NATO Declassified: Screening event for archive researchers
IWM held a screening event in London on 19 June to showcase the NATO film collection to a select audience of archive researchers and producers with plenty of opportunity to discuss forthcoming projects with IWM curatorial and licensing staff. It was also a celebration of the end of an extensive digitisation project commissioned by NATO to mark their 70 year anniversary.
We were delighted to be joined by NATO Archives Officer Nicholas Nguyen and IWM’s Head of Cold War & Late 20th Century Carl Warner who both gave presentations. Positive feedback from one guest was that the event was "fascinating and another breathtaking example of the breadth of work the Museum undertakes." Watch our showreel for a taster of the 2000 titles exclusively available for licensing via IWM Film.
NATO Archives Officer Nicholas Nguyen giving his presentation at IWM London
"Thank you. On behalf of NATO and especially the NATO Archives, I’m very pleased and excited to be here today. This film digitisation project has been years in the making and I’d like to congratulate everyone at the Imperial War Museum, from the archivists to the conservators to the administrators to the organizers of this event, for reaching this milestone. Their work has yielded fantastic results and this is a great opportunity to share it with the rest of the world."
Greg Brockett, Curator at IWM with Kay Gladstone, former Senior Curator Film Acquisitions and Documentation at IWM
Greg Brockett was one of the key people involved in the NATO digitisation project. He worked with the Film Archivists to digitise and catalogue, or dispose of, over 18,000 reels of film through a process of research and technical identification. He also interpreted the films’ historic content for online captions and IWM’s digital archives.
Carl Warner, Head of Cold War & Late 20th Century at IWM
Guests included Ben Taylor, Director at Snappin’ Turtle Productions and 2018 IWM Short Film Festival winners Squeaky Pedal Productions - Peter Roch and Jason Davidson
Find out More
Over 90 NATO films are currently available to view on IWM Film with many more available in the months ahead.
The collection comprises of 350 hours of films consisting of four sub-collections: Marshall Plan; NATO Film documentaries; NATO film log; and the SHAPE (Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe) Film Library. As well as being useful for telling the story of NATO, the films are also interesting from a cultural and social history perspective and include the award winning High Journey (1959) narrated by Orson Welles.
For assistance with research or information about access to the collection, please contact: filmcommercial@iwm.org.uk