're using these films and creating schools of photography they're keeping records on that so in RG 111 there's a lot of material that researchers are just getting started on projects or even if you're pretty deep into what you're looking at on an audio visual side or photography I think that you would find a lot of records on these topics and obviously central files for women's bureau, children's bureau even state department and not on any specific topic that I want to call out but anything anytime that the US and the world is at play the State Department is talking about the films that are being broadcast the pamphlet literature even that's being circulated in the US some of that's being circulated abroad too so copies would go to state copies would get sent to posts so you never know what you're going to find and one of my favorite parts of working on site with researchers which obviously this year has been a little bit rough is people going through those boxes and finding those exciting documents that why is this here, why are they talking about it and then piecing that story back together Absolutely and so we're about to segue into a short break and then we will have our panels on doing research at the National Archives but I think that it would be good if each of us on who had presentations on the panel talked about a little bit about our experiences with archives and archivists helping us out with our research and I think that would be a good way to close so if you don't mind me starting with this I'd like to say for my presentation I found this Expo 67 stuff by chance, I thought it looked neat I requested it I was already requesting a bunch of other boxes so it's like hey why not and you know there's been a lot of mention of paper trails and so on this wasn't really a trail it was like three or four thick folders that I just went through and I'm like alright what in the world is happening here because I'm reading this story about a mess and it was just coming through from all the documents were in reverse order so I'm seeing it come from this film happened and it was just okay back to alright this is how much work we went to to get a film that wasn't that exciting so I went up to the motion picture room and I put in a request for to see if I could get a copy of this film or see if I could find it it wasn't in the catalog so I started the reference staff there and I shot an email to Audrey and Heidi who are couple of my co-organizers on this and work in the film lab like hey is there a chance that this is floating around and I actually did a conference talk years ago on this missing USIA film and a couple months later the film shows up it's just that there's still records that are being processed that the films are being processed and there's a staff member at National Archives Mike Taylor who has just done this Herculean effort to get through these USIA films since they were never classified but they were not available on US soil until the early 90s and then not much happened with them for a little bit Mike's just been going through and getting them ready so thanks to the lab they were able to transfer that once Mike put it in the catalog and shortly after I had a copy of it I somehow got contacted by Arkane's son like hey I heard that you found this or that you did a conference paper on it do you happen to have this and that was like a week later after they got me the digital copy so I was able to unite that so if anybody else wants to comment on their experiences in archives sure yeah I've gone to NARA for a buku number of years especially in college part and you know it's been a big help from the research associates and things there to kind of narrow my focus down you know it's one thing if you're looking for something a lot of times you know a lot of us aren't exactly sure what we're looking for we know the basic subject matter but exactly where to find it tends to be difficult and they're critical and narrowing down that focus but one of the things you mentioned about the missing USIA film one of the things I found over time is you're kind of at the mercy of who entered the record originally because it's been entered you know especially if something's gone back to the 20s it's been Lord knows how many times and as you re-enter it every time the person who enters it has a different format and a different style as to how they enter it so it it makes you kind of open up a little bit more to expand in the way you research and change the way you think and not always accept that you know what you're looking for isn't there you have to kind of dig a little bit deeper and kind of put the puzzle pieces back together absolutely all right Jenny I can just jump in and say my debts are huge to the reference staff at National Archives and I know Carol Swain is in the participants list and early on Carol answered a number of my questions I wouldn't have gotten very far with the American Red Cross records or the Children's Bureau without contact and I think also with USIA but but I will just make mention of the fact that with a lot of these organizations which were massive and had secretaries, secretarial staffs that created early organization systems it's really critical to work with someone in the reference room because what you're looking at is both the original departmental organization of those records and I guess this is kind of echoing what Bucky's just said ingested into the National Archives and then in some ways reorganized for the purpose of separation and management within the textual records and still photography division and motion picture area so you kind of need a dual lens when you look at these documents you want to be paying attention to the sort of origination structure as it's then mimicked in the National Archives own way of organizing materials and I don't think one should rely on their own gut to do that you really need to reach out to the reference staff and they can help you in immense ways Absolutely Yeah Let me see Yeah the reference staff is indispensable and I kind of as we're talking I just kind of want to shout out the staff at the Rockefeller Archive Center in Terry Town up in the Hudson Roader Valley if you have anything to do with the Rockefeller philanthropy I strongly encourage you to reach out to them to go up there it's literally in a mansion on a hill and it's the only archive I've ever been to where they actually provide you with snacks like a fully stocked kitchen and to kind of bounce off of something that Jane just said one of the things that's interesting that we it's good to kind of bear in mind is again like what is the to try to reconstruct the original business filing system or to understand how these documents get produced so it's like to go with the Rockefeller Foundation I have looked at thousands of documents from the Rockefeller Archive Center and they are impeccable they are they're formatted perfectly very very few typos and that's all because of the of the secretarial pool and you can really tell the difference although you might tend to overlook it when you come across someone's someone's correspondence and they open it by saying I'm sorry my secretary isn't here today so I'm typing this myself and it looks like it's from the it's looking like it's from the typewriter typewriter from madman like it's just you know the it's just the indents are all wrong everything's everything's a mess and you see that in you know it's just it's there's something too about the different kinds of the materiality of the documents themselves whether or not their carbon copies or their photo stats or their original document like the original documents another kind of example of how these things sort of spread out across different archives is that I a couple summers ago I was in Los Angeles and I came across a I came across some very minor correspondences from the from the film critic and sociologist Siegfried Crackauer in a collection I wasn't expecting to find and I found like his an inscribed letter from him and I realized that I had seen the first I had seen the carbon copy of it in the German literature archive in Marbach so I so you know how they ended up one of them ends up in Marbach it's written in New York the other one's written in New York and eventually makes its way to Los Angeles and it's interesting you can kind of piece together how that happened because essentially what had happened was that the the person to whom the letter was written basically gave this material to this other person who then donated it whose widow then donated it to UCLA and that's just kind of that's the sort of backstory of the correspondence which in and of itself is not particularly germane to anything except for the way that these documents kind of travel and kind of end up in different places and I think that's something that I thought about particularly dealing with bureaucratic history is that sometimes documents or letters are not sent or you find drafts but you don't find the sent version and that may tend to kind of overly complicate things but they also help us better understand how how these institutions worked as organizations like how they you know how they kind of distributed their own knowledge or kind of communicated with one another so that's my take away from that yeah absolutely and so we're a little bit over time I promise I won't take much more as I wrap us up if we were to I think that especially the four presenters who are here on this specific panel were to go into how our research is massively indebted to archivists we would not get out of here today if we did our full conversation and again I'm grateful for Kate Brennan for joining us as our archived representative from the National Archives too the work that archivists do in making sure that records reflect these organizations that they reflect how things actually operated how they use principles like original order and provenance to make it so that we're able to trace these concepts I think that there's often among researchers not enough credit for just how much of the work is already done for us when we show up to do this research how much we're able to trace it because an archivist is good at their job and speaking of archivists who have been very good at their job we would not have been able to do this conference without the staff of the National Archives there are too many people to miss but many of them have been on the program throughout this conference and there were many others behind the scene so I would like to thank everybody for coming and if you stick around in 26 and a half minutes we will have the workshops on how to do research on film related matters at the National Archives so please stick around for that thank you very much