 Hello, I'm John Berto, associate provost for faculty affairs and professor in the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland College Park. It is my great pleasure to welcome you to the films of state moving images made by governments virtual conference organized by the University of Maryland Cinema and Media Studies Program and the National Archives and Record Administration. I would in particular like to thank Oliver Geichen of the University of Maryland College Park, Brian Reel of Southern Connecticut State University, Martin Johnson of the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, and the honorable David Ferriero of the National Archives, and others who have made this conference possible. It is a particular pleasure to be able to welcome you to this conference, as my father served in the United States Information Agency as a cultural and public affairs officer for a career that spanned over 30 years. He would often mention that a highlight of that career was the nation's bicentennial celebration of 1976, which featured many USA sponsored films such as Vince Collins 200. At the time we were stationed in the Netherlands and as an 11 year old, I was privileged to be able to join the many bicentennial inspired performances and celebrations and film showings in particular. It was later that I learned that these events were part of a much broader effort by the USA, only those who embrace public service and the value of government sponsorship of the arts could envision and implement. In particular, the bicentennial celebrations featured grant funded student films, in addition to 200, such as an American tune, winter count, and came here from over there. These and other films produced by USA and other government agencies are part of our cultural heritage and history, and represent significant contributions to art and the story of our nation. These are also significant work records worthy of preservation, providing public access to these records is essential, and I would like to express my thanks to narrow for its efforts to ensure access to these films by the public researchers and others. Over the last several years, we have witnessed two significant events that bring into sharp release the challenges of government information records. The shutdown of 2018 2019 at 35 days the longest shutdown in our government's history, and the coven 19 pandemic which has affected access for over one year. During the 2018 2019 shutdown access to government information holdings, even those that were digitized were affected due to closure of government and the furloughing of federal employees. At the time, the public was often greeted with messages on federal websites that stated that the content was not updated and therefore not reliable. Though the coven 19 pandemic has not closed the federal government, it has separated the public and federal employees from critical collections only available in physical form, thus diminishing access. The employees of Mara and the many stewards of our cultural heritage throughout government are to be commended for their steadfast dedication to the mission of openness and public access. They also are to be commended for the many innovations adopted throughout the pandemic to foster new ways of enabling the public to engage with our nation's records. In particular, however, has highlighted the need to continue to enhance efforts to preserve and digitize our nation's records, regardless of their original format to ensure continuity of access. As you celebrate our past and present over the coming days, we also must look to the future. For example, as blockchain technologies such as non fungible tokens or NFTs emerge, they will create new opportunities and challenges for the preservation of our cultural heritage, and the means through which we ensure access. It is from this community that will emanate critical principles standards technologies and solutions that will allow us to innovate preserve and access our vital records now and going forward. I wish you a successful conference. Hi everyone, my name is Lucas and you can currently the director of the program in cinema media studies and it's my great pleasure to welcome all the participants and guests of this conference on behalf of the program in cinema media studies. I want to take in particular thank in particular all the organizers who put a lot of work and putting this event together. I look forward to the lectures and presentations. And I also want to in particular single out or note how thrilled I am that this conference is a product of collaboration between cinema media studies here at UMD and the National Archives. This kind of work is extremely important, both for us faculty as well as our students, because an event like this I think really expands the sense of what constitutes film culture or moving image culture. It gives us a sense of multiple uses of film or cinema that we typically, or most commonly don't encounter in our teaching or research where we focus maybe more on entertainment art cinema and so on. So this kind of event in particular the collaboration between cinema media studies and the National Archives I think is a kind of crucial event that adds to our understanding of what cinema is what function it plays in society and how rich really and truly moving image culture is so thank you again for the organizers and I wish everyone to have a wonderful intellectually stimulating conference. Thank you. Good afternoon. I'm David Ferriero archivist of the United States. I'm pleased to welcome everyone to the first ever virtual films of state conference. This conference highlights the history production study and use of government films and showcases the film holdings of the National Archives in new and innovative ways. I want to thank the University of Maryland Cinema and Media Studies program and Dr. Oliver Geichen for his long time collaboration with the staff of the National Archives and for being a champion of NARA's holdings and research opportunities. Dr. Martin Johnson of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has also played a pivotal role in bringing this conference and its participants together. I also want to acknowledge and thank the NARA staff involved in this conference for their hard work and dedication in making it a reality. Motion picture films were among the earliest records accessioned into the holdings of the National Archives dating back to its inception in 1934. As was the case then and remains to this day NARA was charged with preserving and making available the permanently valuable records of the agencies of the federal government and other records of historical significance documenting the national experience. Dr. John G. Bradley the first chief of the Archives motion picture division recognized the importance of building a national collection of film and recorded sound materials consistent with NARA's charge. Bradley's tireless efforts to acquire and preserve such materials were continued by his successors throughout the decades and still continue to this day. The collection now stands at over half a million reels of film and is one of the largest film archives in the United States and around the world. Included among these holdings are some of the most iconic images of American history from Harlem's Hellfighters in World War I, the flag raising at Iwo Jima to the first steps on the moon. Despite historical challenges and limiting factors the motion picture film holdings of NARA are among the most open and accessible in the world. In recent years we've made great strides in further expanding that access and availability to the public and to our research communities. Our online researchers have grown each year and our online collections are growing with them. Over the course of the past year like the rest of the world NARA staff has had to work separately from each other and in remote environments. Not only are we separated from each other but we are largely separated from the holdings, the physical collections entrusted to us that are the lifeblood of our work. We've also been separated from our researchers who visit our research rooms and make use of these holdings in a variety of ways. This conference is above all an opportunity to connect. It is an opportunity to bring NARA staff and researchers together and to celebrate what the film holdings have to offer. You will listen to and participate in panel discussions uniting scholarship and film history and production with archivists, preservation specialists and education specialists. You will see film clips, film screenings and other visual presentations that demonstrate the significance of NARA's collection and the imagery that it contains. You will see familiar and unfamiliar images representing both the shared national experiences as well as holdings yet to be discovered or utilized to their full potential. You will hear from NARA staff on newly available electronic resources in new ways to access the holdings. I am hopeful that this conference will bring participants together in the spirit of greater collaboration and in furthering the importance of film preservation and access. I am positive that NARA can learn from researchers and that researchers can learn from NARA staff. I am optimistic that this will be the first of many such conversations. The National Archives welcomes this opportunity to connect with all of you and we appreciate your participation and presence this week. Good afternoon and welcome to the Films of State Conference. My name is Dan Rooney and I'm the director of the Special Media Records Division here at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland. I want to thank our collaborators from the University of Maryland and other academic institutions as well as the staff of the National Archives who have worked hard over the past several months to make this week a reality. I'm pleased to have the opportunity to speak with you for a few minutes this afternoon about the holdings, the functions and the staff of the Special Media Records Division. Our division is entrusted with custodial responsibility for NARA's permanently valuable non-textual holdings, including the vast motion picture collection of government films which you will hear much about in the coming days. That responsibility includes ensuring the two cornerstones of NARA's mission mentioned by the archivist, preservation and access. All functions that we perform across all record types tie back to those two core principles. The National Archives was established as an agency of the federal government in 1934 to house its permanently valuable records. Today, NARA administers a wide expanse of holdings across the country at over 44 sites including the Presidential Library System. NARA works with all agencies of the federal government within the three branches, executive, legislative and judicial. It operates the Federal Records Center program and provides records management services to federal agencies every day. The Special Media Records Division is comprised of three records holding branches, the cartographic branch, the moving image and sound branch, and the still picture branch. Each is responsible for large collections of analog and digital media. The staff work in media specific branches and are generally divided into smaller teams with opportunities for both group and independent work. The records held by the division document the activities of federal agencies and other historically significant events, people and places. They are used by a variety of researchers including the general public, attorneys, documentary filmmakers, social and cultural historians, military veterans, journalists, students, genealogists, writers and academics. The majority of the division's 288,000 cubic feet of analog records are stored and managed in College Park. However, many are also stored in specialized cold vaults in NARA's underground storage facility at the Lenexa Federal Records Center in Lenexa, Kansas. This is a shared NARA facility housing over 300,000 reels of motion picture, aerial and microform holdings. The center staff work closely with our division on storage and retrieval services. Each unit is responsible for all functions of the archival records lifecycle within their respective media types. Special media staff members accession records directly from federal agencies and other donors, process new accessions and prepare and update descriptions and finding aids. They establish physical control of records through appropriate data entry and tracking in NARA systems. Once records are processed, the staff provides reference services to both on-site and off-site researchers. This is achieved through consultation, responses to written inquiries and assisting in using records on-site with a variety of equipment. Staff operate three public access research rooms and manage reproduction services for both on-site and off-site public requesters. Ongoing preservation assessments and surveys of records are conducted on an annual basis and records are prioritized for inspection, repair and reformatting onto stable media. As born digital records have become the norm for federal agencies, so too have NARA services transition to digital platforms. The division also partners closely with our preservation program staff for a variety of preservation and reformatting services. NARA's Motion Picture Film and AV Preservation Labs both provide specialized laboratory services, including production of access copies, inspection of new accessions to identify film elements and condition issues, preservation reformatting of deteriorating film, repair of damaged film, and quality control of contracted vendor work. Increasingly in more recent years, the division staff also manages content for a wide variety of NARA online resources, some of which you will hear more detail about during this conference. Updated web pages within the archives.gov site for each of the three media branches seek to connect NARA researchers with the holdings in the most direct ways possible. Numerous links to the NARA catalog point directly to descriptions and digitized holdings now available. Topical pages provide overviews of which series of records are relevant for research. Tutorials for conducting research within popular series seek to break down access barriers and expand access to as wide an audience as possible. During the past year of telework for NARA staff, incredible progress has been made on adding descriptions and digitized content to the NARA catalog from across the division, and staff have been busy adding content every month. Staff have contributed to the development and creation of wholly new electronic resources, such as the web-based finding aid featuring digitized historical photographs from Bureau of Indian Affairs. For the first time, users can now explore digital copies of over 18,000 photographs of various Native American tribes through an engaging and easy to use online experience. The staff of the Special Media Records Division work every day to ensure that the records held by NARA continue to be available for the public that we serve. As the archivist stated, this conference allows us all to connect with each other at a time when those connections have been lacking. Thank you very much for joining us. Thank you for your interest in NARA's film holdings, and thank you for supporting the work that NARA does. Hello, and thank you everyone for joining us today. Thank you also to the organizers for what promises to be an exciting program this week. My name is Ellen Mulligan, and I am the Chief of the Moving Image and Sound Branch in College Park, Maryland. Today I'm going to provide an overview of the branch's holdings and functions. As the archivist David Ferriero mentioned in his welcoming remarks, motion pictures were specifically included in the establishing legislation of the National Archives. This legislation affirmed the value of moving images as sources of historical evidence. It also shined a light on the many unanswered questions about how exactly to preserve and provide access to what was still a relatively new medium in 1934. Over the ensuing decades, staff of the National Archives have played a leading role in developing the art and science of preserving the constantly evolving media used to capture audio visual content, while simultaneously innovating ways to safely provide access as broadly as possible. It is a challenge we continue to face today as the technologies and uses of moving image and sound content continue to evolve and the platforms and opportunities for sharing the national treasures in our custody proliferate. First, I'd like to make a few key points about how the Moving Image and Sound Branch fits into NARA's broader organization. Our mandate to preserve and make available the records of the federal government means that we work closely with colleagues all across NARA. We work closely also with colleagues at the federal agencies that create records to identify records of permanent value to transfer them in a timely fashion and to establish the physical and intellectual control necessary for long life and use. We also collaborate closely with NARA's preservation programs and especially with the motion picture and audio visual preservation labs here in College Park. I also want to mention that the presidential libraries maintain additional audio visual holdings and we also have significant collections of donated materials here in College Park that complement our federal holdings. The holdings of the Moving Image and Sound Branch currently measure approximately 82,000 cubic feet and this breaks out into more than half a million film reels, more than 350,000 sound recordings on disc, tape and other media and more than 200,000 video recordings. We've also started to accession digital audio visual recordings both born digital materials and materials migrated off of other media. Our physical holdings represent over 330,000 Moving Image titles and over 200,000 sound recording titles. To help understand and make use of these materials, we also manage certain associated textual records such as production files, scripts, shot lists, indexes and catalog cards. The National Archives catalog is increasingly the primary tool for accessing our records and we are described at the series level at 96%, 58% of our holdings are described at an item level and 6% of our titles include video files in the catalog. So that's 6% of the Moving Image titles currently have video files in the catalog. Broadly speaking, the function and use of audio visual media has varied and expanded over time. Our film holdings are primarily nonfiction and spanner range, edited and unedited footage, documentaries, newsreels, instructional films, combat films, research and development tests, public education and interpretation films and other types of content. Sound recordings consist of recordings of radio broadcasts, oral histories, documentaries, speeches, interviews, press conferences and other types of proceedings and public affairs information. Video recordings tend toward primarily television news programming, agency created or acquired programs, proceedings and conferences and public service announcements. There holds a number of documentary film classics. You can see here a list of some award winning and very well known titles. These are honor holdings and several have been efforts of restoration projects by our film preservation lab. Many of these are available for screening on the National Archives YouTube channel and they're also available for download from the catalog. Narrow audio visual records from the military have long been the most voluminous and heavily used, with films dating from the beginning of the 20th century through the Gulf War and into the mid 1990s. Tomorrow's panel on military records will delve more deeply into these holdings, so I'll mention just a few highlights. Among the earliest records accession into motion picture holdings was the historical film series from the office of the chief officer of the US Army Signal Corps. This series contains over one million feet of motion pictures shot during the American involvement in World War One. It is now fully available in our online catalog, including scan copies of production files and film scans of the footage. Subsequent transfers from the Army Signal Corps document all theaters of the military activity during World War Two, the occupation of Germany and Japan and war crimes trials, and the Korean and Vietnam wars. Additional materials of interest in our military holdings include films from all branches of the military, captured enemy films and newsreels from access powers in World War Two, films documenting home front activities, and films used for training, internal communications, and public affairs. So I mentioned that the US Army Signal Corps historical collection is now fully available online, and I want to take a moment to talk a bit more about how it serves as an example of some of the work we've been doing to provide new levels of access to the holdings. This project actually started six years ago, thanks to a generous donation from an anonymous source to digitize a wide variety of records in advance of the 100 year commemoration of the First World War. It is an extensive series that was primarily shot by US Army cameraman and documents a range of activities as listed here on the slide. Historically, it was catalogued extensively, but the films were showing effects of age and the series was difficult to use. Over the course of time as the films were scanned and tools and features were added to the catalog, we've been able to upload not only reference copy files of the films to the online catalog, but to also include copies of the production files. And you can see in the image that you can click on the different types of objects, the textual pages or the little film strip icon to see different pieces of the record. And those little blue flags indicate that there's additional data available for the textual records. We enhanced the discoverability of the information in these records by transcribing them. This was a collaborative effort between staff in the moving image and sound branch and the motion picture film lab. The textual records had been run through OCR programs, optical character recognition programs. But these records did not respond particularly well to that application for a couple of reasons. The most obvious, the records that are handwritten or have handwritten notes on them, you know, didn't respond to the OCR at all. And some of the additional records had typeface that was either smudging or blurred and just wasn't easy for the software to read. In addition, there were some tables that the OCR couldn't really decipher. So you can see that the manual transcription of these files would add a lot of valuable information. So we are really excited to complete that project and we hope you find it useful. In addition to military films, narrow holds a wide array of films from civil and foreign service agencies. These records represent the government's efforts to document their accomplishments to communicate with international and domestic civilian populations about projects and efforts and to implement policy. The bulk of these film holdings in our holdings date from after World War II to the 1980s, though there are some notable earlier holdings. Subjects here include infrastructure, the management of natural and cultural resources, labor and equal employment opportunities, health and safety, law enforcement, civil rights, housing and the environment. And that's barely scratching the surface. Among the highlights are films in the office of the Secretary of the Interior and the Department of Agriculture concerning civilian conservation corps camps, soil and forest reclamation, the development of water power, and recreational uses of the national parks. We're also excited to be making significant progress on some more recent Park Service holdings, consisting of films from the Park Service's Harper's Ferry Center for Interpretation. And you'll hear more about these in another panel this afternoon. Audiovisual records from the Department of State deal with foreign policy issues related to World War II, the Cold War, and national security. Foreign aid and relations with other nationalities are dealt with in the audiovisual records of the U.S. Information Agency and the U.S. Agency for International Development. The USIA holdings are especially rich in film subjects, as they were produced to serve the agency's mission of public diplomacy, to understand, inform and influence foreign publics in promotion of the national interest, and to broaden the dialogue between Americans and U.S. institutions and their counterparts abroad. So with reference to these films, the USIA films, I'd like to talk about a couple additional approaches for description and transcription that we've been adding to the catalog. For the description example, we're going to look at this series of USIA library stock shots. This is a series of under-described and uninvited footage. It's of high quality, and it had piqued the interest of researchers who had taken note of the minimal description in our preservation books in the reference room. They began requesting sets of reference files, and the footage was of high quality, but there was little in the way of descriptive information beyond occasional source notes on film leaders and slates. Once the video files were uploaded to the catalog, staff were able to screen them remotely and create metadata, often by the time code and often with reference to outside reference sources to identify people and places, locations, events, and enhance the discoverability of the high quality footage. You can see here some of that information in the screen grab in the lower window. And you can also see that the slate identifies the director as Lawrence, who many of you will recognize that name from many of the documentary film classics and in our holdings. So it was a very exciting discovery, and there's an article in our blog, The Unwritten Record. If you'd like to read more about the project, I would direct you there. Another type of access we've been working on is soundtrack transcriptions, and here you can see a shot from a film from the USI series of films from the Tales of the Hoja. We actually have two different models for transcription that I'm going to share with you. This is the model in our online catalog, which doesn't allow the transcription to be applied as closed captions, but rather preserves the characteristics of the original record, which was not captioned, and allows for the entry of the transcription in the lower window. This was a rather labor intensive process. It was done manually, including the time code was entered manually. So we're looking for additional tools that may be available to help automate some of that. But the bonus of this approach to transcription is that it does keep the record in its, you know, a true copy of the record, and it is also downloadable. You can export the transcription from the catalog using the export tools, and you can also download the film. So the data and record are both available for reuse. The other model for transcription, which our colleagues in the Motion Picture Film Lab have been working on, is entering transcriptions or editing the automated transcriptions in YouTube. And these do appear as closed captions, and the YouTube platform also allows for that smoother viewing experience. So it's two different approaches. YouTube is more user friendly for a screening experience, whereas the catalog is more authentic to the original record and also downloadable for use. And last, but definitely not least, I happily mentioned nearest holdings from NASA. These holdings have grown substantially over the last decade and have been the focus of several large archival processing projects in the runoff to the Apollo 11 anniversary back in 2019. The films run the gamut of NASA's spaceflight programs, including Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, Skylab, and the Space Shuttle programs. And the holdings include film reports, onboard footage, documentary footage of tests, launches, site construction, parachute and spacecraft recovery. There are also film or press conferences and edited films. And I've listed just a handful of series here on the slide. There's really much, much more. So I've got two last access models to talk about in reference to the NASA films. The first is another catalog project where we used the Citizen Archivist tools. And this time it was actually with Citizen Archivist. These films came to us from NASA. It's over 13,000 titles dating from 1959 to 1993. They were transferred in non-sequential batches over time and they were accompanied by item lists and copies of scene lists for many of the films. So where we had the information we were able to create item level descriptions in the catalog very efficiently. And we were able to add the scene lists where we had them available. However, most of the films came to us in single preservation instances. We didn't have reference copies. So as different researchers requested reference copies, we immediately loaded them up into the catalog. And depending on the item, there may or may not be anything beyond a title description. So you can see in this example, the title is not really very descriptive. It's just the manned spacecraft sent for film report. So we worked with our colleagues in the Office of Innovation to create what's called the Citizen Archivist mission to add metadata. And that's what you see over in the tags on the side when we would put a film in the catalog. We would then invite Citizen Archivist to watch the film and add tags. So personal names, names of equipment, mission, identifications. You can see how valuable it is to add that information to an item like this. And finally with NASA, I just wanted to mention a new source for access copies, which is digitization partnerships. We entered into a very successful digitization partnership for our large format film. The partner was interested in NASA's Panavision collection. And we were able to have the partnership cover both that collection and some special venue films that we had not been able to access or reformat for many years. So we're still working on the data and getting the access copies in-house and into the catalog, but the results have been very successful. So I hope that was a helpful, if somewhat whirlwind tour. I hope it gave you an idea of the scope of our holdings and the new kinds of data and tools and projects that we've been developing for enhanced discoverability. In summary, there are a number of ways to pursue research remotely, including contacting our reference staff through the Mopix email box. We are also now able to provide limited numbers of courtesy copies of previously digitized items in response to research requests to our Mopix mailbox. You can also reach out to us at the History Hub, which is an online research community supporting genealogists, historians, and others interested in public history. And I've mentioned a number of online resources that you can make use of from home, including the National Archives Catalog, which I've discussed extensively. The US National Archives YouTube channel, where you can screen a wide variety of our holdings as well as public programs. The Special Media Division maintains a blog. It's called The Unwritten Record. And there you'll find features on fascinating discoveries in the holdings, new accessions, preservation and access projects, and rediscoveries across the special media holdings. We've also been updating our webpage, the Motion Picture Branch webpage. And there you'll now find some topic pages to help guide research in some of our most popular holdings and frequent updates to our holdings and what's available in the catalog. So when we are able to, we look forward to welcoming you back to our research room. In the research room, you'll have access to a number of resources and services, including staff consultants, reference copies in a variety of formats, finding aids, and textual records. We can also instruct you in the use of our reproduction services, which have been on hiatus during the coronavirus closure. And you can keep up to date on our status at archives.gov slash coronavirus. And once again, I hope to welcome you back to our research room in College Park sometime soon. Thank you for your attention, and I'm looking forward to the conference this week. Thank you. A successful cooperative curb market. Some of these markets are quite profitable. Splendid views few men have seen because the peaks were inaccessible. Now open up as these trails lead hikers to the mountaintops. Handpicked both for their ability as soldiers and their skill as motion picture technicians. To perfect their camera technique, they receive advanced instruction in all phases of aerial and ground photography with all types of equipment. They'd shown us movies before, but they said this one was special. This one was made by the Army just for us. It's your first time under fire, and suddenly you realize something. It's a surprise. Those guys are trying to kill you. You reach your spot, and you reach up and push the button. As soon as our troops arrived, arrangements were made to remove these people from the miserable surroundings. You see, we human beings are not born with prejudices. Always they are made for us, made by someone who wants something. Remember that when you hear this kind of talk, somebody is going to get something out of it, and it isn't going to be you. They're members of the Japanese-American combat team, thought that lands their parents. The Hawaiian boys gave the combat team a motto, go for broke. It's a gambler's term. It means, shoot the words, go all out, do or die, go for broke. I was thinking of the men in service. Private Roberts, Sergeant Jackson, and uh... Private Park, first class. First class is right. The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights are now assembled in one place for display and safekeeping. They will be protected from disaster and from the ravages of time. As the lathe turns, so does my mind turn over the work of our union in the community. With skilled fingers, Maria coils the clay. Only the potter knows what form the finished product will take. The ideal state must own everything, business and industry and farms. Our growing and peaceful economy is dedicated to the well-being of the people who take part in the Healthy Sports Program. Approved structures are marked with this distinctive yellow and black sign. But buildings alone will not save lives. When danger threatened him, he never got hurt. He knew just what to do. He got... What are you supposed to do when you see the flash? Well, when they're up there in space, you know what parts you've worked on. And you just say, well, I hope that part don't fail because I feel it was my fault if it did. No longer serve on a committee which cannot possibly make changes if it functions only in an advisory capacity. I see a constant recurrence of the conflict between the police and the community until the community finally has some measure of control over the police. That means to make decisions. My name is Lydia Farrethunder Bluebird. I am an Ogallala Sioux. My great-uncle was Moses Red Horse owner. This is his winter account. In Sioux, it is called Varnier to Yawhapi. Whenever people, it's hardly room for any... Just say no. Well, good afternoon. I'm happy to be with you today in our world of instant distancing and Zoom. And I want to thank the National Archivist, David Ferraro and his colleagues for their cooperation with the conference and for their role in preserving motion pictures with special thanks for their efforts over the years and preserving United States information agency films from the era that I was part of. Also, my friends and colleagues at the Library of Congress, the librarian Carla Hayden and Mike Michon, head of the moving image section. I've been asked to speak about filmmaking at USIA during 1962 to 1967, the years I headed motion picture production. My recall of that period has been refreshed because I'm just completing a rather ambitious memoir that has required me to look back an endeavor that leads me to want to acknowledge scholars and historians who did such valuable research in documenting the history of USIA filmmaking. Among them, Nicholas Culls, Jennifer Horne, Tony Shaw, Brian Reel and the late Richard Dyer McCann. By the way, my memoir, An American Story, My Life in Hollywood and Washington will be coming out a year from now, spring of 2022. And you have just heard the very first plug from my book, Among an Avalanche that will be coming during the coming year. I was not the first in my family to make films for the United States government. My father, having directed Alice Adams in 1935, at the age of 30, had made his way to the top of the front rank of Hollywood directors. One night in 1942, he was in his screening room at Columbia Pictures and he watched Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will. He would say later, it affected me more than any film I would ever see. The next day, he arranged for a commission in the Army and on the condition that he would serve overseas. And he went and he, as a major than a lieutenant colonel, headed the special coverage unit of the Allied, the Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Force, a group that became known as the Stevens Irregulars. And my dad headed the photography on D-Day through the liberation of Paris, the Battle for Normandy before that, the Battle of the Bulge. They would link up with the Russians at the Elbe River and perhaps most Syrian in his memory, the liberation of the concentration camp at Dachau. I, George C. Stevens, Colonel, Army of the United States, hereby certify that from the 1st of March 1945 to the 8th of May 1945, I was on active duty with the United States Army Signal Corps, attached to Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Forces. And among my official duties was the direction of the photographing of Nazi concentration camps and prison camps as liberated by Allied forces. And he was a man who made mostly lighthearted comedies before the war and came back to make a place in the sun and chain and giant in the diary of Anne Frank and the greatest story ever told. Well, my introduction to filmmaking was as a lieutenant in the United States Air Force. I was a motion picture officer. And I would just mention that in passing because it was my first experience directing films. And perhaps the National Archivist can find meat cutting by the rail method or the walk around inspection of the F-86D or even the walk around inspection of the F-86E classics. But after the Air Force, I worked with my father, but before that I had the opportunity of working with Jack Webb of Dragnet fame and he made me a director and I directed Alfred Hitchcock Presents and Peter Gunn. And I just completed working with my father on the diary of Anne Frank when President Kennedy was elected. And he appointed one of his first appointments was Edward R. Murrow to head the United States Information Agency. If you recall, Ask Not was the slogan of the times, what you can do for your country, but what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country. A friend of mine at 20th Century Fox and I read an article about Jackie Kennedy planning a trip to Pakistan. And we wrote to Murrow saying, we'd like to make a pro bono documentary about Mrs. Kennedy's trip. Then we thought it would would be a wonderful expression of American goodwill. We hadn't heard from Murrow. And then we had an announcement that he was coming to speak to the motion picture industry at a dinner at Chasen's on Friday night. And we contacted his office, as he was going to meet with all the heads of studios and top directors and producers, writers. That it was the new frontier and we wondered if he would like to meet with some younger people from the film industry. And he did and he came to a meeting at the director skill on a Friday afternoon. And we spoke for an hour and Murrow was of course so impressive. And we talked about government filmmaking, even discussing the possibility of a foundation to support documentary filmmaking. And the next day I was in my bachelor pad in the Hollywood Hills and had a call from Sam Goldwyn Jr. And he said that Ed Murrow is staying at my father's house and he wonders if you could come by tomorrow and Sunday and spend some time with him. And of course I was, I'd be very pleased to and but I asked I said, you know why he'd want to be seeing me. And Sam said, well he's looking for somebody to head the motion picture operations at the USIA. And I said Sam, I'm totally involved in preparing the greatest story ever told with my father and I'm like his partner now, and I just couldn't do it. So I don't I wouldn't want to waste Mr Murrow's time phone rang half an hour later it was Sam Goldwyn. Ed says, you won't be wasting his time. So I went to Sam Goldwyn's on that Sunday and remember driving up and on the lawn was the famous croquet game with Darryl Zanik and Mike Romanoff and others of the Hollywood tribe. And I sat in Murrow in Goldwyn's living room with with Murrow. And he asked me to take the job and and I explained to him my commitment. But he understood and so I left and we went about my business and the next day I was walking to lunch with my father and mentioned this for the first time. And I remember it so clearly he looked at me. And he said, I think you'll have to do it. He understood that rather than me being, though I never considered it a shadow, but, you know, a junior going forward. And I did I went to see Murrow and I took the job. And many 1776 Pennsylvania Avenue on the first day in February of 1962. Ed used to say that we're telling America's stories warps and all. And he he was not pleased with the films us I had been making he wanted them to be livelier. And so coincidentally our first challenge was the film about Jackie Kennedy's trip to India or to Pakistan, but she had now added India. And so she was visiting both countries and of course the first question was, who will make the film. I really did not know of any vocabulary of filmmakers, documentary filmmakers. So I started screening films and I saw two films by a man named Leo Seltzer from New York. And I'd like invited him to come down and he came with his wife Doris Rantsehoff. And we discussed the film and I thought that they would be ideal for doing. And since we're talking about filmmaking in the government. I should mention that. Two days later, a fellow with close cropped hair and rimless eyeglasses named Paul McNichol came to my office joined by my deputy Tony Guarco. He had a file and he put a tall file on my desk and said this is Leo Seltzer's security file. And McNichol felt that there were things in his background that made him unsuitable for working for the government that his associations might embarrass the government I won't elaborate. And I then said, well, Mr McNichol, what if we don't agree what happens and he said we go to see Mr Murrow. So the next morning, we met with Ed Murrow with this security file on the top of a coffee table before us. And Murrow talked about it a little bit. And then he said, well, let me ponder this overnight. And remember as we walked out Murrow kind of put his arm on my shoulder and he said, Paul McNichol's a good cop. And I went home kind of wondering what my fate was. The next morning I heard from Paul McNichol. He said, Mr Stevens, he says, we're going to be okay with Leo Seltzer you can go ahead with him. And of course it was Ed Murrow, a real leader who did the right thing. And the next step again about government filmmaking was all films were made under contract to the lowest bidder. We asked Seltzer to submit a bid as they asked Hearst metrotone and Fox movie tone. The newsreel agencies and Hearst metrotone came in the lowest at $36,000. And Seltzer was around 70. Of course I was was a real setback but I was learning the value of civil servants. Anthony Guarco, my deputy, this made everything possible for me. And he took a day, and he came back to me and said, Hearst metrotone is going to hire Leo Seltzer and Doris Rantsehoff, and they will make the film a solution and they did a wonderful job and in the film was a success. We made three films actually invitation to India for showing in India invitation to Pakistan for showing in Pakistan and Jacqueline Kennedy's Asian journey for showing in 100 to 100 countries to which USIA sent its films overseas. And my most important job going forward would be searching for skilled independent filmmakers because we had as many as 300 documentaries to make a year. And I met the first of and one of the best at the Cannes Film Festival a month later. I saw a first film by an American graduate of the French film school called The Olive Trees of Justice. It was a beautiful film. And I met James Blue, the director, and he became one of our most valuable filmmakers through the years of my time at USIA. I'm not going to recite lots of titles, but the school at Rincon Santo and most notably the March, which was a film about the 1963 March on Washington, which is now part of the national film registry of the great American films. Another was Charles Guggenheim from St. Louis, who eventually moved to Washington and became a mainstay of USIA filmmaking, giving us our first Oscar winner, nine from Little Rock, about the students who entered the Rock High School, ending segregation in the school. And there were literally done dozens of others, just a few names, Terry Sanders, Gary Goldsmith, Haskell Wexler, Bill Greaves, Carol Ballard, Adam Schwiller, Bruce Hershenson, and I had heard of none of them before, except for Terry Sanders, who with his brother had won an Oscar for a time out of war. And these were the heart of the success of the films we made. And a key factor in our work was managing the approval process for our films. And the goal was to have the films approved without having the point of view of the films being diluted. And there was a tension between the cold area directors, the Foreign Service officers responsible for the geographic areas, and me and the filmmakers with Murrow in the middle, and my need to protect the filmmakers and their work. And there was this question of, some felt that our films were too sophisticated for the audience, whereas we were inclined to respect the audience and its perception. And I had grown up with a father whose most important category really in his thinking was the control of his pictures against the intrusion of studio executives. Also, I remember Frank Capra, when he left studio filmmaking to make the Why We Fight series during World War II, and Frank, who was about maybe a five foot six, came to Washington for a meeting at the Pentagon, and he walked into this room, and there were about 14 generals in their uniforms with their medals, and Capra had his major's uniform on. And he smiled, and he looked around and said hello to all of them, and he said, well, fellas, he said, are we going to talk about motion pictures? And they said, yeah, they nodded yes. He said, then I sit at the head of the table. And that was the mentality that guided the best filmmaking in Hollywood and during the war. We made a film called John F. Kennedy Years of Lightning Day of Drums, and I remember I went to Africa to see films with audiences to comfort the regional directors that I was, did take an interest in how they observed films and how they saw them. And I remember we went in a mobile unit out in the Congo, out in the bush, and one evening set up the screen, portable screen, and the people from the village all gathered around. And I remember they watched from both sides of the screen. And I was fascinated by their attentiveness. And I remember the scene when the motorcade in Dallas, and you see Kennedy and the people waving, and you cut to a shot of the schoolbook like depository. And the audience in a village in Africa, it had a utterance of shock when they saw this, that image. In other words, images had traveled traveled so widely in the movies, and this audience was so alert, even that kind of subtly in a film. That whole era of USIA filmmaking, it was, you know, wonderfully stimulating and to be part of many people said that those Kennedy years were the greatest years ever to be in government, and he took an interest in our films. I occasionally receive receive calls from him. One, I was drawn out of a meeting of Ed Murrow's large SAF meeting one afternoon, my secretary came with a note. And I went downstairs one flight to my office and walked in and picked up the phone and it was Mrs. Lincoln, the president's secretary. And he heard this voice and he said, George, I saw the five cities of June last night. I think it's one of the best government documentaries I've ever seen. Where's it being shown? How many countries? What languages? He had an interest and he was known for not calling the secretary to state, but calling the person on the, on the Korea desk, where he'd get a firsthand report. But it was Murrow, excuse me, who, who really made everything possible. And I just would kind of close this with a story. Looking back at this story, November 23 1963, we'd heard the news today before. And Ed Murrow had been out for six weeks and he had lung surgery. As you know, he was a big smoker and he had lung cancer. And Ed had always wore those Savile Row suits or often in shirt sleeves. But on this day I walked into his office and he had a green cardigan sweater. And, you know, he was just come back from the hospital. And of course, what do you say on a day like that? And he handed me a letter. And it was a letter from President Kennedy to him in the hospital saying how important he thought the film, the five cities of June was and how important Ed's work was and how he looked forward to having him back. He handed me the letter and I read it, you know, it was so moving to read it that it was in his hands just 10 days before. And I handed it back to Ed and Ed put his hand forward. He said, you keep the letter you made the film. And I was there to propose something to Murrow. I wanted to make the first feature length film that USIA had ever made. We had cameraman in countries around the world with 35 millimeter color film covering the aftermath of the assassination. We were prepared to set up and cover the funeral and to make a feature length film about Kennedy's time in government, which would be called Years of Lightning Day of Drum. John F Kennedy Years of Lightning Day of Drums. And Murrow thought for a while. And then he said, first, he said make a 10 minute film about Lyndon Johnson. And Ed Murrow had the experience that I didn't have in the judgment that he was now our president. That was what the public had to see first was that the transition had been made a peaceful transition and the handling over a power. And make your Kennedy film. And that just gives you a sense of the kind of man that Ed Murrow was and were it not for Ed Murrow, I don't see any way that I would have been able to do the work that we did. And create the successes and the value to the country that the USIA films were in that period. So that's my brief of my USIA experience and and I was just saying that the experience I gained there and what I learned there that to another venture that involved government and filmmaking. And that was a creation of the American Film Institute in 1967. But that is a story for another day. And I thank you for listening. And my wishes for a lively and informative conversation on the topic of 75 years of government filmmaking. I've enjoyed discussing a few of my years with you. Thank you very much. Welcome to films of state moving images made by governments. My name is Oliver Geichen, and I'm an associate professor of English at the University of Maryland, where I am also a member of the cinema and media studies faculty. This conference has been made possible by a number of different organizations to whom we are very grateful. The University of Maryland Cinema and Media Studies program, and the National Archives and Records Administration deserve the first and biggest share of thanks for their significant contributions to making this conference a reality. Thanks to Luca Arseneuk of Cinema and Media Studies, and to Ellen Mulligan and Dan Rooney of the National Archives. Without their support. This event would not have come to pass. Thanks as well to Karen Nelson at the English Department Center for Literary and Comparative Studies, and Rosie Grant also of the English Department for their help with logistical issues. And special thanks to Kyle Bikoff who set up the conference website, and to Caitlin McGrath, the executive director of the Old Greenbelt Theater for completing the work on the conference flyer. Dennis Doros generously arranged for us to use the milestone film's Vimeo account for the conference screening, which will take place this evening at 730. Don't miss it. Thank you very much for that Dennis. And finally, I have the happy task of thanking my co organizers Martin Johnson and assistant professor of English and comparative literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Brian Reel, an assistant professor of library and information science at Southern Connecticut State University, and Audrey Amidon and Heidi Holmstrom, motion picture preservation specialists at the National Archives. The process of working on this conference has been wonderfully collegial and I'm grateful to my co organizers for their hard work and good cheer. And now I will hand things over to Martin Johnson for an overview of the conference topic. Historically, the cinema has been understood to be a commercial enterprise emerging from the cauldron of inventors, capitalists and artists in the late 19th century. But governments were active participants in the cinema from the beginning, and not just as regulators of theaters, business practices and films. It's early as 1896, government officials were using moving pictures and election campaigns, and soon after, film became a valuable tool for documentation, research and propaganda. Early experiments with using film for governmental purposes became full fledged operations by the mid 1910s, and government film production, distribution and exhibition expanded alongside the growth of the nation state in subsequent decades. In order to capture the diversity of government film, we have organized this conference into seven panels, each focusing on a discrete topic. Each panel will open with a series of short, pre-recorded presentations, followed by a live, lengthy discussion, including questions from members of the public. This afternoon we have our first panel on government and the land, starting at 3pm Eastern. This evening, at 7.30pm, we have a screening of selections from government films reflecting the topics explored by presenters at the Films of State Conference. Tomorrow morning, at 10am Eastern, our second panel on moving images and the military will commence. Our third panel, scheduled for Thursday at 1pm, will focus on how moving images are used by museums, documentarians, television producers and educators. We will close out Thursday with two panels focusing on films made by the United States Information Agency. At 3.30pm, our fourth panel will focus on the infrastructure of public diplomacy. And then, on Thursday evening, at 7.30pm, we will spotlight films focused on the ideas of public diplomacy. We chose the late time to allow us to accommodate presentations by researchers who are based in Asia and who have discussions about the impact of government films around the world. On Friday, we will start at 10am with a panel titled Government and its People. And then that afternoon, we will hold a panel on using textual records to research moving images. We are also very excited to be able to conclude our conference with a series of short workshops, organized by National Archives and Records Administration staff, on how to conduct research at the National Archives. This will start at 3pm. In closing, we would like to extend our appreciation for the scholars, archivists and others whose time and expertise are making this conference possible, and whose presentations will attest to the diversity, the complexity and the enduring interest of films made by governments. Thank you for attending Films of State.