Industry News

Headline	Historic Time Capsule Of News Footage Recovered From WWII Bunker By The Associated Press
Article	A treasure trove of historical footage which has been stored in General Dwight D. Eisenhower’s former World War II headquarters has been resurrected by The Associated Press as part of a major restoration project. The news organisation's project is unveiling a vast archive of film footage providing new perspectives on past events from the 1960s and 1970s. AP Archive is making the footage available in high definition. The project has unveiled new colour footage of key political figures from the era including a young Yasser Arafat, Libya’s Colonel Gadhafi immediately after taking power, Richard Nixon with Nicolae Ceausescu, Fidel Castro meeting Latin American and Eastern European leaders, and a young Saddam Hussein in Paris. Celebrities also feature and include Jane Fonda’s controversial visit to North Vietnam at the height of the Vietnam War, Elizabeth Taylor’s star-studded 40th birthday party, as well as a host of performers ranging from Joan Baez to Barbara Streisand. In addition to coverage of the events and the people that shaped the 1960s and 1970s, the new footage captures the mood of the period, documenting youth and popular culture: from hippies at music festivals and amazingly bizarre fashion shoots, to footage of protests and anti-war demonstrations. Twenty-thousand film cans containing 3,500 hours of international news footage have been lying dormant for decades deep underground in the Central London bunker from which Eisenhower directed the D-Day landings. Although the films themselves have been well preserved, the numerous pieces of text catalogue that accompanied them were scattered across various locations in the UK and US. The text catalogue is essential as it identifies what footage is held in each film can and without it, the archive has been virtually inaccessible since the day the films were first produced. This "lost archive" is the legacy of United Press International Television News (UPITN), which was a major television news agency from the early 1960s to the mid 1980s. UPITN was at the forefront of international newsgathering and had a vast network of foreign bureaux around the world with film crews capturing images of the events and people that defined the era. It went through several changes of ownership before being renamed WTN (World Television News), and its holdings were purchased by AP in 1998 as part of its acquisition of WTN. AP’s footage business, AP Archive, assembled a team of leading archival researchers to painstakingly piece together the scattered paper records and to create a coherent online text database. The films themselves are being cleaned and restored by Laboratoires Éclair of Paris, and then transferred onto high definition videotape for use by professional producers. AP Archive is also digitising the films so that they can be viewed online.
Company	Associated Press
Date Published	2/7/2009