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Newsreel

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.

For the film collective, see The Newsreel.

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 Newsreels are considered significant historical documents, since they are often the only audiovisual record of certain cultural events.

Effect of television[edit]

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 February 16, 1948, NBC launched a ten-minute television program called Camel Newsreel Theatre with John Cameron Swayze that featured newsreels with Swayze doing voiceovers. Also in 1948, the DuMont Television Network launched two short-lived newsreel series, Camera Headlines and I.N.S. Telenews, the latter in cooperation with Hearst's International News Service.


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. 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 that opened in 1933 and closed in 1981.


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]


The last American newsreel was released on December 26, 1967, the day after Christmas.[15]


Newsreels died out because of technological advances such as electronic news-gathering for television news, introduced in the 1970s, rendered them obsolete. Nonetheless, some countries such as Cuba, Japan, Spain, and Italy continued producing newsreels into the 1980s and 1990s.[16] Newsreel-producing companies excluded television companies from their distribution, but the television companies countered by sending their own camera crews to film news events.

Retrospectives[edit]

A 1978 Australian film titled Newsfront is a drama about the newsreel business.


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.[17][18][19]

List of newsreels by country

newsreel series produced by Time-Life from 1935 to 1951

The March of Time

newsreel series produced by Universal Studios from 1929 to 1967

Universal Newsreel

newsreel series produced by Hearst Corporation from 1914 to 1967 (distributed by Fox Film Corporation 1929–1934 and by MGM 1934–1967)

Hearst Metrotone News

produced by Fox 1928 to 1963

Fox Movietone News

newsreel series produced by Paramount Pictures from 1927 to 1957

Paramount News

newsreel series produced by Pathé Film from 1910 to 1956 (distributed by RKO Radio Pictures 1931–1947 and by Warner Brothers 1947–1956)

Pathé News

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  9781452963600

ISBN

Clyde, Jeavons, Jane Mercer and Daniela Kirchner (Editors), "The story of the century!" An international newsfilm conference, London: , 1998

BUFVC

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: , 2002

BUFVC

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

The Newsreel Archive

News on Screen

Media related to Newsreels at Wikimedia Commons