Talk:Newsreel
From Dead Media Archive
Galloway's comments for our dossier: ---
Newsreels
Good work here in this first dossier. I like how you described the newsreel in terms of a remediation of newspapers, particularly the organization of sections and articles. You described the formal structure of the newsreel including narrative, etc. (the voice over narration creating unity out of disparate film sources), and how it adopted different contexts and narrative styles from different sources. The description of the balance between fact and fiction was also interesting, particularly when you demonstrated that this narrative is built into the film through restaging and reenactment. I like how you talked about about Crary and Zielinski, and how you talked about film in terms of both dioptric and catoptric phenomena. Good work on film as a fusion from discrete to continuous, the image only being an apparent effect. The section on speed was also nice, how playback influences if we think it's real. I also was fascinated by how you discussed the aspect of time delay and the notion of the "first pictures" as dramatization of the news. You talked about the war as a four year film with hundreds of parts, and that the dramatization united people around a discourse of national unity, all of which was helped by the perception of realism in the newsreels. I particularly liked how you talked about the balancing of "fictional facts." For improvement I would like to see more of an argument here, more engagement with the assigned texts, and more use of the critical techniques. Try to steer clear of the Wikipedia-style neutral or descriptive language and really do a close reading of your artifact in which you make a clear argument. Overall a good first start to the semester.