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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, and some large city cinemas also included a smaller theaterette where newsreels were screened continuously throughout the day.
Lewis Wickes Hine was an American sociologist and muckraker photographer. His photographs were instrumental in bringing about the passage of the first child labor laws in the United States.
Ralph Steiner was an American photographer, pioneer documentarian and a key figure among avant-garde filmmakers in the 1930s.
Sam Brody was a founding member of the Workers Film and Photo League, an independent organization founded in 1931 to produce and present films documenting the Great Depression from a Marxist perspective. He is also known for his work as a photographer and film critic, and for his 15-year relationship with New York City painter Alice Neel.
Hi De Ho is a 1947 American musical race film directed by Josh Binney. Distributed by All American Entertainment, the film stars an all African American cast, led by Cab Calloway. It first showed at the Squire Theatre in New York, and would be shown in the more than 500 African-American theaters in the US.
David Richard Koff was an American maker of documentary films, social activist, writer, researcher, and editor. His interest in social and economic justice has shaped a career largely spent exploring human rights, colonialism, resistance movements, racism, labor unions, and the oppression and exploitation of undocumented workers in America. However, he veered from political concerns long enough to write and co-produce the film People of the Wind, for which, in 1976, he was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Feature Documentary.
People of the Cumberland is a 1937 short film directed by Sidney Meyers and Jay Leyda and produced by Frontier Films. The film is designed to support the U.S. labor union movement and it mixes non-fiction filmmaking and dramatic re-enactions.
James Balog is an American photographer whose work explores the relationship between humans and nature. He is the founder and director of Earth Vision Institute in Boulder, Colorado.
Helen Victoria van Dongen was a pioneering editor of documentary films who was active from about 1925–1950. She collaborated with filmmaker Joris Ivens from 1925 to 1940, made several independent documentaries, and edited two of Robert Flaherty's films before retiring from filmmaking in her 40s.
The Ford Hunger March, sometimes called the Ford Massacre, was a demonstration on March 7, 1932 in the United States by unemployed auto workers in Detroit, Michigan, which took place during the height of the Great Depression. The march started in Detroit and ended in Dearborn, Michigan, in a confrontation in which four workers were shot to death by the Dearborn Police Department and security guards employed by the Ford Motor Company. More than 60 workers were injured, many by gunshot wounds. Three months later, a fifth worker died of his injuries.
Tami Kashia Gold is a documentary filmmaker, visual artist and educator. She is also a professor at Hunter College of the City University of New York in the Department of Film and Media Studies.
Lester Balog was a labor activist and founding member of the Workers' Film & Photo League.
Leo Seltzer was an American social-documentary filmmaker whose career spanned over half a century, having made more than sixty films.
Leo Hurwitz was an American documentary filmmaker. Among the films he directed were Native Land (1942) and Verdict for Tomorrow (1961), the Peabody Award-winning and Emmy Award-nominated film of the Eichmann trial. He was blacklisted during the McCarthy period for his strong left-wing political beliefs.
Conrad Friberg (1896-1989) was an American filmmaker, labor organizer and wallpaper hanger in Chicago, Illinois. Many of his films are credited to "C.O. Nelson". His best known work is Halsted Street, which he produced when a member and lead organizer in the Chicago Workers' Film & Photo League. Portions of Halsted Street were re-used in Halsted Street, USA (1994) on YouTube.
Peter Entell is an American-born documentary filmmaker, living in Switzerland. He has both American and Swiss nationality. He has filmed in Europe, Africa, and Asia on film projects with social, political, and environmental subjects.
Thomas J. Brandon (1908–1982) was a founding member of the New York Workers Film and Photo League. He later worked as a film distributor for Garrison Films before founding his own company, Brandon Films in November 1940. During the 1950s, Brandon Films owned the largest collection of 16mm available for general release in the United States. He was the first president of the New York Film Council, and helped to found the short-lived Film Forum in 1933 with Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Sidney Howard. In 1968, Brandon sold his company to Macmillan; the new entity became known as Audio-Brandon. His work in the 1970s to reclaim and publicize the history of 1930s film activism is an important source for film historians. Brandon's unpublished manuscripts and documents on radical film history are deposited at the New York Museum of Modern Art Film Study Center. Films from his collection were donated to several archives including the Museum of Modern Art and the U.S. Library of Congress, and others.
All-American News was a film production company in the U.S. bringing war propaganda newsreels and entertainment films to African American audiences.
The Newsreel, most frequently called Newsreel, was an American filmmaking collective founded in New York City in late 1967. In keeping with the radical student/youth, antiwar and Black power movements of the time, the group explicitly described its purpose as using "films and other propaganda in aiding the revolutionary movement." The organization quickly established other chapters in San Francisco, Boston, Washington, DC, Atlanta, Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles, Washington, DC and Puerto Rico, and soon claimed "150 full time activists in its 9 regional offices." Co-founder Robert Kramer called for "films that unnerve, that shake people's assumptions…[that] explode like grenades in people’s faces, or open minds like a good can opener." Their film's production logo was a flashing graphic of The Newsreel moving in and out violently in cadence with the staccato sounds of a machine gun. A contemporary issue of Film Quarterly described it as "the cinematic equivalent of Leroi Jones's line 'I want poems that can shoot bullets.'" The films produced by Newsreel soon became regular viewing at leftwing political gatherings during the late 1960s and early 1970s, seen in parks, church basements, on the walls of buildings, in union halls, even at Woodstock." This history has been largely ignored by film and academic historians causing the academic Nathan Rosenberger to remark: "it is curious that Newsreel only occasionally shows up in historical studies of the decade."
References
- ↑ "Film and Photo League Filmography compiled by Russell Campbell and William Alexander". www.ejumpcut.org. Retrieved 2018-06-02.
- ↑ Workers Film and Photo League of the W.I.R. (1931), National Hunger March 1931, The – via Internet Archive
