Good morning. I just want to welcome you all to the films of state conference day to panel to my name is Heidi Wasson. I'm a professor of film and media studies at Concordia University in Montreal, and I have the honor to chair this panel, devoted to the topic of moving images and the military. I'm going to introduce each panelist, and then we will be treated to their presentations in tight sequence, and then we'll have a Q&A session afterwards. So I invite you to use the Q&A session at the button at the bottom of your zoom interface and those questions will channel to me and I will have the privilege of reading them to the panelists and we'll have a discussion thereafter. So, let me begin with the panelists I'll go in the order of their presentations. First, we have Nick Schwartz, who is an archivist in the National Archives at College Parks moving image and sound branch. Nick received his Bachelor of Arts in History and Bachelors of Science in biochemistry from Oregon State University in 2011, and a master of library science from Catholic University in 2015. He worked in the moving image branch since he was hired there in 2014 as a student employee. Next we'll have a paper from Dr. Alice Lovejoy associate professor and Department of Cultural Studies and comparative literature and the moving image studies program, excuse me Alice at the University of Minnesota. She is the author of army film and the avant garde cinema and experiment in the Czechoslovak military 2015 and co editor of the forthcoming book called remapping Cold War media institutions infrastructures translations. She is at work on a book, tentatively entitled militant chemistry film and its raw materials. Kaya Scott will come next. She holds a PhD in film and moving image studies from Concordia University here in Montreal, her dissertation, picturing the damaged mind film and techniques of visualization in the modernization of World War two military psychiatry is a critical history of the role of media and the modernization of the United States military psychiatry program during World War two. And Dr. Florian Hoof is currently a professor of media systems and media organization at pattern born university. He is the author of a book called Angels of Efficiency, a media history of consulting with Oxford University Press recently out, and co editing a forthcoming anthology on non theatrical film entitled films that work harder, the global circulation of industrial film with Amsterdam University Press. And I just want to say we also have joining us for the discussion session, Dan Rooney, who is the director of the special media records division at the National Archives and College Park. He's worked at the National Archives since 2002 as an archives technician in the still branch still picture branch as an archivist with the civilian textual reference branch, and the motion picture sound and video branch. And also as supervisory archivist for the motion picture sound and video branch since 2010. He currently represents NARA on the National Recording Preservation Board and the Association of moving image archivists. Thank you very much for joining us and I'll see you after the presentations. Hi, everyone, my name is Nick Schwartz and I am an archivist in the moving image and sound branch at the National Archives at College Park. Today I will be giving a short overview of the military films in our holdings and some potential entry points for your own research into our holdings. While this presentation will by no means be an exhaustive or complete guide to all of our military records, I am hopeful by the end of this presentation you'll have foundation to start your own research into our motion picture holdings. This will be a two part presentation. I'll start with a short overview of the branches of the military and their assigned record group or groups that are most useful for film research, as well as highlight some particularly interesting or high use series contained by those record groups. Then in part two, I'll run through a much abbreviated timeline of the 20th century highlighting key record groups in series. That being said, let's dig in. There are currently six branches of the United States military. They are the Air Force, Army, Coast Guard, Marine Corps, Navy, and Space Force. We currently do not have any records from the Space Force and the Moving Image and Sound Branch, but we do have some high use series from the Department of Defense, which I will cover instead. We'll start with the Army. While the Army has many record groups assigned to various departments within the branch, far and away the most useful record group for our purposes is record group 111, records of the Office of the Chief Signal Officer. This record group is quite broad, holding many different types of films such as edited productions, training films, unedited combat footage, and interagency communications like newsreels and press releases. This record group also spans much of the 20th century, however it does tend to taper off after the Vietnam War. Series of note include 111H and 111M, both of which cover World War I and are mostly, if not completely digitized. 111ADC and 111LC, which between them cover World War II through the Vietnam War. And finally, 111OF, of which contain edited informational films. Meanwhile, the Air Force has two relevant record groups assigned to it. Record Group 18, records of the Army Air Forces, and Record Group 342, records of the United States Air Force commands, activities, and organizations. Technically, Record Group 18 is part of the Army Record Group family, but as it is the precursor to the Air Force, I find it helpful to keep it with the Air Force material. Record Group 18 contains mostly World War II related material, while Record Group 342 covers almost the entirety of the 20th century. Another important distinction is Record Group 18 contains mostly unedited footage, while Record Group 342, similar to Record Group 111, contains both edited and unedited footage. The most high-use series from these record groups are 342USAF and 18CS, but it is also worthwhile to note 18SFP, which contains Color World War II footage. We recently finished a project to upload catalog card scans of the series to the catalog and are in the midst of transcribing these cards to improve findability. Next is the Coast Guard or Record Group 26. This is our least used military record group in this presentation, as it tends to be overshadowed by the Navy. Nevertheless, it's still a good place to look for naval footage from World War II onward. It's also worth noting that this record group tends to contain more non-combat or peacetime footage and holds more edited footage than many of the other series and record groups mentioned in this presentation. Noteworthy series include 26 General, moving images related to Coast Guard activities, and 26EX, moving images related to the Exxon Valdez oil spill. In contrast is the Marine Corps, Record Group 127, which contains mostly unedited footage, much of which is combat or wartime footage. This record group consists of three series, 127R, 127G, and 127MH, with the majority of the records in either 127G or 127R. 127R holds silent 16mm color films, while 127G holds black and white 35mm films. Next is the Department of Defense. For the Department of Defense, the major record group to focus on is Record Group 330, records of the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Our two main series in this record group, 330DIVIC and 330DIMOC, hold a wide range of material and cover a variety of topics. This is because while the individual branches may still hold and create their own AV material, the Department of Defense has started centralizing that responsibility and collecting AV material from numerous scattered repositories. This also means that it is quite possible that some material in our 330 series are duplicated in the other record groups that I've mentioned. Finally, the Navy has two relevant record groups for motion pictures. Record Group 80 and Record Group 428, both named General Records of the Department of the Navy. This division is due to a reorganization of the military with the establishment of the Office of the Secretary of Defense in 1947. Records transferred before the reorganization are filed under Record Group 80, while those transferred later are filed under Record Group 428. Record 428 tends to hold our newer material, while Record Group 80 tends to hold our older material. However, both record groups contain material related to World War II. In fact, it's not unheard of to find a copy of a record in both 428 and Record Group 80. Important series to note include 428 NPC, and 428 MN, and 80 MN. That concludes Part 1 and kicks off Part 2, where I'll play some of our frequently used record groups in series into chronological context. Many of the series I'll highlight will be ones I've mentioned in this previous part, but I'll also cover some new material as well. We'll start with anything before World War I, which isn't a whole lot, even less when we limited to military-related footage. Both 342 USAF and 330 DMOC have some footage related to early aviation and the Wright brothers, but generally, if you're looking for footage this early, you'll have the most success by looking in a donated collection, such as the American Film Institute Collection, which holds some footage from the American Expedition into Mexico, or some of our larger donated collections, such as the Ford Collection or the American Red Cross Collection. Fast-forwarding to World War I, we have three key series to highlight, 111H, 111M, and CVS-CVS-WWI. I believe most, if not all, the films in these series are digitized and available either in the catalog or on our public access PCs in our research rooms, and even better, most of the 111H files are scanned from film, so the quality tends to be very good. While these are our three main World War I series, I'd also like to point out the Motion Picture website has a topic page for World War I records, which you can view for a more extensive list of related material. Now for what is one of our most requested topics, World War II. We have a lot of record groups in series with World War II related material. We also have many donated collections, which will contain relevant material. As such, there is no way I'll be able to cover everything. So again, I'll refer you to our Motion Picture topic page for a more exhaustive list of series and record groups. I'll start by talking about some of the more regionally focused series. I do want to make it clear that just because I've put a series under a certain theater, it doesn't mean that that series only holds material related to that theater. For example, both 111ADC and 18CS include footage from China. They just tend to hold more footage from Europe. We also have some series with color footage, the aforementioned 18SFP, which mainly focuses around Italy and France, and the Jack Leib collection contains footage from the D-Day landing on Utah Beach. Record Group 238 is better known for its audio recordings, which include the entire Nuremberg trials, but it does contain some films which were used as evidence during the trials as well. On the Pacific Front, 428NPC, 80MN, and 342USAF, similar to 111ADC and 18CS, contain footage from multiple theaters. They hold a lot of footage from the Pacific and Japan, but there is some Atlantic theater footage contained in them as well. In contrast, both of the 127 series World War II material is very heavily focused in the Pacific. Homefront footage is a bit more spread out throughout our holdings, but key series or record groups to know about include Record Group 210 and our 111TEAM21 series for footage related to the internment of Americans of Japanese ancestry, Record Group 171 for educational films related to civil defense, Record Group 56 for films promoting the purchase of war bonds, and the Ford collection for footage of wartime production. Sometimes you can't narrow down your research or you want a more general view of World War II. We've got some good starting points for that type of research as well. American produced newsreels can be found in Record Group 208 and in our donated newsreel collections such as the Universal, Market Time, and Paramount newsreels to name a few. Similarly, Record Group 242, the National Archives collection of foreign record seas, holds captured records which for us consists mostly of German, Italian, Japanese, or Russian newsreels, all of which and more are contained in our 242MID series. Record Group 107 covers the span of World War II as do the two major 330 series, and finally the 111OF series contains some famous informational films such as the Why We Fight series, the Your Job In series, and the Negro soldier. While I've barely scratched the surface of our World War II material, I do need to keep moving on to the Korean War. This war does not have the breadth of material that World War II has, and you've probably noticed that many of the noted series are series that I've mentioned before. 111ADC 342USAF, 428MPC, 330DIMOCK, 330DIVIC, and both of the 127 series. Of the new series, 111TV and 111DD are both army produced news broadcasts, while 111LC is similar to the 111ADC series and consists of unedited footage. The Korean War is where we start to see the transition from the 111ADC series into the 111LC series. So far, I've been categorizing our holdings based on wars. I do want to be clear that we also have a lot of military footage that isn't related to combat or wartime. There is a lot of variety in our non-combat footage, and it can range from training films produced by the Army or Air Force in our 111TF and 342TF series respectively to internal news and communication films like our 342AFN series to PSAs and recruitment ads found in our 26R series. As the big bucket series of the Department of Defense, a lot of this type of footage can also be found in our 330DIVIC and 330DIMOCK series. I'll very briefly cover the Vietnam War, since so many of the series I've previously mentioned also include Vietnam War-related records. The most relevant of these repeated series would be 127R and 111LC. Much of the 127R footage is unedited footage with the troops on the ground, and both record groups 127 and 342 will contain aerial footage from helicopters. Finally, I'll end the presentation by covering everything we have available post-Vietnam, which, like our pre-World War I content, isn't a whole lot. However, we are constantly processing new materials, so you may wish to contact us to learn more about newly-accessioned or processed records. Our 428NPC series has some footage from the 80s, and both record group 342 as well as record group 518 have some series related to operations Desert Storm and Desert Shield. However, the best place to look for this relatively modern footage would be our major 330 series, especially 330DIMOCK, which contains footage from the War on Terror and Operation Iraqi Freedom. With that, we've reached the end of the presentation. I hope that this will be of use to you if and when you begin your own research at the National Archives. Thank you for your attention, and I look forward to answering any questions you may have. Hello, my name is Alice Lovejoy. I'm an associate professor at the University of Minnesota, and I want to thank the organizers very much for inviting me to present. What I'll be talking about today is drawn from my book in progress, which is entitled Militant Chemistry, Film, and its Raw Materials, and I'll be discussing research done in part at the National Archives in Atlanta in College Park. But I'm going to begin not with American materials, but with a film, Congo, which was made during World War II by the Belgian director Andre Covent, and shown in the United States in 1945. Congo came about because the Belgian government was frustrated with what it perceived as international ignorance about the role that its colony, the Belgian Congo, and by extension the Belgian metropole, played in the war effort. A major part of this was the colony's role as a source of raw materials, and particularly of metals such as the copper, zinc, silver, gold, tungsten, and steel that was largely mined in the Katanga province, and that is pictured in the film, as you can see in this clip. These materials were extracted with the violence for which the Belgian Congo is notorious, and in turn they became, as Raymond Dumet writes, a fundamental part of the slaughter of war, devoured by the assembly lines that made brass cartridges and cannon shells, unquote. But in his report on the film's production, Covent recounted the story of these strategic minerals in different terms. In his words, they made Katanga, without a doubt, the part of the African continent that lends itself best to the cinematic experience. Minerals made the Belgian Congo cinematic not only in the way in which glittering on screen, they reflected back on Belgium. A year before Covent made his film, another mineral mined in the colony, uranium, had found itself entwined with the American film industry. In October 1940, 1200 tons of the radioactive ore was packed into drums, such as those you see in this clip, loaded onto boats and shipped to New York. It sat for nearly two years in a Staten Island vegetable oil warehouse until in September 1942, it was purchased by General Leslie Groves of the Manhattan Project and sent to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where it was separated into fissionable and non-fissionable material for the physicists working at Los Alamos. The separation was carried out by the Tennessee Eastman Corporation, Eastman Kodak's chemical subsidiary, and by its scientists and technicians who had previously spent most of their time manufacturing celluloid and related products. Now, uranium and film are uncomfortable bedfellows. As I discussed elsewhere in this project after the Trinity explosion, Kodak and other American film manufacturers were plagued by what were called black spots, and you can see them here. Fogged film caused by radioactive particles and water or packaging, film that was unusable and unsellable. But from 1943 to 1945, uranium and film coexisted at Tennessee Eastman. And in this talk, I'll discuss how this happened and then consider what it means for the topic of this conference. That is, for how we understand the film's relationship to the state. So I'll begin with a condensed history of the chain of chemical slash material and industrial developments that led Tennessee Eastman and Eastman Kodak to the atomic bomb. This began with methanol, a solvent for cellulose nitrate film base, which you can see on the left side of the screen, which Tennessee Eastman was established in 1920 to manufacture. Among the byproducts of methanol production are the chemicals acetic acid and acetic anhydride on the right side of the screen. And within a decade of its founding, Tennessee Eastman began to use these chemicals to manufacture numerous cellulose acetate, that is, plastic products, including safety film stock. But the chemicals were equally central to the powerful explosive RDX, a chemical compound that during World War II, Tennessee Eastman began mass producing for the US military at the Holston Ordnance Works, a facility that it designed, built and operated. And you can see this industrial and material progression here. Now it was Holston that brought the Manhattan Project to Tennessee Eastman, and this happened on Christmas Eve, 1942, when Groves called James White, who was president of the company, to propose that Tennessee Eastman build and operate an electromagnetic separation plant at Oak Ridge. According to company history, White hesitated, stating that it was Kodak's headquarters in Rochester, New York that typically handled chemical research. Tennessee Eastman was an expert in quote unquote, operations. But it was operations that Groves wanted, a company that would be capable of overseeing the large-scale conversion of a raw material into a usable product or, in other words, the work of chemical engineering. The raw material in this case was uranium. Now the work that Tennessee Eastman would eventually do in the Oak Ridge plant, which was dubbed Y-12, was coordinated between several offices across the country. One of these was in Berkeley, where Ernest Lawrence's Radiation Laboratory conducted physics research, advised on technical and design issues, and trained Eastman employees. Another office was at the Kodak Laboratory in Rochester, where scientists and Y-12's chemical group piloted ways of preparing charge material, carrying out the plant's extensive chemical operations, and maintaining its equipment. Y-12 itself was essentially an enlargement of Lawrence's laboratory setup. In it were a series of Berkeley developed calutrons, which you can see here. In each calutron, 96 four-foot tanks were positioned between electromagnets. Uranium was loaded into each calutron, and as it began spinning within the machine, visionable uranium-235 atoms moved in a tighter circle than the heavier uranium-238 atoms, thus allowing 235 to be separated from non-visionable 238. But the chain from film stock to the atomic bomb was not just constructed in raw materials and manufacturing methods. It was also constructed in industrial knowledge and skills. Indeed, when Kodak established Tennessee Eastman, it did so both because there was a half-finished methanol plant in the town, and because there was a ready-labor force nearby. By World War II, the Kingsport Plant, Holston, and Y-12 employed thousands of the area's residents, many of them women. Employees were also transferred from Eastern's other offices, bringing with them technical, scientific, and managerial expertise that had been forged there. And to give just a sense of this, of the 64 Eastman employees who came to Y-12 from Rochester and Eastman Kodak in 1943, which you can see on the left side of the screen, nearly all were research scientists, chemists, engineers, physicists, et cetera. The 160 from Tennessee Eastman in Holston, conversely on the right side of the screen here, were senior technical and manual laborers sent to oversee the plant's operations. Most were foremen and supervisors. Some were office managers, carpenters, painters, and a handful of nurses, doctors, and others. And so, in short, like the progression from methanol to acetic acid and acetic anhydride to RDX, Kodak's high-level research in chemistry and physics, which were themselves rooted in photographic chemicals and optics, gave it the know-how to collaborate with the Berkeley scientists and perform in-house research and development for Y-12. The foremen and supervisors at Tennessee Eastman in Holston, in turn, were able to put all of this into industrial practice. Now, as I start to conclude, I'll say that all of this suggests a new perspective on film and photography's relationship to the atomic bomb. For instance, while we know that photographing the Trinity test required special film stock and cameras, Tennessee Eastman's history makes clear that the stock used for this purpose did not just record the explosion as it occurred, but was already materially and industrially caught up with it. Uranium offers a way to think about this idea. When the metal is mined, it's typically found alongside and often bonded to other minerals and metals, some of them radioactive, others not. A term that historian of science, Gabriel Hecht, uses to describe this phenomenon is conjunction. And we might think in a similar way of the industrial processes that at Tennessee Eastman produced the uranium used in the atomic bomb. Processes that, again, were derived from and bound to the manufacturing of film stock. And I'll add that UC Perica's concept of media geology is equally helpful in conceptualizing this. I'll end by briefly reflecting on what this means for moving images and the state. Because as uranium moved through Tennessee Eastman's supply chains and factories, its geopolitical resonance has shifted. No longer did the metal only embody the links between colonial economies, the war economy, and Belgian sovereignty, traced in Kovazfilm. Instead, situated at the Manhattan Project's nexus between government, industry, and the academy, the quintessence of World War II's big science, it became central to the new form of sovereignty that emerged with the atomic bomb. This, quote, state of being nuclear to return to Hecht's work was continuous with its colonial precursors, quote, extending the assumptions and practices of the new imperialism, unquote. And not only did film at the Trinity Test document the beginning of this new form of sovereignty, this new form of statehood. In its manufacturing, it helped it emerge. Thank you. I'm Kaya Scott. This is my talk on the US military psychiatric films. My research on the US military's use of films for psychiatric purposes during World War II brought me to the National Archives in search of military documents and films. I decided at one point to spend a comical amount of time scanning the entirety of the military film title index from 1939 to 1947 to see if anything jumped out. I'm sure that anyone watching a panel like this is familiar with the fact that the US military used films in virtually every aspect of their extensive operations. The endless scanning, however, eventually yielded that singular thrill that finding a needle in a haystack came when it came across three films titled simply Combat Psychiatric Casualties, A, B, and C. There was no corresponding documentation connected with these films that I could find, nor have I seen them referenced anywhere else in my research. It's impossible to know for certain what these films were used for, but my research into the role that film played within the larger apparatus of military psychiatry during World War II makes me quite confident that these three films were at least made for, if not used, in clinical therapeutic treatment for personnel who were at the time called, quote, combat fatigued or neuropsychiatric casualties and was now referred to as post-traumatic stress disorder. Throughout their involvement in World War II, the US military increasingly pivoted away from the general mistrust of psychiatry as a quack science and began slowly at first and then with lightning speed to integrate psychiatry into operations as a tool for institutional optimization. From a marginal science to a military panacea, psychiatry was eventually believed to be able to do it all. We doubt, quote, weak men prior to service to keep active soldiers fighting longer and harder and to heal fatigued battle casualties faster, getting them back to work and crucially keeping them off of disability pensions. In this way, the psychiatry that flourished in the military setting was necessarily oriented to the best interest of any particular individual but to the efficiency and effectiveness of the institution's war efforts. This extraordinary and extraordinarily fast shift in attitudes, policy, and practice was made possible through an extensive use of moving images at all levels of military psychiatry. Films were a media workhorse put to task and were presumed to be effective in diagnostics, inoculation, training, information dissemination, and therapeutic treatment. The three films found at the archives very likely belong to a particularly fascinating facet of these applications in which certain kinds of films shown to soldiers either during training or in treatment or both were seen as interacting with the viewer's mind in an almost pseudo-pharmaceutical way such that they could act either as inoculation against developing combat fatigue or as an instrument in curing it. Psychiatrically informed training films operated on one level as straightforward pedagogical films but were also designed with a more neurological understanding of their role as pre-combat conditioning. By seeing and hearing actual weapons firing live ammunition on screen and other battle scenarios, it was believed that these films acted as a kind of vaccine that interacted with the body's senses as lived memory might. The assumption was that this sensory conditioning would lessen and even bypass the initial shock and possible paralysis that a soldier might experience when confronted with traumatic battle situations in real time. The principle of using films to desensitize soldiers prior to combat was the same one that was subsequently applied to treating neuropsychiatric casualties often using the very same films in both training and therapy. During World War II, over half a million U.S. military personnel received a neuropsychiatric diagnosis. The overwhelming numbers meant that finding ways to treat soldiers with minimal resources was paramount. A film screened at the front of a room full of men was more efficient and cost-effective than an individual session with a psychiatrist who themselves were in short supply. While several military psychiatrists wrote about their experimentations with film in desensitization, the titles of films they used are rarely listed. It appears that the process could be somewhat haphazard with practitioners making use of whatever relevant battle footage they had at hand, which is part of what makes the combat psychiatric casualties A, B, and C so interesting to me. I believe that these films may have been part of a pilot program in the Navy to start standardizing some treatments by making reels available to psychiatric and medical practitioners through official military channels. The three five-minute films housed in the Navy motion picture film production series 1939 to 1947 are short black-and-white sequences of a naval battle with no dialogue that seemed to be three separate sequences added out of observational footage shot during a single event. The primary difference between them is that each film has been carefully edited to focus on a particular element of the action, the firing of the ship's weaponry in one, the crew below death loading warheads in the other, and the ship's crew preparing for battle in the third. Film A, which we're watching now, begins in the midst of a battle filmed from the deck of a naval ship firing heavy artillery at planes that are approaching in the distance. While there are implicit casualties from the planes and boats being shot and burning, there are no explicit images of human death. The focus of the action is on the blooms and blasts coming from the ship's artillery and was likely intended to provoke startle reactions from patients watching. Film B can be assumed to be the same battle but filmed from the perspective of the munitions crew working below deck. The visual action remains focused on the men loading the weaponry below deck while a marine's voice can be heard over the intercom narrating the action from the battle above. The film may have been meant to trigger the anxiety associated with a number of different high stress scenarios while still avoiding explicit human casualties. Film C takes place chronologically prior to the other two, what distinguishes this third film is its focus on the ship's crewmen jumping into action before the battle actually begins. While markedly less dramatic in action than the other two, this film brings human vulnerability to its scenario by allowing the camera and sound to focus on the feet, the naked and unarmed bodies and the faces of the crewmen who are about to be shelled by planes. Therapeutic desensitization in the hospital setting would often involve showing patients who were very heavily sedated films of graduating intensity. Military psychiatrist Lieutenant Commander Louis A. Schwartz wrote in 1945 that films of actual combat scenes graded in order of intensity and stimulation are shown followed or accompanied by a record of battle sounds. Some of the more innocuous sound films are introduced first. Later, actual combat films of bombings, strafings, and some captured Japanese films are shown with the battle sounds. The patient's reactions to these sessions are described as including violent psychosomatic symptoms. He writes that some actually flee from the scene, sweat, develop uncontrollable tremors, or exhibit severe vasomotor manifestations. Films would quickly administer a dose of sensory shock, provoking observable symptoms of distress from patients that were interpreted as cues that their trauma had been sufficiently uncovered and they were ready for group therapy or other follow-up treatment. As I don't yet know for certain how these films were used and on what scale. If it's true, as the title suggests, that they were used for desensitization treatments of combat psychiatric casualties, these three five-minute films are a significant addition to our known catalog of military psychiatric media. Films framed within this context, they offer a fascinating glimpse into early experimentations with moving images in clinical therapy, which were the precursors to the contemporary use of virtual reality to treat PTSD in military veterans. They also help us to further understand how the military's institutional mandates invariably shaped both how it adopted psychiatry and its subsequent use of moving images in the search for efficient, standardizable methods of treatment. Thank you. My name is Florian Hof and I'm a professor of media systems and media organization at University of Paderborn. My paper Shooting Standards Standardizing Shooting focuses on early training films that were produced for the US Army in context of World War I. Amongst other films that should introduce new weaponry such as the Browning machine gun. In 1917, the US Army started to gather experts from the entertainment and film industry to jointly produce training films for the US Army at Foursville. And besides the internal photographic section of the US Army Signal Corp. This included also Victor Fleming, later to be known as director of Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind, and he brought with him 10 cameramen he selected for this endeavor. Furthermore, the JR Bray Studio, a studio that specialized in animation and animation film. And after the first films were produced, they were also joined by Frank Gilbert, a specialist in film-based consulting and industrial rationalization. The title of my presentation focuses on two dimensions of these training films I want to address today. First, it is about shooting standards. This dimension concerns the filming of standard procedures of how to handle and operate weapons. Second, it is about standardizing shooting. This focuses on how film was used to establish standardized knowledge and training routines for the handling of machine guns. So my focus is on the relations between the practices and the logics of filmmaking and the organizational culture and structures of the military as one example for an organization that wanted to introduce media as a useful tool into their organizational routines. In 1918, Victor Fleming and the Bray Studios finished one of their first films with the title How to Fire the Lewis Machine Gun, and I will show you a small part. In this context, Frank Gilbert's task was to critique these films and edit their scenarios. He criticized that the films needed to generate interest to be more pleasant to watch since they needed, and this is a quote, to be shown many, many, many times. His overall estimation of the films was that they were gloomy and monotonous. When Gilbert started to conceptualize and shoot films by himself, he tried to improve the films in disrespect. In case of his film The Browning Machine Gun, Gilbert included into titles to structure the film and even used them to post tasks or questions to the audience. These are examples of Gilbert's working to draw more interest and engage trainees during the otherwise highly technical and largely unadorned films. Another suggestion was to incorporate more interesting scenes into the training films. Consequently, Gilbert began to include what he called motion picture-like narrative sequences into his training films. An exemplary case for this approach is the film The Browning Automatic Rival Third Section. Here, explanatory parts alternate with action scenes showing diverse firing positions to demonstrate how the weapons would appear in action. The film ends with footage showing bullets hitting a body of water. This sequence has obviously no value for occasional training at all. Its primary purpose is to feature the cinematic spectacle of spraying water. Being a passionate moviegoer himself, Gilbert had ideas and concepts that directly stemmed from the emerging commercial cinematic culture. He was specifically fascinated by the innovative cinematic techniques that D.W. Griffith used in his first feature-length film. Furthermore, he recommended adopting as standard practice the insertion into each movie of motivational hate footage showing enemy atrocities. He also suggested showing scenes that depicted wrong methods at different speeds to make them look ridiculous and to boost the pedagogical value of film. This mixture of entertainment and didactic illustration he believed would make film a productive tool for education. The supervising cameraman, Victor Fleming, argued that this film should give, and this is a quote, recruits about everything there is in gunnery except the feel of hot metal and the smell of powder. While this perspective made sense for the professional filmmakers, it did not at all make sense for the US Army. The idea to include scenes of entertainment and interest into vocational training was rejected by the military and the organizational culture that prevailed within Foursill. In 1918, filming activities at Foursill were suspended and partly moved to the newly established US School of Military Cinematography at Columbia University in New York. So what other theoretical assumption can we draw from this case of a dysfunctional filming activity of films like these that were produced by actually not used as useful films. So this is the list of films that were actually produced but these films were basically never used as vocational training films. I think one way to account for the situation is to analyze why and how film became part of the organizational discourse and struggle inside the military administration. My argument is that the main reason for these tensions was the diverse demands made up on film, demands that seemed almost utopian and that the medium film just couldn't handle. First, film should provide a standardized vocational training system to secure continuous supply of well-trained soldiers for the ongoing war. Second, film should make training efforts more efficient. And third, film should extend vocational training from purely physical exercise to the transfer of complex knowledge to an expanding body of recruit. Specifically, the second and third aspects of film's remit conflicted with the organizational culture of the military. New ways of presenting facts such as adding visual and dramatic interest to the films as proposed by Fleming and Gilberts compromised the perception of film as a proper tool for education by military officials. Gilberts asserted that the strengths of film was its capacity to blend learning and enjoyment and this then would make training more interesting for the recruits and thus more efficient, a view that the military never shared. I want to end with some methodological remarks concerning research on non-searchable film. I argue that film and media need to be understood in their relations to the organizational culture and practices of institutions such as the military. This perspective on film and media history is part of a project that I pursue over the last years that understands film and media as instances that organize. It has ties to my recently published book on the media history of consulting that has an emphasis on Frank and Lillian Gilberts and is part of a dialogue I started to build between the disciplines of film and media both in studies and organization theory. In this regard, the case of the failed attempts to produce and use training films is an example that shows the productivity of such a perspective. Expanding the analytical angles on the material, praxeological and thus social material dimension helps to understand the role of film and media within governmental organizations. They might serve as means of representation and ideology, but they also might end up as organizational media as instances that organize through their materiality and thus foster new alliances and structures within existing organizations. Thank you for your attention. Okay. I want to thank our panelists. That was some excellent talks with lots of ideas and lots of things to discuss. We have an active Q&A set of questions. And I've been tasked with communicating those to our panelists. I'm wondering if our panelists would be willing to turn their cameras on. It might make it a little more engaging for all of us and also the audience. Thank you so much. Okay. Some of these questions work in order of the papers, which might make sense so that we might aspire towards integrating and having a cross-panel discussion as we build up. So let me start with the first question, which begins with the thank you for the presentations. And this is a question for Nick, our first paper. And that is, has NARA collected amateur footage filmed in the U.S. or overseas by military personnel? And if not, are you aware of such collections and archives outside of NARA? Hi. Dan, feel free to chime in as well. I believe we do have some, but it's never really been a major collection point for NARA. It seems somewhat incidental as we mostly focus on records created by the federal government. I do believe that there are some in our 330 dimok collection. I believe it focuses on China there. It is the, a Captain Jay McGinnis, McGannis has some footage from early China. I believe I'm looking at the record now from around 1940 or so. I can't think of any others off the top of my head, but as I said, it's somewhat incidental. So I wouldn't be surprised to come across any if you're searching through our holdings. Dan, I think you're on mute. Okay. Maybe we'll, we'll move down. Will you continue to run a bit of a tech test? And I'll move on through the questions. Yeah. Okay. This is another one for Nick. Wondering if you could tell us about the current status of digitization of the World War two army air forces material, particularly the work of the first motion picture unit. Yeah. Oh, I also got a message that we have the Jack Leib collection too, which contains some amateur footage from Utah Beach. So moving on to the next question that was the one about the army air forces. So we recently added a whole lot of catalog cards for our 18 SFP collection. And I believe we have that series described in its entirety in the catalog now. As I mentioned, the presentation we're going through and transcribing the cards that have not been read by OCR to make them more findable. So that is a big plus to the army air forces. We also have the 18 CS series, which I believe about 75% of the records that have been added to the catalog. Unfortunately, much less of them have been digitized and added as files to the catalog, but a lot of those titles are findable. There hasn't been any major projects to digitize our 18 CS or 18 C, which are the two other major series in our, in our record group 18 that I can think of off the top of my head. Maybe when Dan fixes his technical issues, he can chime in a bit more if he recalls anything. I'm not sure if Dan can. We're still having a tech issue there. I'll try to keep track of all the things Dan owes us as we accrue through the meeting, the comments, and we'll go back to him hopefully. There are a couple of questions for Alice. One is really just a question about if you could just describe or explain a little more what the Trinity explosion was. And I, yeah, if you could just say a little bit more about the Trinity explosion and what the effects on celluloid were. Thanks. Yeah. So the spots, the black spots that I've talked about in this paper that showed up on film in Kodak Park were not from being present at the explosion, but they were from radioactive particles that came from the explosion, fallout essentially that fell onto the fields and the rivers that were used, the fields that were used as sources of straw and the rivers that were used in the mills that produced the packaging for film, which is called straw board. So it's a cardboard. So I believe this, this packaging was produced in the Midwest and then it was shipped to Rochester. So what you ended up having was radioactive particles in the packaging that imprinted on the film. This had happened before with radium, with trace radium from paints in packaging that ended up on film, but they were able to trace the black spots in this case to the Trinity explosion because it showed up from a production run of straw board that was made about three weeks, two or three weeks after the Trinity explosion. Great. Thank you. And there's a question for Kaia, but I think this opens up to the fantastic people from NARA as well. So we'll start with Kaia, but are you aware of any similar films or desensitization of films and their practices forward in time, particularly with regards to the Korea conflict? So I would definitely be happy to open this up to the experts from NARA as well. My own research doesn't go that deeply into this era, although I know for sure that one of the things that follows World War II in particular in this area was sort of a bit of an offshoot, but continuing on during World War II, were experiments using both film and different kinds of drugs. So during World War II, the drug of choice that was administered during desensitization treatments was normally either sodium ametal or pentothal. And then in the post World War II era, of course we all know the infamous experimentations with LSD really started to take off and these experiments both incorporated showing films, but more sort of filming the study participants themselves and trying to analyze their behavior through the use of film. And this is something that starts to lead more into the Vietnam era. One thing I know quite a bit more about is the fact that this process has eventually continued on into the contemporary period where we now see psychiatrists using virtual reality in their treatment of veterans. And so that's happening still now, so there's obviously some sort of continuous lineage that happens from these earlier desensitization treatments in World War II that are continuing on to now, but my expertise doesn't fill that full gap in terms of knowing exactly how it's carried through, whether it was sort of picking up again of something that was maybe dropped for a while or whether there have been certain practitioners using it continuously the whole time, which I would imagine on some level there definitely would be, but again, that's not something that I've researched myself. Nick or Dan, do you have any ways to respond to that? Are you aware of any psychiatric films from later periods in the collection? Unfortunately, I can't think of any off the top of my head as well. I know that the LSD testing films that Kaia mentioned are in our one record group, I believe, but unfortunately I don't know any off the top of my head. And I'm wondering if Dan's mic is fixed yet so we could get him in on this. Testing, is it working? Yes. Yes, okay. Sorry about that. Thank you, Oliver, for the help. So on this question, the answer is yes, there are additional, as Kaia pointed out, I think the difficulty with it is that they can be very difficult to find. They tend to have very vague titles that is not necessarily going to draw one in. And I think the example that she gave of going through reams and reams of scanning these giant lists of titles is unfortunately how one tends to come across those. The more that gets populated in the online catalog, the better, obviously, but even the descriptions like the Navy catalog that Kaia mentioned can be very vague. So it takes a lot of digging. But certainly from the Korean war era, there are similar films that exist in Nara's holdings. Great, thank you. I'm actually going to ask Florian a question that I had percolating in my head too. And I was just particularly, as were several other question askers, interested in the relationship that you articulate between the idea about training and an idea about entertainment and it being not suitable to the institutional culture of the military during World War I. Anyone aware of the films made during World War II would note that disagreement or ill-fit disappears. And so I'm just curious if you could say a little bit if you know anything about how that shift might be explained or accounted for. Well, I would make a rather broad argument there and you can trace it not only in the case of military training films, but also in kind diverse areas where film was used in big organizations and the argument would be that the first part like this World War I training films were set in a situation where film was not not in a, well, the film was not a kind of well-entertainment genre that put it this way and this I think changed. So if you think about all this research on early cinema and the problems and moral panic connected to the film industry, I think this changed during World War I and World War II and I think this has a big impact that now you don't have to go into these discussions about the legitimacy that you have to do in World War I because the issues were just gone. So I think this would be a way to express it and there is another argument that I'm not quite sure because I cannot really comment deeply in this. I think that there is a section in the film industry that started to specialize in this kind of specific films and this was not in existence in World War I so the products, let's put it this way were perhaps really not quality training films. So it was more of an experimental phase which makes it interesting to see the failure if you put it in this way and the films that they produced for World War I but I'm not sure and I cannot I'm not quite sure they might use them in World War II and even in the Vietnam War for training of these machine guns because this machine gun was not used in World War I because it was broke, it did not work but instead they used the French one but they used it in the following battles in the Korean war and there is a list of films that was made in 1936 that compiles all the films that were in existence from World War I and they would ask things like how can we make use of these films for the next war and for vocational training so that we don't have to shoot them again. Fascinating, thank you. The next question is for Alice you spoke about the connections between radioactive materials in academic or industrial research regarding the atomic bomb and film stock. I'm not very familiar with this area but I was wondering what part of such materials were imported and what were mined in the U.S. further I would assume that these materials were also used in radiographic and radiotherapy activities of this period. Could there also be a connection to medicine as part of your project? Thanks for the question. The uranium was heavily mined in the United States and Canada and this was a major part of the Manhattan project. The particular uranium shipment that I'm discussing in this paper was an early one and it came from the Belgian Congo. So this is an important shipment because it was the subject of very fraught negotiations between the Belgian government and exile and the U.S. and UK documentation of which is held in the National Archives. So this is an early one. It's beyond the scope of this particular project but you're right there are and were also many scientific uses of radioactivity on and with film both in medical fields but also in physics and other scientific fields. If I could follow up on that Alice you brought up the question of skills and labor in this paper and knowing a little bit about the transportation of uranium and its travels south and all of the people who got sick from performing that labor. I'm just wondering if that isn't yet another layer in your project to pull in is that kind of human ethics and the damage to bodies and people caused. Yeah, absolutely. And this is a part of the project that extends both the transport is really interesting. I haven't thought of that. It's definitely the case at Tennessee Eastman. It's the case in bomb tests, where you get into the 1950s and think about the tests in Pacific Islands, etc. So there is a longer history here about violence that's not just colonial or taking the shape of the atomic bomb but that happens through everyday labor involved in making this material whether that's film or the weapons themselves. That's a great question. Okay, thank you. I'm going to work my way in order here. This is a question for Kaya. Could you speak any more about the military's faith in psychiatry at this time? I'm wondering if there was a particular person or event that spurred this particular buy-in or institutional faith in psychiatry. And if you could account for the change in any way, I know that's a big one, but. It is a big question. And I'll try to keep it somewhat brief because I could talk far too much about that. So it's really a confluence of a lot of different factors. Two of the major ones, one is that during World War I, of course, there was a certain amount of buy-in in terms of employing psychiatrists in psychiatry to help deal with the incredible numbers of soldiers and other military personnel who had shell shock. And one of the results of that, sort of going into World War II, was actually a strategic decision on the part of certain military officials to try to avoid the situation of having so many men on disability pensions. And there are very clear records of these conversations in which these officials are saying, listen, we spent so much money paying people disability pensions. There's got to be a way to avoid this problem going into the Second World War. How can we make sure that we don't have as many people suffering from shell shock? And so the idea of preventative psychiatry really gained its access point, partly through that discussion about saving money. And another thing was actually the experience of a bit earlier, going through the depression in which because of financial reasons, the main form of psychiatric care at that point was basically institutionalizing people in asylums. And because the level of care really, A, went down for financial reasons, but B, the number of people who were being institutionalized because of the psychological pressures of the depression. So it sort of became a public issue where people were saying, you know, there's so many people in asylums, they're being cared for so poorly. And it really spurred an interest in what was called sort of, like radical therapeutic techniques that could, as opposed to just housing people in this way, aren't there, isn't there something we can do, some sort of like magic bullet that you can administer in order to get people off of this, you know, out of this cycle. And so the interest in things like using drugs and other treatments increased from this as well. And then of course, there were a couple of key people in particular, men and their brothers who became very instrumental in sort of championing the value and use of psychiatry in the military, gain strategic footholds and then really push the programs. And partly because psychiatry was used so widely at the very beginning as sort of preventative psychiatry and in screening to try to keep, you know, what they considered to be weak men out and using these techniques became very successful in terms of streamlining and they were saying, hey, listen, look, we're doing such a good job, you know, with all these screening and preventative psychiatry things, why don't you give us a little bit more leeway in terms of, you know, doing other things in the military as well. And so it really, at some point, I think there was a bit of a sudden burst and all of a sudden the uptake as the respondent called it really started to gain enormous speed and foothold in the military. Thank you, Kaya. This is a question for Florian. It's a question about if you can speak to the proportion, I guess the proportion and influence of American training films on the training film genre in a more international context. So is there a sense that American films disproportionately influenced the genre or were being influenced by other militaries invested in the question? Well, that's an interesting question. I have to think how to take this one. My research, I will start with the military training films. I came across this military training films because I was researching something in Germany. And I came across Frank Gilbert, which as I understand is a kind of popular person in the U.S. tried to train the German army in 1914 and he did not succeed. And then two years later he went back and trained the American army. And I found this a perfect example of consulting how you take on with your knowledge. But I think the militaries here are quite a specific case because wars are not all the time and you have this kind of ruptures between this training times. So I think there is basically the military training film is one example of a whole bunch of films that you rather find in industrial films all the time. And if you put it to industrial film as a kind of international phenomena, I would say this is really specific to the industries. And I think we had today really good examples and some of the industries and depending on the purpose they would use film or they would not use film. But I'm not sure if training film is a genre because in a regular perspective you can put it into a genre description. But I'm not sure if the production system and infrastructure at least in the 10s, 20s and 30s are so connected that you can speak of a kind of system that runs along. Hope this makes sense. This is a question that might be interesting for all of the panelists and it's a question about the use of rhythm or time in the films that you're looking at. I think it's particularly pertinent for the training films but I wonder if the other panelists might be interested in taking a swing at that. So the temporality of the films that you're looking at and how rhythm in particular might be shaping them. I can start. I think you have to look at rhythm as a kind of more general phenomenon that connects to the film culture that surrounds these films and if you look at this, I mean there are really slow and there are really not pleasant to watch but they would really be the state of the art of industrial film at the time like concerning the animation, the speed of the animation. I've seen so many films from the German car of the 10s and 20s of work as exactly the same as these kind of films I showed in my presentation. And this idea to introduce entertaining scenes into the films, if you look at film production at a time and if you look at the angles they use and the rhythm of the montage, you can basically take for example a Griffith film and it would be almost the same rhythm. So I think they would adopt to a kind of cultural, to the film culture that would be the background, the cultural background of these films. But I didn't find anything about specifically rhythm that would give me the opportunity to make a specific claim on this. Would anyone else like to explore that one? No, not really. Okay. I can say something about that. I mean, it's one of the interesting things about this area is that with certain aspects of the films that I look at, there is this sense of a larger body that's developing the films and making policy decisions at a fairly high level that are then filtered through in terms of systematizing what happens. So that would happen more at the level of training films, films watched earlier on. But then in terms of films that are used for therapeutic techniques, often, you know, as I said before, we're really dealing with the individual whims or ideas of a researcher or psychiatrist. And so you end up with a lot of variation, which means that they basically experimented with almost everything, because really there was a lot at stake in terms of figuring out some sort of magic bullet that would help to heal people more quickly and efficiently.  And actually, I mean, how do you probably know as much about this as I do because of Charles Ackman's research. But flicker fusion was one thing that they did experiment with at one point, which I mean, it may be vaguely related to rhythm, but it is where they developed a machine that used film in order to create distinct patterns of light when you would show the film at particular speeds. So it wasn't about showing images as much as it was about using film technologies to create light. And they used flicker fusion as a diagnostic tool. So the idea was that by assessing how capable any particular patient was at seeing the patterns of light and how quickly or slowly they were moving would help to diagnose how severe their particular case was or wasn't. So anyway, just an interesting sort of technological use of speed and rhythm in that particular area. And Kaia, just to signal you further, and I'm forgetting the name, which is why I can't help it, it was the company that was a post for technology that actually developed in the reverse with slow films that were psychedelic, but slow with classical music. I can't remember. Yeah. So that I think one could generalize and say there were experiments with rhythm and temporality in cinema across the board from quick flicker to slow light patterns and classical music to do the reverse to slow someone down and calm them. So there was a kind of broad spectrum of experiments with film speed and tempo and rhythm from what I've seen. And it sounds like from what you've seen too. From what I've seen the experiment with basically everything they could try, whatever they could throw at it. And then, you know, certain things stuck like flicker fusion and or tone films. So yeah, I think there's a lot there to be discovered if you really delved into it. Great. So we have a couple of, we have a question about Africa. And this is as much for Dan and Nick, I think, as for anyone else, possibly Alice. But could you direct our listeners to anything, any collections or any part of the collection that might actually have to do with the U.S. military's relationship to Africa, particularly during World War II? Yeah. So I just did a quick search of our catalog. And I know that we have 111 ADC records which show North Africa specifically. They focus a lot on Rommel. We also have some newsreels that cover a lot of the action that happened in North Africa as well. That's most, there's some in other series as well, but it was mainly focused, it looks like in the newsreel collections that we have. And in our 111 ADC, you can probably find others in our just big bucket series. I wouldn't be surprised if you found anything in our 330Dimox series, possibly our 428 NPC series as well. Those would be good places to start to look. I agree with Nick. There's, there's the ADC collection, which is the Army Signal Corps, the main World War II body of material, which is fairly well described in the online catalog. There's, there are quite a bit of reels related to U.S. activities in North Africa during the early part of World War II. Great. Thank you. And Alice, the one question about Africa was directed to you in particular, not just through resources for further research, but also the question of films materiality. So I'm wondering if you wanted to maybe say a little bit about your paper and your project in relation to that question in particular. Yeah, thanks. That's a really important part of this project. And I'm certainly not the first scholar to make arguments about the ways in which films materiality is caught up with colonial economies. But that is one of the major parts, both of this section of the project and the project in general is the ways in which the raw materials of film were dependent on colonial economies and in turn on the violence that structured these economies. So we have the uranium case here with Tennessee Eastman and the Manhattan Project, but one of the other materials that's been discussed in this regard and that I look at is camphor, which was a plasticizer and nitrate film stock, which was mostly extracted in what was then Formosa, a Japanese colony in today's Taiwan. So it's a really important question about, you know, how we think about where violence lives in film, right? What films relationship to violence is, is this something that was pictured on films? It is something that we think about in relationship to aesthetics, right? And here I'm making the argument that it has to do with the materials and the industrial processes. Thank you. This is a question for anybody who will listen and answer. And it's a question about resources at NARA or elsewhere that discuss or reveal the conditions of exhibition of World War II films, in particular training films, as well as studies of effectiveness and or reception by military audiences. I can take an initial crack at this. So this might also be a good question to ask during the textural records panel, because while the motion picture branch does hold, the moving image branch does hold some textural records. A lot of them tend to focus more on the production of the film. So they might cover rights. They might cover costs. Some of them include releases and general statements saying why the film was made. This is especially true in our 111 TF series. I'm not sure how much of it is going to be focused around World War II though, which I believe the question focuses on. In our textural records branch, they might hold more records which go more into reception and how and why the film was produced. And I'll jump in to say that, you know, following Nick's point about production files, what can be interesting is tracing the use and, you know, continued use of the films within the military as time progressed. So there are statements in the files sometimes saying, you know, there was a point in time where this was considered no longer effective or it was considered, you know, outdated in terms of the content that it contains. So you can sort of trace how effective that they thought it was for the internal military audience. And I also agree with Nick about textural records existing from the Army Signal Corps and from the Air Force certainly that may get at that question a little bit better in terms of the research. I have never seen any kind of real audience reaction surveys, you know, along the lines of what NARA holds with USIA records, for example, or even within the military films that were intended to be shown to the public. So distinction with this question, with the, you know, internal audience with the military, because they did quite a bit of surveying with films that were shown in theaters, for example, and how the audience reaction, you know, whether it was effective to continue showing it or not, how the audience reaction played in different places in different countries and so forth. But I, yeah, I think to really get at that question for the internal reaction with training films specifically, you may find some information in those production files which get at the effectiveness, but otherwise I would go to the organizational units that were responsible, the records of those organizational units which were responsible for film production within the various branches of service. So I do have a couple of researcher type questions and then they're kind of short ones, but I thought I might just run through them. One for Kaya. Do you have a sense of any textual psychiatric records that you were able to find or used or would like to find textual rather than visual? Yes, definitely. And in fact, there were quite a few records at NARA that I spent a fair bit of time looking through and finding, I mean, for my particular research, the textual records that I was looking for had to do with film and treatment, but all kinds of things from policy documents to film scripts that had been written and rewritten by different levels of people who are getting involved from the psychiatrist themselves to sort of people in the signal core to then other administrative heads. And then of course, just records of the psychiatrist themselves and the experimentations that they were doing and the results and that sort of thing. So in terms of records that I would like to find, things that, yeah, sorry, can you just refresh me again in terms of like what kind of records you're imagining? Sorry, I need a review on that question. That's a perfect answer to my question so far. Thank you. It's still 6.30 ish in the morning here. So we're working on things. And the question for Alice. One of our listeners would just like to know if you have any suggestions for reading further on the topics that you discussed in your presentation, particularly the relationship between General Leslie Groves and Eastman Kodak. Yeah, so this is Tennessee Eastman's work for the Manhattan Project is discussed in many of the sort of major works in the Manhattan Project. Some of the trade works as well as the scholarly works. I'm writing a book about it now that looks at it in terms of how we think about film in the context of the chemical industry. So that's my particular angle on it. I don't have the titles at hand, but in many of the sort of major, major books that have come out about it, it is mentioned as one of the key institutions. And I think one of the important points to make about that is that it was just one of many companies working for the Manhattan Project companies that we know well. So in terms of other film manufacturers, DuPont was an even larger military contractor, even larger contractor for the Manhattan Project, making plutonium in Hanford, Washington. And this is discussed really beautifully in Papandai's book, Nylon and Bombs. So I'd recommend that book as a way to look at this question from the perspective of DuPont as well. Thank you. So it's been a couple of delicious comments in the Q&A segment. So I thought I would, I've been asked to read them out loud just to share them with the group. So one comment, it was directed towards Alice. Kodak used uranium nitrate in the early 1920s for a number of toning processes. Perhaps there's an extended history of engagement worth investing, investigating, sorry. So like a longer history of these kinds of chemicals and what we think of as a film technology company. There are two comments about amateur film that are very interesting. I'm sorry, my cute, my, there we go. During World War II, the U.S. military solicited amateur films and photos of locations that might be studied to better map places it might engage. Solicited in newsreel pieces as well, asking people to mail films to an address publicized in the newsreel. So that's a kind of interesting what films did the military collect and then make use of as different from the films that they made might be another pathway in. And another comment, there was an orphan film symposium, which is a wonderful every other year event that is held to explore lost films that made use of amateur films shot by soldiers. And there were a couple of presenters named including Matt Barron of the Library of Congress, using Marine Corps combat recordings and other presenters were Jeff Martin on work by R.P. Reed. So apparently there are other researchers gathering up the bits and bobs related to amateur filmmaking by enlisted men and then use of amateur films by the military. So that could be another pathway on that one. Also one more resource comment that was in the Q and A segment that presidential libraries can also be important places for finding footage shot by individual soldiers. That's another possible avenue for those of us interested in that. One last question. And this is for our NARA people. Can you talk more a little bit about the topic page and where to find or access related military footage and then related when will you be open again in College Park? So I'll take that one first. I think the question about the topic pages is focused on the reference to the topic pages in the website that Nick mentioned in his presentation. So we can certainly distribute the link to the motion picture web page on archives.gov. And it's very obvious the topic pages are listed right on the home screen there. Those pages were released in the last couple of years . Those pages were revised starting last year. And we're still working on the revision. But there is a lot that's public right now. There are six topic pages currently I believe. Some of which we've touched on today certainly with World War I and World War II. There's also a topic page related to newsreels and space exploration. And there's one called America Abroad which is available on USIA and other foreign assistance agencies and so forth. And they all contain links directly to the catalog with resources related to those topics. So you should be able to find those relatively easily. But we will make sure that that's sent out to everybody so you know specifically. When will NARA be open? I do not know. There have been. We are open as far as continuing to field reference requests. We have been taking inquiries into our public reference mailboxes all throughout the pandemic. We are limited somewhat in what we can do. But as we have been focusing on creating a lot more descriptive content and getting new digital objects added to the catalog it has sort of brought us to a point where we are not able to do that. We are not able to do that. So that has been a positive outcome of all of this. But the research room timetable I don't have any information to share about that today unfortunately. I think that's reasonable under the circumstances. I would like to thank all the panelists. It was a wonderful set of presentations and a really stimulating discussion. Thank you so much. See you soon. Thank you.


Tons of plastic is dumped across the world every single day. We can't keep abusing our planet like this, but we are doing something about it. From the Clean Air Act in 1956 to Margaret Thatcher's landmark address to the United Nations in 1989, where she warned of irretrievable damage to our atmosphere, to our oceans, to the planet itself. Conservatives in government have a record of tackling the threats that face our planet. At the end of last year we launched the new resources and waste strategy to make sure that we as a nation play our part. I'm here at a recycling centre in London to talk to an expert. So Richard, can you quickly explain what actually happens here? Well this is London's largest and newest urban mine where we collect materials from people's houses that we turn back into raw materials to make new products. Recycling. And what can people at home do to try and improve recycling rates? Well recycling is really worthwhile for the householder. If you read the instructions on packaging and you read the leaflet from your local authority it tells you what to do and that will save council tax and it will save the planet at the same time. What should the government be doing now? Well the government has brought together a number of things such as deposit return schemes, packaging taxes into a new policy called the Waste and Resources Strategy which is going to change the way we manage waste in the UK for the better. Our new resources and waste strategy will cut our reliance on single-use plastics, end confusion over household recycling and tackle the problem of excess packaging by making polluters pay. Unnecessary packaging covers so much of what we buy. These plastics are used for such a short period of time yet last in the environment for centuries. We need to increase how much we recycle and improve how we do it. We've previously failed to see the true environmental costs of these products and now we're paying the price. The new strategy will make producers pay the full cost of disposing or recycling their packaging and thus make them fully accountable for any excessive waste. With businesses having to pay higher fees if their products are harder to reuse or recycle it will give them a powerful incentive to produce more sustainable designs. The money raised will go to councils to help them improve waste and recycling systems. With consistent labelling it will make it easier for people to know exactly what they should put in which bin. The strategy builds on existing government work to reduce excessive waste including a world-leading ban on microbeads, the 5p plastic bag charge which has helped take 15 billion single-use plastic bags out of circulation and a 15 million pound pilot scheme to help reduce food waste. As a nation we need to come together and stop being a throwaway society so that we can leave our planet in a better state for future generations.