Difference between revisions of "Talk:Newsreel"

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Newsreels - Tyler's notes and ideas from group meeting February 22, 2010 - Re-written in no particular order
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Galloway's comments for our dossier:
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---
  
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Newsreels
  
We should start watching some newsreels...
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Good work here in this first dossier. I like how you described the
 
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newsreel in terms of a remediation of newspapers, particularly the
 
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organization of sections and articles. You described the formal
- Newsreels as dramatizations of newspaper news reporting
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  structure of the newsreel including narrative, etc. (the voice over
 
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  narration creating unity out of disparate film sources), and how it
- The sensationalist quality of the reporting, which seems to accompany the 'actual' pictures of the news.
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  adopted different contexts and narrative styles from different sources.
i.e. "And here are pictures! from the front of the War in Europe!"
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The description of the balance between fact and fiction was also
 
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  interesting, particularly when you demonstrated that this narrative is
- Although newsreels were made I guess as early as 1929, they seem to have taken mainstream form during World War 2. A lot of battle footage, interestingly...   
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  built into the film through restaging and reenactment. I like how you
 
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  talked about about Crary and Zielinski, and how you talked about film
- Questions of "mode of address":  who is this narrator, and who is the audience he is speaking to?  His narration, in a sense, 'creates' a public to hear it.
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  in terms of both dioptric and catoptric phenomena. Good work on film as
 
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  a fusion from discrete to continuous, the image only being an apparent
- A news 'anchor' is not present visually, just aurally. Seems all the more 'impersonal' because of this, as if representative of an unseen public.
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  effect. The section on speed was also nice, how playback influences if
 
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  we think it's real. I also was fascinated by how you discussed the
- We might tie in Benedict Anderson's discourse on Imagined Communities here, i.e. how newspapers created for readers a sense of 'nation.'  There seem to be strong parallels here.
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  aspect of time delay and the notion of the "first pictures" as
 
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dramatization of the news. You talked about the war as a four year film
- Were the events portrayed in newsreels actually the events described?
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with hundreds of parts, and that the dramatization united people around
 
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  a discourse of national unity, all of which was helped by the
- Newsreels seem more like a 'genre' than a 'technology.'  They were made on film, and shown before films in theaters.  Is this true?  Perhaps, how might they be read as either?
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  perception of realism in the newsreels. I particularly liked how you
 
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talked about the balancing of "fictional facts." For improvement I
- This 'nonfiction' text as implicitly contrasting with the characteristically 'fiction' text of the movie following it
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  would like to see more of an argument here, more engagement with the
 
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  assigned texts, and more use of the critical techniques. Try to steer
- What was the relation to other shorts shown also before the film, i.e. cartoon shorts?
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  clear of the Wikipedia-style neutral or descriptive language and really
 
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  do a close reading of your artifact in which you make a clear argument.
- How current was the news? How long would news reels be shown for, i.e. 1-3 weeks, shorter or longer?  An implication seems to be that the news had to be somewhat 'general,' in order to not go out of date too quickly.  Nevertheless, it still 'seemed' immediate on reception
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  Overall a good first start to the semester.
 
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- Questions of alliances between movie studios and news agencies? Was the news exclusive to their distribution partners?
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- Newsreels continued to be distributed (apparently) long after TV was widely distributed, far into the 1960'sWas this a 'theater' experience that people were still interested to witness after TV?
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- How does the era of the news reel compare, socially, with our current era of 24 hour news?
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- How might questions of audience reception be relevant?
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Other interesting questions that come to my mind (Tyler):
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- Since we so often associate newsreels with war footage, what other subjects did they report on, i.e. before or after WW2?
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      For example, did they report on the economic growth in the US and concurrent suburbanization;  The Marshall Plan in Europe?
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- It seems the discourse in newsreels implicitly supports a narrative of 'Western progress'.  Is this borne out?
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- Did other countries produce newsreels, and what were they like?  Were they 'vessels' for propaganda during WW2?
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- Why did news reels 'die'? Did it have more to do with changing social circumstances ("the times they are a-changing" (1963)), or technological changes such as the prevalence of television programming?
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- Was there anything that took their place?
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- Do we see 'echoes' of news reel tone today? Either in news coverage, or in other places?  i.e. Is it seen as constitutive of social norms of its time more generally, as it might influence the Cold War culture following WW2, the particular qualities to culture we associate with the 1950's?
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- Is the footage ever re-used, and how?
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      i.e. Is the news re-used in documentaries, film or television, such as Ken Burns' film "The War" or documentaries on the History Channel? 
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- If so, does the textual interpretation change on re-contextualization? Should we see these documentaries, in a sense, as 'writing history' in a more final way than is said of journalism as 'the first draft of history'?
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- How were news reels actually shot? Were 'journalists' embedded with soldiers, or did soldiers actually shoot the footage?
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- How are news reels different from "stock footage"?  Were news reels considered 'public domain,' or were they copyrighted?  Did 'stock footage' enter the public domain?
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- Seems the original video was unnarrated. Was sound recorded during or after when the footage was shot, and what was the process for this?  If unnarrated, did journalists need to interpret what the pictures were about, if they received them by mail?
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- What actually were the news sources for newsreels? I.e. was news collected by wire (telegraph), or was it written and transmitted along with the film?
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- Like film, newsreels seem to be shot on film. So they did not have the status of television or radio, which are 'ephemeral' mediums that must be recorded to be re-shown.  What were the consequences of this? 
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- Were newsreels generally destroyed when they were out of date, or were they archived, like newspapers have been archived?
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- How do newsreels change over time, during the 40 years or more that they were distributed?
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- Are their interpretations of historical events different from conceptions we may now hold?
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- We should remember that, during wars, the outcome was uncertain. In this way, newsreels seemed, in a way, to 'remediate' the war, to show it almost as a movie, but a movie with 'real-life' drama!
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- There seem to be discourses of realism that attach to documentaries of WW2.  Rebecca Salaszek, for example, wrote a paper about how the History Channel constructs their documentaries as if the viewer was 'actually there,' 'immersed' in the action.  This seems to be a historical view looking back.  Surely people at the time did not want to be there. In a sense, film was the perfect medium to 'transport' the viewer to the battlefield.
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- This seems to support the connection to nationalism. Viewers 'safe' in movie theaters could watch 'our boys' out on the front...
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- If newsreels 'died' in the 1960's, what was their impact on news reporting during the Vietnam War?  Reporting during that war was famously variedThere were many independent journalists, just 'guys with a camera' who were down 'in the shit.' If this reporting attempted for realism, for example, did it construct this in response to the apparent ideological or even propoganda tone of newsreels?
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- Would be interesting to look at the connection with propagandaWere newsreels 'vehicles' for propaganda messages from the US government? As Americans, we may not 'see' the propaganda in newsreels, if it can be argued to be present.   
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- Did the US government encourage certain types of reporting, or restrict others?
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      i.e. Were newsreels very violent, did they show human casualties?
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Latest revision as of 10:41, 24 November 2010

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.