Tag: FDR

Casablanca!

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Today’s film, shot by US Army Air Forces photographers, presents no mysteries. Instead the reel is a gift that keeps on giving. Shot during President Roosevelt’s allied conference in early 1943, the film touches many bases. It opens with a segment of FDR meeting with Free French commander General Phillipe LeClerc and continues with a session showing FDR conferring with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill (good closeups!) The roll concludes with an early sound film of Roosevelt conferring the Congressional Medal of Honor on Col. William Wilbur as Generals George Marshall and George Patton look on. The sound segment continues with interviews of African American service members.

This film is barely described in the National Archives’ Catalog by the title “PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT & [AND] CHURCHILL AT CASABLANCA”. No digital surrogate is available on the Catalog. This copy was made by pointing a digital camera toward a vintage film work print on the flatbed film viewers provided in the National Archives’ Moving Image and Sound Research Room. As the work product of US government photographers, the film is uncopyrighted and available for use.

Content like this is usually ONLY screenable in the National Archives Research Rooms. Professional archival researchers can unlock unique content like this for your presentation, publication or production.

Yalta Conference outtakes

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British newsreel outtakes

In honor of the 75th anniversary of the Yalta Conference, I’m sharing these outtakes of British newsreel coverage of the summit meeting between President Franklin Roosevelt, Soviet leader Josef Stalin, and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill.

Under the laws existing at the time, copyright in these materials lapsed in the United Kingdom around 1995. There is no evidence that this film was ever registered for copyright in the United States.

This video came from a U.S. Government agency collection in the holdings of the National Archives and Records Administration. The series is described in general terms in the Archives on-line catalog, but no description of the footage is included, making specific films essentially inaccessible. Only a knowledgeable free-lance archival media researcher working out of the National Archives research room could find and identify this footage. Don’t depend on a production assistant or intern to find the perfect footage for your next production! A professional researcher adds value!