December 13, 1948
—That’s news for American newsreel cameras, which focus mainly on wars, monkeys, volcanoes and pretty girls.
It happens at least once to every commuter. Cyrus Fairweather misses the 5:31 and walks into the newsreel theater in New York’s Grand Central Station to while away an hour before the next train. He also has a vague idea that he might catch up on what is happening around the world, but as he settles back in his seat, what does he see and hear for his forty cents?
Kettledrums; a Voice of Doom; grinning, bearded Greeks firing a cannon at what looks like a mountain. According to the commentator, aggression is being stopped as Time Marches On in Greece.
There follows the up-to-the-minute news.
The battleship New Jersey is deactivated as granite-faced admirals salute and a boatswain’s mate dramatically turns off the ship’s ventilation systems;
Somewhere in the USA, a duck crosses Main Street;
A French wrestler, weight 276, grapples with a Belgian with a long, black beard; Secretary of the Treasury Snyder signs a check for $7.5 billion;
Girls in bathing suits dive from towers; girls in bathing suits parade before solemn judges; French girls in French bathing suits coyly assume sidewise poses for the prudish American cameras, while American girls in American bathing suits put on skis and fall down in the snow.
“The ski’s the limit,” cries the commentator, and Fairweather looks at his watch. His time is up, and he starts off for his train, his ears still buzzing from assorted squawks and explosions and his eyes watering from the quick shifting of the scenes.
As he emerges from the theater, Fairweather is little impressed by what he has seen that he immediately wonders what Mrs. F. is having for dinner.
Like thousands of other Americans Fairweather thinks of newsreel theaters as convenient places to wait for trains, get out of the rain, or cool off in air-conditioned comfort. The customer who really expects to see the news is a naive character.
The average moviegoer is so accustomed to bathing beauties, monkeys, baseball games, politicians, etc., that he would probably be mystified by a newsreel which attempted to give him fifty minutes of significant current events. Since he raises no effective objection to the status-quo, the newsreel producers are content to let things ride.
The result of this apathy has been to perpetuate a newsreel format that hasn’t changed appreciably in the past twenty years. The same old subjects are given the same old treatment. In covering horse races, animals at the zoo, speeches, etc., the photographic techniques used by five major newsreel companies (20th Century-Fox Movietone, Warner-Pathé, Paramount, Universal, Hearst-M-G-M News of the Day) are as predictable as the days of the week.
As for authenticity, some newsreels are almost as phony as the old staged photographs of the sinking of the Maine in 1898, which were shown in the nickelodeons.
However, to attack the newsreel on artistic grounds, or as an agency for disseminating important news, is like hitting a man when he’s down. Even the men who make them are far from proud of what they turn out. Their attitude is deprecating and, instead of plugging their product, they go into long explanations of why it is no better.
Problem number one is money. None of the newsreel companies makes more than a moderate return on its investments; at times they show a loss, which must be absorbed by the parent company in Hollywood. Unlike newspapers, they have no advertising revenue, and the cost of taking pictures, developing the negatives, making prints, etc., is high.
A second big problem is the difficulty of getting hold of enough spectacular or important news week after week. One harassed producer complains: “The Daily News can’t always be bright with a good sex murder; the Times can’t always be bright with an international situation; and so how in hell can you expect us to be bright every time some chump sits down in front of a camera and opens his mouth?”
Even if important news stories broke every day, limited budgets would make adequate coverage impossible. Most of the companies operate on a “stringer”-correspondent basis. Although they pay a few men a regular salary to obtain material, most of the work is done by stringers, who are paid small fees. This reliance on half-time correspondents gets half-time results.
In faraway places like China and Japan, the newsreels use a “pool” arrangement under which one cameraman works for several companies. This a cheap way of getting film, but it discourages imaginative reporting. Another example of pooling is the non-competitive way in which representatives of the major newsreel companies often cover a single big assignment such as a national convention. The cameramen travel in a tightly knit group, shoot the same stuff, and look with a fishy grin at colleagues who attempt to get exclusive stories.
A talk with a newsreel editor is roughly analogous to picking up an empty vase which you expected to be full; it throws you slightly off balance. The editors, conscious of the shortcomings of their output, add criticism of their own to the general uproar. For example, Newton Meltzer of Telenews admits that the commentary is much too verbose, and hopes that American newsreels will learn to emulate the European films’ terse, reserved treatment.
For Movietone’s Dan Daugherty, a red-headed newsreel veteran, faces criticism with equanimity. “We have made billions of mistakes,” he agrees, “but when we do a good job nobody notices. For instance, we told the public about Hitler, Mussolini and the rest of their gang—filmed thousands of feet of speeches, parades, planes, and guns—but almost nobody believed us. What the hell? You show some people the truth, and they close their eyes. But if you miss something, that’s different.”
Two outstanding critics of newsreels are Bosley Crowther of the New York Times and the New York Herald Tribune’s John Crosby. M. D. Clofine, editor of Heast-M-G-M’s News of the Day, blames the term “newsreel” for many of their adverse comments.
“What the critics don’t see is that the newsreel has got to be more than just a documentary. As part of a theatre program it has two functions—to inform and to amuse. Since the entertainment factor has to enter our calculations, we often use light subjects in preference to a ‘significant’ piece of news that is pictorially dull.”
Clofine also points out that the scope of the newsreel is limited by the requirements of the individual theater exhibitor, who, after all, is in the business to make money. Since the main features are the most important revenue-producers on his program, he allots most of his budget to them; the result is that when the exhibitor gets around to the newsreel he has very little left to spend. This simple economic fact explains why the newsreels are not as elaborate or as exhaustive as they might be. The producers cannot afford it.
Economic and technical difficulties may explain many of the newsreels’ weaknesses, but not their editorial shortcomings. Newsreel material about world affairs, for instance, follows a singularly conventional course and, in most cases, industriously beats the drum for US foreign policy (Palestine is a possible exception).
The films are saturated with anti-Communist and pro-military propaganda. When Cardinal Spellman and President Truman spoke on St. Patrick’s Day, it was the anti-Communist portions of their addresses that were singled out for screening. Extensive shots of army maneuvers, diving planes, smoking rockets and General MacArthur reviewing his troops in Japan are screened while sound tracks blare do-or-die college marching songs.
On the home front, the newsreels frequently make no bones about being partisan. Labor conflicts are usually treated with ill-concealed bias. During the soft-coal strike last year, elaborate shots of abandoned mines and joking, idle miners invited moviegoers to ponder the destructive effects of the shutdown. The cameras did not go into the miners’ side of the story. The newsreels’ way of treating the packinghouse workers’ strike was to give prominence to signs in butcher shops proclaiming the rising cost of meat. Occasionally, however, impartiality is shown. Telenews’ coverage of the Wall Street strike was fair to both sides, and also told the story in an interesting way.
There is little doubt that US newsreels distort current political events. Yet these distortions would do so little harm if it were not for the newsreels’ tendency to blunt audience’s critical faculties.
First, there is too much chatter. Newsreel audiences are spoon-fed a constant stream of words, wisecracks and loaded phrases. These are spoken in overemphasized tones of seriousness, despair, triumph or happiness that only the worst ham actor would dare to employ on stage. Not only is it corny; it is much too long. The comment in American newsreels takes up 80 percent of the screening time, while many of the European reels restrict commentary to a third as much footage.
Again, American newsreel sequences almost always alternate between disaster (floods, fires) and fun (gorilla eats birthday cake). The emotions of the newsreel fan are made to bob up and down like a yo-yo, and the effect of this jerky, kaleidoscopic attack on his eyes and ears is to induce a state of near paralysis. When he finally emerges from the theater, his memory is a hodgepodge of noises, faces, catastrophes and shifting backgrounds.
At least one major newsreel company, Telenews, is showing that new techniques can be evolved. In its short existence, Telenews has emphasized the “trend” approach to significant news stories, featuring intelligent interpretation of the scenes it records.
An excellent example of Telenews’ reporting was its treatment of the Supreme Court decision invalidating restrictive covenants.1 The sequence opened with shots of men picketing the White House in protest against the Negro segregation in the Army. Then came footage contrasting white and Negro housing in such cities as New York and Washington D.C. The narrator interviewed the Negro family which brought the case to the Supreme Court. The disputed portion of the covenant itself was enlarged on the screen, while a background voice slowly quoted that section of the Fourteenth Amendment which played a crucial part in the court decision. This was superb reporting—thorough, convincing, and original.
Sloppiness, distortion, and bias are probably unintentional. They may play up or omit certain topics for political reasons, but it would be preposterous to assume that they select and manipulate their material with a view to stupefying their audience. They seem to be indolent rather than totalitarian minded.
There is no valid reason why US newsreel companies should not try to develop patterns that challenge the intellect instead of blunting it. The newsreel need not be as bad as it is. The eternal mixture of disasters and silly jokes is not unavoidable, and even sports events can be depicted in a less stereotyped way.
But the most urgently needed reform is in structure. Commentary should be limited to essential supplementary information, while the pictures tell the actual story. The audience would then be in a position to digest material that now scarcely reaches its senses.
NOTE
1. Kracauer is referring here to the landmark United States Supreme Court case Shelley v. Kraemer (334 U.S. 1, 1948), that struck down racially restrictive housing covenants. On Shelley v. Kraemer and the history of racially restrictive housing covenants in the United States, see Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (New York: Liveright, 2017), 77–91.—Eds.