Newsreel

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The newsreel was a short collection of nonfiction stories compiled on a single reel of film produced primarily between 1911 and 1967. A number of countries produced their own domestic newsreels, however this article focuses primarily on American-made productions. Usually included as part of a theatrical program including other shorts and a feature film, the newsreel covered an assortment of events and human interest stories that were directed at a national audience. In peacetime regarded as a form of light entertainment, during World War 2 it gained national significance as the primary source of news images of combat. Produced by motion picture studios, newsreels were not the sole source of news for American audiences, rather they presented a cinematic interpretation of the events of the day.

Multiple factors, including reduced industry competition, censorship, and the increasing popularity of television news, contributed to the decline of the medium, and the last of the major newsreels ceased production in 1967. From the very beginning of its existence through its demise, the newsreel was caught between the impulse to entertain and the impulse to inform.

Origins

Silent An early form of non-fiction cinema, actualities, recorded unscripted moments, while news films captured events of historical significance or staged reenactments. These early cinematic products of Edison, Muybridge, Lumière, and others created a cinema of attractions that overtly acknowledged the spectator and played to the camera as described by Tom Gunning, professor of cinematic history at University of Chicago. Both genres declined in the United States, along with the nickelodean theater, as the feature length narrative film gained traction. The newsreel remediated the topical journalistic diversity of newspaper and radio news; the camera techniques of the actuality; the narrative devices of the news film; and the abbreviated length of the nickelodeon picture.

"The idea for the newsreel is credited to Leon Franconi, Charles Pathé's American-based confidential interpreter" (Fielding 69). Charles Pathé released French and British newsreels in 1910, with an American edition of Pathé's Weekly premiering on August 8, 1911. The Vitagraph Company, with over a decade of experience producing news films, released its newsreel, The Vitagraph Monthly of Current Events, ten days later on August 18, 1911. Over the next decade a number of companies entered the newsreel market, only to find that the expense of cameras and processing apparatus impeded on profits.

By 1925 two major Hollywood studios--Fox Film Corporation and Universal Studios, in association with Hearst Corporation--and two independent producers--Pathé News and Kinograms, operated by Educational Pictures, Inc. were producing newsreels. Two other Hollywood studios entered the field in 1927, Paramount and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) in association with Hearst, just as sound pictures were on the rise.

Production and Technology

Collecting Footage


Editing


Types of Stories

Distribution and Censorship

Reception and Propaganda

Decline and End



References


Doherty, Thomas Patrick. Projections of War: Hollywood, American Culture, and World War II. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. Print.

Fielding, Raymond. The American Newsreel. Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1972. Print.

Hanssen, Eirik Frisvold. "Symptoms of desire: colour, costume, and commodities in fashion newsreels of the 1910s and 1920s." Film History. 21 (2009): 107-121. Project Muse. Web. 4 March 2010.

Roeder, George H., Jr. "The Censored War: American Visual Experience During World War Two." New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993. Print.

Zielinski, Siegfried. "Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means." Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2006. Print.