It was a wonderful story of Frank Daniel, who later became the head of the Columbia (University) Film School in New York. He was then the head of the film school in Prague. And when the tanks started rumbling through in August of 1968, the film students at the school woke up, and went home, which is to say to film school, which is where they spent most of their time. And Frank was there.
And he said, 'We don't know what's happening. But for all we know this could be the beginning of World War III. Something is going on.' And he unlocked the equipment room, and started handing out 16 mm cameras and raw stock, which were normally kept very carefully under locks. But he started handing them out to whoever film students were around. And said, 'Just go out there and film it.' And this was the beginning of what now you see every night when you watch the news. Basically, let's call it 'the democratisation of on-the-spot recording.' People with iPhones, they're in Syria filming these events. And that had happened to a limited degree in Hungary in the mid- '50s. But very little in comparison with what was now possible because of... We weren't yet in digital, but everything had gotten relatively inexpensive and lightweight. And you could go out with cameras and shoot stuff that would have been very difficult 10 years earlier. So dozens of film students were out there filming this material. And they were telling the passers-by, as soon as they had finished a roll of film... They would wrap it up and find somebody who was leaving Czechoslovakia, a tourist, and say, 'Where are you going?' 'Stockholm.' 'Take this, and as soon as you get to Stockholm, give it to Svenska Television.'
And so this was happening in Brussels, Stockholm, and Rome, and London. It was as if there was an explosion of film that was coming from Prague, and going everywhere else in the world. And that was what you saw on the news the next day about these events.
