THE newsreel film is a superficial, inconsequent mirror of world affairs which inevitably comes in a poor third to the radio and the newspapers in its news coverage. Two weeks ago the newsreel program offered in movie houses contained the de Marigny trial, the bombing of the Naples post office by delayed-action mines the Nazis had left there, the Moscow Conference, Notre Dame’s football victory over Navy, a war-plant fire in New Jersey and an article titled “Swim for Victory” (which had no swimming or even water in it, but showed the new bathing suits to be worn presumably during the winter months). Football fans saw a few scattered touchdown plays, the Moscow Conference consisted in a brief snapshot of Cordell Hull getting out of a plane at some airport, almost a third of the newsreel of what is supposed to be actuality in the making was posed, and the storm, the fire and the football game followed such old, conventional newsreel patterns that they could have been a thousand other storms, fires or football games that the newsreel has covered, and no one would have noticed.
The attitudes in newsreel making parallel those that go into making story films, because they are produced at the same impossible rate of speed and in the same exorbitant quantities (the newsreel produces two complete changes of program weekly), in the same kind of vacuum, inside of which there are half a dozen different newsreel companies but not one whose product is appreciably different from the others, or tries to be, and they command the same complete popularity. The newsreel, like the story film, is more conscious of its audience than of its reason for being, and will vary and modulate each of its programs until it has an item in each for every taste—polar bears, the Apple Queen, the President’s speech and the latest-style mink jacket. It is just as afraid of a subject that is controversial as the fiction film is, just as afraid of the instinctive, individual and characterful, and of showing a subject that is short of being the height of pleasure (the terrible nature of the Naples bombing, in which you can see the injured trying to escape the explosion and fire, and a man covered with blood lying stunned against a lamppost, is ended with a shot of some town where the Italians rejoice at the arrival of American troops). The newsreel is so rushed for time it loses all sense of timing in its individual shots and, like Hollywood, invariably falls back, as a result, on certain well worn patterns of newsreel presentation.
Since it involves so much more complicated a process than the other newsgathering agencies which have only to set type or put mouth to microphone, it becomes ever more questionable whether the newsreel should attempt keeping abreast of all the news, and not instead concentrate on presenting a more comprehensive digest of fewer events. During the last decade, and especially since the war, the documentary, which also treats of actualities but examines the idea or event in all of its references, has made the newsreel look more and more functionless and its content less valuable. This was never more apparent than in the four-reel film, “Desert Victory,” which gave audiences a greater knowledge of the event it covered than anything that has been written or broadcast about it, let alone all that has been sprinkled haphazardly about the event through a hundred newsreels.
Whatever its future direction and task, there are definite ways of improving the newsfilm in its present form, and the most apparent way is to limit its coverage by at least cutting out those events that are of no importance as far as one’s knowledge of anything is concerned, for instance, the way in which Mr. Hull descends from an airplane. A shortening of the field covered would release more cameramen to each event, and would necessarily counteract the spottiness of present-day coverage. What is most needed is more curiosity and imagination on the part of the cameramen, or perhaps it may be the editors. Consider how little we know of the actual visual character of personages that we have been seeing over and over in newsreels, like Hull or Roosevelt or de Gaulle, and you will realize how uninterested and sterile the newsreel camera is. There is nothing candid about this camera. The personality that is interviewed by Fox Movietone, Paramount or RKO-Pathé is invariably prepared with his most presentable or least spontaneous manner.
The only truly unposed and disarming and significant portraits we get in our newsreels are either of military enemies, like Mussolini, or of little people who have no social prestige who are allowed to go to pieces or get along as best they can in front of the camera, and as a result appear natural and human. The medium’s laziness is also shown in its inability to stay with a good thing in an action, but to be moving forever away from it, and unable to alter the speed of the moving so as to make the material more easily grasped. At present it employs few of the newsreel’s resources, especially slow or fast motion, still photography, microscopic lens, divided screen and montage. What seems most characteristic of the modern newsreel is this lack of imagination or even interest in what it is doing; people run for touchdowns, soldiers walk through cheering throngs, storms lash countless seaboards, and the newsreel streaks past with the attention of an eight-day bicycle rider, showing neither less nor more interest for any part of what it sees, though the announcer is always enthusiastic and happy, and only different when he is more so.
November 22, 1943