On July 24, the National Gallery of Art will be hosting “The March of Time: Seventy-Fifth Anniversary” as part of their ongoing film series, “Film and Reality in the 1930s: Roots of the Docudrama.” The screening will take place at 1:00 p.m. in the East Building Concourse Auditorium. No ticket purchase is required. These screenings are free and open to the public on a first-come, first-served basis.
HBO Archives®, which launched in 2002, has been managing and restoring The March of Time® newsreel collections since 2007. “We are thrilled to be making some classic March of Time stories available to the public and to be partnering with the National Gallery of Art on this event,“ says Barbara Thomas, senior vice president, HBO. The March of Time is the award-winning series produced by Time Inc. from 1935 to 1967. Each episode takes a focused look at culture, news and events from around the world. “Before this legacy series, there really wasn’t any documentary film movement in the U.S.” adds Thomas.
“We are targeting the very early The March of Time period, picking one short film from 1935, the first year, and two more shorts from 1936,” reports Margaret Parsons, Film Department Head, National Gallery of Art. The series separated itself from its Hollywood studio competitors by mixing highly produced, long form documentary with dramatic reenactments. “All together there are ten stories, using their trademark reenactments, that illustrate the roots of the American docudrama,” adds Parsons.
Another one of the highlights of the event is the screening of the first-ever The March of Time feature length film, “The Ramparts We Watch” from 1940. Once more, mixing historic footage with dramatic re-enactments, this controversial movie strongly advocated for U.S. intervention in World War II at a time when our nation was undecided. “The March of Time leveraged Time’s journalistic credibility to spread this anti-fascist, war rallying call in a media form several steps away from traditional journalism,” explains Parsons.
A fan page on Facebook has been established to keep track of all the 75th anniversary events and as a place for fans to talk about and view clips from the series. www.facebook.com/themarchoftime.
HBO Archives is a full-service stock footage library for commercial/professional use; in addition to The March of Time® collection, it offers sports, entertainment news, contemporary stock and royalty-free wildlife footage. The footage available is wide-ranging, culled from images shot around the globe by HBO’s producers for more than three decades. Clips from The March of Time can be licensed directly through HBO Archives at www.themarchoftime.net.
The National Gallery of Art serves the United States of America in a national role by preserving, collecting, exhibiting and fostering the understanding of works of art, at the highest possible museum and scholarly standards. The National Gallery of Art, one of the world’s preeminent museums with collections of some 116,000 paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, sculpture and decorative arts traces the development of Western art from the Middle Ages to the present.
www.nga.gov/programs/film/filmandreality.shtm