"Showdown in Vietnam", a February 8, 1965, war propaganda newsreel by Universal Newsreel, with narration by Ed Herlihy.
A newsreel is a form of short documentary film, containing news stories and items of topical interest, that was prevalent between the 1910s and the mid 1970s. Typically presented in a cinema, newsreels were a source of current affairs, information, and entertainment for millions of moviegoers. Newsreels were typically exhibited preceding a feature film, but there were also dedicated newsreel theaters in many major cities in the 1930s and ’40s,[1] and some large city cinemas also included a smaller theaterette where newsreels were screened continuously throughout the day.
By the end of the 1960s television news broadcasts had supplanted the format. Newsreels are considered significant historical documents, since they are often the only audiovisual record of certain cultural events.
History
Trade advertisement for the Universal Animated Weekly, a newsreel series created by Universal Pictures in 19131931 Pathé newsreel of Mahatma Gandhi arriving in London.News cameramen, Washington, DC, 1938January 31, 1946 report on Fort Monmoutharmy engineers sending a radar signal to the moon.
Silent news films were shown in cinemas from the late 19th century. In 1909 Pathé started producing weekly newsreels in Europe. Pathé began producing newsreels for the UK in 1910 and the US in 1911.[2]
Newsreels were a staple of the typical North American, British, and Commonwealth countries (especially Canada, Australia, and New Zealand), and throughout European cinema programming schedule from the silent era until the 1960s when television news broadcasting completely supplanted its role. The National Film and Sound Archive in Australia holds the Cinesound Movietone Australian Newsreel Collection, a comprehensive collection of 4,000 newsreel films and documentaries representing news stories covering all major events.
The first official British news cinema that only showed newsreels was the Daily Bioscope that opened in London on May 23, 1909.[3] In 1929, William Fox purchased a former cinema called the Embassy.[4] He changed the format from a $2 show twice a day to a continuous 25-cent programme, establishing the first newsreel theater in the United States; the idea was such a success that Fox and his backers announced they would start a chain of newsreel theaters across the country.[5][a] The newsreels were often accompanied by cartoons or short subjects.
The First World War saw the major countries using the newest technologies to develop propaganda for home audiences. Each used carefully edited newsreels to combine straight news reports and propaganda.[6][7][8] During the Second World War, the Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, a state organization in Nazi Germany for disseminating stories favorable to the administration's goals, created Die Deutsche Wochenschau (1940–1945). There were no other newsreels disseminated within the country during the war.
In some countries, newsreels generally used music as a background for usually silent on-site film footage. In some countries, the narrator used humorous remarks for light-hearted or non-tragic stories. In the U.S., newsreel series included The March of Time (1935–1951), Pathé News (1910–1956), Paramount News (1927–1957), Fox Movietone News (1928–1963), Hearst Metrotone News (1914–1967), and Universal Newsreel (1929–1967). Pathé News was distributed by RKO Radio Pictures from 1931 to 1947, and then by Warner Brothers from 1947 to 1956.
An example of a newsreel story can be found in the film Citizen Kane (1941), which was prepared by RKO's actual newsreel staff. Citizen Kane includes a fictional newsreel called "News on the March" that summarizes the life of title characterCharles Foster Kane while parodying The March of Time.
On August 12, 1949, one hundred twenty cinema technicians employed by Associated British Pathé in London went on strike to protest the dismissal of fifteen men on the grounds of redundancy while conciliation under trade union agreements was pending. Their strike lasted through to at least Tuesday August 16, the Tuesday being the last day for production on new newsreels shown on the Thursday. Events of the strike resulted in over three hundred cinemas across Britain having to go without newsreels that week.[9]
Television news
In 1936, when the BBC Television Service was launched in the United Kingdom, it was airing the British Movietone and Gaumont British newsreels for several years (except for a hiatus during World War II), until 1948, when the service launched their own newsreel programme, titled Television Newsreel, that would last until July 1954, when it was replaced by News and Newsreel.[10][11][12]
On August 15, 1948, CBS started their evening television news program Douglas Edwards and the News. Later the NBC, CBS, and ABC(USA) news shows all produced their own news film.
In New Zealand, the Weekly Review was "the principal film series produced in the 1940s".[13] The first television news broadcasts in the country, incorporating newsreel footage, began in 1960.[14]
Demise
Newsreel-producing companies excluded television companies from their distribution, but the television companies countered by sending their own camera crews to film news events.
Newsreels died out because of the nightly television news broadcast,[15][16] and technological advances such as electronic news-gathering for television news, introduced in the 1970s, rendered them obsolete.
Newsreel cinemas either closed or went to showing continuous programmes of cartoons and short subjects, such as the London Victoria Station News Cinema, later Cartoon Cinema[17] that opened in 1933 and closed in 1981.
The last American newsreel was released on December 26, 1967, the day after Christmas.[18] Nonetheless, some countries such as Cuba, Japan, Spain, and Italy continued producing newsreels into the 1980s and 1990s.[19]
An Australian movie production dramatizing the cameramen and producers of newsreels was released in 1978. The title was Newsfront.[24] Some events featured during the presentation were regarding the 1949 election of the Australian Prime Minister, the rabbit plague, and the introduction of television (1956).
A 2016 Irish documentary, Éire na Nuachtscannán ("Ireland in the Newsreels") looked at the newsreel age in Ireland, mostly focusing on Pathé News and how the (British) company altered its newsreels for an Irish audience.[25][26][27]
↑ The six or seven minutes of newsreel exhibited in ordinary program houses are selected from many reels of current events. Nowhere could one be sure of seeing all the newsreels made in any one week. In Manhattan, William Fox, in collaboration with Hearst Metro tone, found what to do with the newsreels discarded weekly by their companies. He took over a Broadway theater (Embassy) and changed its program from a $2 show twice a day to a continuous 25¢ show. He made the program all newsreels, to run for an hour, a full photographic report of the pictorial parts of the week's news.
Related Research Articles
The Fox Film Corporation was an American independent company that produced motion pictures and was formed in 1915 by the theater "chain" pioneer William Fox. It was the corporate successor to his earlier Greater New York Film Rental Company and Box Office Attraction Company.
Newsreel footage of the 6 May 1937 Hindenburg disaster, where the zeppelin LZ 129 Hindenburg crashed and burned down, was filmed by several companies.
Gaumont SA is a French film and television production and distribution company headquartered in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France. Founded by the engineer-turned-inventor Léon Gaumont (1864–1946) in 1895, it is the oldest extant film company in the world, established before other studios such as Pathé, Titanus (1904), Nordisk Film (1906), Universal, Paramount, and Nikkatsu.
Movietone News was a newsreel that ran from 1928 to 1963 in the United States. Under the name British Movietone News, it also ran in the United Kingdom from 1929 to 1986, in France also produced by Fox-Europa, in Spain in the early 1930s as Noticiario Fox Movietone before being replaced by No-Do, in Australia and New Zealand until 1970, and Germany as Fox Tönende Wochenschau from 1930 to 1940 and from 1950 to 1978. An Indian version called Indian Movietone News ran in 1942 and 1943 before getting replaced by Indian News Parade.
Pathé is a French major film production and distribution company, owning a number of cinema chains through its subsidiary Pathé Cinémas and television networks across Europe.
The March of Time is an American newsreel series sponsored by Time Inc. and shown in movie theaters from 1935 to 1951. It was based on a radio news series broadcast from 1931 to 1945 that was produced by advertising agency Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn (BBDO). The "voice" of both series was Westbrook Van Voorhis. Produced and written by Louis de Rochemont and his brother Richard de Rochemont, The March of Time was recognized with an Academy Honorary Award in 1937.
Television Newsreel is a British television programme, the first regular news programme to be made in the UK. Produced by the BBC and screened on the BBC Television Service from 1948 to 1954 at 7.30pm, it adapted the traditional cinema newsreel form for the television audience, covering news and current affairs stories as well as quirkier 'human interest' items, sports and cultural events.
Paramount News was a newsreel series that was produced by Paramount Pictures from 1927 to 1957.
Pathé News was a producer of newsreels and documentaries from 1910 to 1970 in the United Kingdom. Its founder, Charles Pathé, was a pioneer of moving pictures in the silent era. The Pathé News archive is known today as "British Pathé". Its collection of news film and movies is fully digitised and available online.
Universal Newsreel was a series of 7- to 10-minute newsreels that were released twice a week between 1929 and 1967 by Universal Studios. A Universal publicity official, Sam B. Jacobson, was involved in originating and producing the newsreels. Nearly all of them were filmed in black-and-white, and many were narrated by Ed Herlihy. From January 1919 to July 1929, Universal released International Newsreel, produced by Hearst's International News Service—this series later became Hearst Metrotone News released first by Fox Film Corporation 1929–1934 and then by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer beginning in 1934.
Look at Life was a regular British series of short documentary films of which over 500 were produced between 1959 and 1969 by the Special Features Division of the Rank Organisation for screening in their Odeon and Gaumont cinemas. The films always preceded the main feature film that was being shown in the cinema that week. It replaced the circuit's newsreel, Universal News, which had become increasingly irrelevant in the face of more immediate news media, particularly on television with the launch of ITN on the Independent Television service, which began broadcasting in parts of the United Kingdom in 1955.
The Gaumont-British Picture Corporation produced and distributed films and operated a cinema chain in the United Kingdom. It was established as an offshoot of France's Gaumont.
Pacific Films is a film production company in New Zealand.
Learning on Screen - The British Universities Film & Video Council (BUFVC) is a representative body promoting the production, study and use of moving image, sound and related media for learning and research. It is a company limited by guarantee, with charity status, serving schools, colleges and post compulsory education interests in the UK.
Hearst Metrotone News was a newsreel series (1914–1967) produced by the Hearst Corporation, founded by William Randolph Hearst.
Indian News Parade was a cinematic newsreel produced by the Indian government between September 1943 and April 1946. Originally a newsreel named Indian Movietone News from 1942 to 1943, it was produced in response to the Anglo-centric newsreels created by British and American companies. It suffered a poor critical reception, and production ceased shortly after the end of World War II.
Fox News was the original newsreel established by movie mogul William Fox. It was eventually replaced by Fox's pioneering sound newsreel, Fox Movietone News, which began regular operations in December 1927.
Leslie Lesser Landau was a British director, film producer, screenwriter, screenplay editor and playwright. He also served as the newsreel editor of British Movietone News from 1929 to 1935 at a time the power of newsreel from a political perspective was first used. He was honoured for landmark film journalism.
↑ Wolfgang Miihl-Benninghaus, "Newsreel Images of the Military and War, 1914-1918" in A Second Life: German Cinema's First Decades ed. by Thomas Elsaesser, (1996) online.
Baechlin, Peter and Maurice Muller-Strauss (Editors), Newsreels across the world, Paris: Unesco, 1952
Barnouw, Erik, Documentary: a history of the non-fiction film, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993 revised
Clark, Joseph (2020) News Parade: The American Newsreel and the World as Spectacle University of Minnesota Press ISBN9781452963600
Clyde, Jeavons, Jane Mercer and Daniela Kirchner (Editors), "The story of the century!" An international newsfilm conference, London: BUFVC, 1998
Fielding, Raymond, The March of Time, 1935-1951, New York: Oxford University Press, 1978
Imesch, Kornelia; Schade, Sigrid; Sieber, Samuel (Editors), Constructions of Cultural Identities in Newsreel Cinema and Television after 1945, Bielefeld: transcript, 2016.
McKernan, Luke (Editor), Yesterday's news. The British Cinema Newsreel Reader, London: BUFVC, 2002
Smither, Roger and Wolfgang Klaue (Editors), Newsreels in film archives: a survey based on the FIAF symposium, Wiltshire: Flicks Books, 1996
Vande Winkel, Roel, "Newsreel series: world overview", in: Aitken, Ian (Editor), Encyclopedia of the Documentary Film, New York/London: Routledge, 2006, pp.985–991
Zielinski, Siegfried (2006) Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means Cambridge: The MIT Press
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