Talk:Newsreel

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Newsreels - Tyler's notes and ideas from group meeting February 22, 2010 - Re-written in no particular order


We should start watching some newsreels...


- Newsreels as dramatizations of newspaper news reporting

- The sensationalist quality of the reporting, which seems to accompany the 'actual' pictures of the news. - i.e. "And here are pictures! from the front of the War in Europe!"

- 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...

- 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.

- A news 'anchor' is not present visually, just aurally. Seems all the more 'impersonal' because of this, as if representative of an unseen public.

- 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.

- Were the events portrayed in newsreels actually the events described?

- 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?

- This 'nonfiction' text as implicitly contrasting with the characteristically 'fiction' text of the movie following it

- What was the relation to other shorts shown also before the film, i.e. cartoon shorts?

- 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 An implication seems to be that the news had to be somewhat 'general,' in order to not go out of date too quickly.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

- Questions of alliances between movie studios and news agencies? Was the news exclusive to their distribution partners?

- Newsreels continued to be distributed (apparently) long after TV was widely distributed, far into the 1960's. Was this a 'theater' experience that people were still interested to witness after TV?

- How does the era of the news reel compare, socially, with our current era of 24 hour news?

- How might questions of audience reception be relevant?


Other interesting questions that come to my mind (Tyler):

- Since we so often associate newsreels with war footage, what other subjects did they report on, i.e. before or after WW2? - For example, did they report on the economic growth in the US and concurrent suburbanization; The Marshall Plan in Europe?

- It seems the discourse in newsreels implicitly supports a narrative of 'Western progress'. Is this borne out?

- Did other countries produce newsreels, and what were they like? Were they 'vessels' for propaganda during WW2?

- 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?

- Was there anything that took their place?

- 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?

- Is the footage ever re-used, and how? - 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?

- 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'?

- How were news reels actually shot? Were 'journalists' embedded with soldiers, or did soldiers actually shoot the footage?

- 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?

- 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?

- 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?

- 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?

- Were newsreels generally destroyed when they were out of date, or were they archived, like newspapers have been archived?

- How do newsreels change over time, during the 40 years or more that they were distributed?

- Are their interpretations of historical events different from conceptions we may now hold?

- 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!

- 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.

- This seems to support the connection to nationalism. Viewers 'safe' in movie theaters could watch 'our boys' out on the front...

- If newsreels 'died' in the 1960's, what was their impact on news reporting during the Vietnam War? Reporting during that war was famously varied. There 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?

- Would be interesting to look at the connection with propaganda. Were 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.

- Did the US government encourage certain types of reporting, or restrict others? - i.e. Were newsreels very violent, did they show human casualties?