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Kenn Rabin, an authority on researching and using archival materials, is credited on both documentaries and dramatic features, including Section Eight's Good Night, and Good Luck and The Good German.

Interview excerpted with permission from the second edition of Sheila Curran Bernard's Documentary Storytelling, to be published in February.

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Good Night, and Good Luck is a dramatic feature, but the film includes a lot of stock footage and sound, and in addition actor David Strathairn, as Edward R. Murrow, recreates Murrow's actual broadcasts for CBS. How much archival material is in the film?

We bought about 21-22 minutes just from CBS. When you add in what we got from NBC and other sources, it would have to total more like 25 or 27 minutes. There's a lot of archival going on at the same time as a lot of non-archival. There are scenes, for example, when Murrow is waiting to speak to William Paley and he's in Paley's outer office with his secretary. There's a little monitor near where she sits, and she's watching a 1953 soap opera. When Don Hollenback commits suicide, he's watching an episode of "The Beulah Show" from 1953, 1954. There's a lot of archival that the average viewer will barely notice; there are some primetime shows playing on monitors in the control room, and there are even little things that are archival, like the CBS cloud logo. That was actually a major feat of clearance, all that CBS branding.

Tell me about the other Section Eight film you've been working on, The Good German, which also involves a lot of archival imagery.

The Good German is an adaptation of a novel by Joseph Kanon. It's not a docudrama, it's not a documentary, but it is a historical piece. It's about an American journalist, played by George Clooney, who goes back to Berlin at the end of WWII, right when the Potsdam Conference is happening. He gets involved in an intrigue having to do with a very young American soldier who's over there, played by Tobey McGuire, and his own former secretary, played by Cate Blanchett. It takes place in divided Berlin, when Berlin's in four sectors: American, Soviet, French and British.

The original plan for the film was that every shot would be digitally placed over archival footage. So that literally, the film would be "shot" in 1945 Berlin; the actors would be green-screened over archival. There was a scene in a butcher shop, for example, and I had to find every camera angle we needed in a butcher shop in 1945 Berlin. If there was a scene outdoors, a destroyed park or a zoo, I had to find those camera angles. There was interplay between the writing, directing, and archival research: what I could find that was in Paul Attanasio's script, and whatever else I found in my research that might work or that piqued Paul's interest, or Steven Soderbergh's.

Basically it was going to be done so that it looked like a 1940s Warner Brothers film, like Casablanca or Hitchcock's Notorious, where a lot of full exterior scenes were done with process projection. But because of budget constraints, because of the decision to work in black and white, we had to not do that. We ended up just doing it for some exteriors and for what traditionally you use process projection for - images out of car windows and tram windows and things like that - and in certain selected scenes and cutaways. The rest of it was created, but because I'd spent almost three years finding them millions of feet of archival footage, they used it as reference. They literally built destroyed Berlin on a back lot at Universal, based on the archival footage. And costumed all the extras, who were playing the Berliners, based on the archival footage and on stills that I got from the Imperial War Museum. A colleague of mine in the art department, Joanna Bush, created an amazing database of all the footage I'd collected. It was organized based on the geography of Berlin. So that on Steven's computer, he could click on a map of Berlin and it would find all the archival footage that I had gotten on a particular plaza or a particular street or a particular location, and pull up all that archival footage and all the stills. Steven could know where he was situated in Berlin, and the art department could recreate a particular strasse. We'd know the ruins and we'd know how much that area was bombed out and all that.

I got footage from various places; Germany, Moscow, London, Paris. The most useful turned out to be the material at the National Archives and the Library of Congress, here in the United States, because that material was vast; it had been shot by Signal Corps camera units headed up by George Stevens and William Wyler. A lot of it we got onto DVD or into a digital form, and then it was linked to this database.

Is there communication, internationally, between archives?

There's an attempt by archives to coordinate, on an international level, through organizations like FOCAL [the Federation of Commercial Audiovisual Libraries International]. And there is a sense that archives are becoming multinational corporations. So if you get on the website of Gaumont Pathé, it's now multilingual and they're prepared to handle you if you're making a request from the U.S. or France or the U.K.. It's not true of some archives from smaller countries, but certainly archives in the major countries in Europe are getting more business from other countries. It's a good thing in terms of access; it's a bad thing in terms of the fact that more and more of these archives are setting their prices high and making accessibility for the little guy a lot more difficult.

Any other thoughts?

I think the whole issue of fair use, and what's happening now, is really important. I'd definitely send folks to the Center for Social Media Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use.

Sheila Curran Bernard is an Emmy- and Peabody Award-winning filmmaker, writer, and consultant. She has been a fellow at the MacDowell Colony and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and recently served as the Anschutz Distinguished Fellow in American Studies at Princeton University.