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There are two topics here. They are of equal importance, I believe.
There is the newsreel film, wliich is the responsibility of the National Archives and Records Service. There is also the cultural or motion picture entertainment film. That is the responsibility more directly of the Library of Congress working with sister archives around the counti*y.
They are equally important, in my view. I believe this hearing is more directed toward the National Archives question, probably because of the fire.
A great deal has been done. The Chaplin films, for example, have now been preserved, I believe, almost entirely at the expense of the Chaplin interest.
All of this does not fall upon the Government. The MGM Co. has preserved their films, but there is a substantial amount of nitrate film held also by the Library of Congress.
Although it may not be directly the subject of this hearing, it is the other half of the problem because I fear that one day we will be having the same kind of hearing because of an accident simply because the material is volatile.
The problem is not going to get any better. These films are going to continue to have the corrosive process take place. It would seem to me that if we could set a plan in motion to deal with this problem once and for all at this time, then we could move on to new problems in the 1980's.
Mr. Preye-r. I have one final question that I would like to ask Miss Gish.
From your wide experience, do you know what the situation is in foreign countries, so far as newsreel and film preservation goes ? Wliat is their attitude toward protecting their heritage ?
Ms. GisH. Not definitely, only from observation.
I was taken through a television studio in Japan, and I was told how it began and how they were trying to make it better and preserve what they had.
I also went to Russia, as a guest, in July 1969. They had asked Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and I to come there as guests in 1928. My mother was ill and I could not go. Mary and Douglas went. Chaplin never went. They asked me again 10 years ago. It was during the film festival.
"We showed our film "2001," which made me very proud. I thought that was a beautiful example to send to them from us.
Then I was taken to their studio. They ran some of their films which I had never seen, of course.
I had seen "War and Peace'' as all of us did when it came here in two 4-hour versions. I saw it in France in French. I saw it about three or four times, but it was their history from a book by Tolstoy.
They give them all of their history. They give them all of their classics. They also show them Russia at its most beautiful in the springtime with fruit trees in bloom with lovely children playing under them and factories looking so lovely you would like to live in them,
Siberia looked like a poem in white. They arouse such pride in their country with their film that I think that is what holds their country