AFI BLOG: Media and Technology

Print tramps to new home - The Hollywood Reporter

A print of “The Great Dictator” that Hitler himself might have watched is among the thousands of historic films that the Library of Congress is moving halfway across the country.

The print of the Charlie Chaplin classic skewering the Nazi leader is among the 120,000 reels of nitrate film that the Library is moving from Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio to its new storage facility in the foothills of Virginia.

The “Dictator” print is part of a larger batch of U.S. materials that the German federal archive turned over to the Library, which is finding a new home in a converted Cold War bunker near Culpeper, Va. The Packard Campus, named for benefactor David Packard, was completed last year, but moving the delicate nitrate archive will take until the fall.

“Hitler saw ‘The Great Dictator’ twice,” Library of Congress nitrate vault manager George Willemann said. “Whether he said anything about the film was never recorded.”

More