The Hearst Metrotone News collection is one of UCLA Film & Television Archive’s most important collections. It includes not only the best surviving material of theatrically released newsreels, but also news programs made for television, films Hearst was hired to produce for the US government, and several million feet of unreleased footage. Tonight’s program will highlight some of the problems and concerns associated with the preservation and restoration of this material. Among the films to be screened are a surprisingly uncritical one-reel documentary on Fidel Castro made in 1958, a short documentary from 1966 on how a new foreign diplomat—actually a young Anwar Sadat—becomes familiar with his host country, and unreleased footage of MAD magazine founder William Gaines testifying before a Senate committee in 1954.
Approx. TRT: 80 min.