Film & History News Film Committee Participates in International Association

31 . Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, by Mervyn LeRoy (1944), Library of Congress, with Robert Walker. Van Johnson. Leon Ames, Spencer Tracy. 32.Objective Burma, by Raoul Walsh (1945), Library of Congress, with Errol Flynn. 33.Wake Island, by John Farrow (1942), Library of Congress with Brian Donlevy and Robert Preston. 34.Behind the Rising Sun, by Edward Dmytryk (1943), Library of Congress, with Tom Neal and J. Carrol Naish. FILM & HISTORY NEWS FILM COMMITTEE PARTICIPATES IN INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION The Historians Film Committee has assumed active membership in the International Association for Audio-Visual Media In Historical Research And Education (IAMHIST), a group organized in 1975 after a series of international meetings. IAMHIST includes members from England, West Germany, Holland, Denmark and the Soviet Union, and plans its next conference in Holland in August 1979. Dr. Rolf Schuursma, of the Stichting Film en Wetenschap, Utrecht, is the current IAMHIST president. As the name indicates, IAMHIST exists to encourage research in audio-visual material for historical study, to encourage preservation of such material and to promote international exchange of information in the field. There is a newsletter for members. For individual membership and information write to Miss Elizabeth Oliver, Director, British Universities Film Council, 80 Dean Street, London,Wl. TELEVISION ARCHIVES MEETING Historians interested in television programming, as possible source materials should take note ofa two-day conference sponsored by the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C, on February 13-14, 1978. The conference was organized by media historian Erik Barnouw, now serving as a consultant for the Library, and Paul Spehr, acting head of the Library's motion picture section, as part of their planning for the American Television and Radio Archives mandated by the new copyright law. Invited to participate in the conference were representatives from institutions engaged in the collection of television materials, including the National Archives, the Museum of Broadcasting, the Vanderbilt Television News Archives, and the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theatre Research, just to name a few. No representatives from the commercial television networks were present, but there were representatives from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the Public Broadcasting Service. The conference agenda emphasized custodial problems of mutual interest such as acquisitions procedures, methods ofpreservation and storage, cataloging and indexing, and access arrangements and facilities. Representatives from each institution described their areas of interest, procedures, and plans for the future. The Museum of Broadcasting and the Vanderbilt Television News Archives have made much progress. One theme that predominated was that all institutions share the common problem ofbalancing reference demands with the need for 48 long-term preservation. The most vexing archival problem raised was that ofthe impermanence ofvideotape. Much of our recent past has been recorded on videotape, and there is no guarantee that the tape will endure long enough to serve future generations of scholars. Although the group in attendance needed no convincing about the need to preserve television programming, they were encouraged by Librarian Daniel Boorstin's recognition of the importance of television in the study of American culture. Boorstin pointed to television records ofevents in Washington as an example and shared his hope that such records would be preserved in order that scholars will have a better chance to carry out historical research. The conference proceedings were videotaped by the Library's staff. William T. Murphy National Archives and Records Service BOOK REVIEW Lawrence H. Suid, Guts and Glory: Great American War Movies (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1978), 320 pp. $12.95 cloth, $6.95 paper. The conclusion first. This book is an excellent contribution to the growing studies on American films and to the war film genre in particular. It belongs in any library dealing with movies and has good potential as a text in film courses. Suid's narrow definition of war movies is those in which combat or its influence are central. He does, however, also consider "military movies" in which military men are portrayed in training or preserving peace. Within these definitions, Suid selects several dozen films from The Big Parade (1925) to Apocalypse Now (scheduled for 1978 release? and uses them to develop his main themes: the image of the military presented to mass...