The subject of non-theatrical films is an understudied topic in archival science. This paper shows how the different approaches to censorship measures that were in play during the 1920s have affected the archiving of non-theatrical films. In the advent of technical and artistic advancement of the film medium, non-theatrical film production had become a prolific business in both the USA and Sweden during the 1920s. At this point in time, filmmaking had become sophisticated enough to tackle more ambitious narratives, while non-fiction filmmaking was still in its gestational period before the 1930s when documentary filmmaking started to be regarded as an art form. As two major film nations of the 1920s, American and Swedish lobbying groups had different views on censorship legislation. In 1911, Sweden founded the first federal censorship bureau in the world, Statens biografbyrå. In America on the other hand, the National Board of Review vehemently opposed any federal attempts to legislate the contents of film. Instead, the National Board of Review implemented a different tactic to sanitize film by incentivizing high quality filmmaking through different strategies that were based on film producers’ voluntary cooperation. Through comparative critical discourse analysis of two case studies, this study found that the archival findings from Tullbergs film and Baumer films were symptomatic of being created during the evidence paradigm, as defined by Terry Cook, where the most useful documentation could be found in state institutions exerting control over film.