ALONG with an unrestricted, more imaginative use of movie technique in making newsreels, and an emphasis on improving the quality of individual events rather than the quantity, American newsreels could stand an overhauling of their ideas of what makes suitable newsreel material. It seems to me that the newsreels, as the journalist in movies, should be concerned with everything that happens around us, rather than restricting themselves, as they do now, to the more spectacular occurrences in human affairs. To get into the lens of an American newsreel camera an event must be as momentous as the first baseball game of the season, the debut of the newest model of anything, or a President’s speech. The concern of the newsreels should be to exhibit material that shows to some substantial degree what we are like and what we have done. For this aim, the record of Frank Sinatra’s or Harry James’s latest performance at New York’s Paramount Theatre, and the reaction of the audience to it, becomes a bona-fide newsreel event, since the event has so much importance to the people and indicates what so many of them are like; a camera account of a day spent on a wartime railroad coach is important newsreel material, since it tells us and a future age much more about ourselves than any train wreck, which is the only kind of train news that makes the newsreels now. The straight reporting of any activity on any American Main Street or a detailed examination of that street’s buildings should become the most important and exciting kind of newsreel event.
The newsreel producers are too apt to show only the limited, obvious aspects of even their most traditional subject matter. The typical newsreel examination of someone’s speech confines itself almost wholly to the speaker, missing all of the effect of the speech as it registers on the audience and all of the character of the event that is defined by the character of the audience. The only part of the event that is shown is the speech part; there is no account of how the people looked as they got ready for the speech, nor is there a post-speech phase—only the speaker’s carefully purposeful, man-to-man stare straight into the lens.
The main concern exhibited on newsreel subject matter is less to give you an understanding of the events or the people in them than to give some kind of visual proof that the incident actually occurred and that Fox-Movietone, Paramount or Hearst covered it; the announcer unsuccessfully attempts to fill in with other aspects of the event to make it an understandable, rounded and exciting story. The endlessly repeated way of showing an Allied capture of an enemy-held town follows up a few last-minute examples of the fighting for the town with scenes of the Allies entering and being celebrated, hugged and kissed by the people. All the newsreel audience gets is what is already taken for granted—that the event happened and that everybody there was happy it did. By going behind this obvious center of such an event and doing a straight report about the condition of the people and the town at the moment of its capture, examining homes inside and out, and as much of the life at its most natural as could be got, newsreels would have the most important material about people in war. Where it has approximated this attitude—in scenes coming some time after such a capture, where people are being fed and cheered by the Allies, and in the trying of traitors—it has accomplished its best releases, giving something of the character of the people as it was affected by the Nazis and war: to an audience this is much more interesting (not to mention more important) than the usual spectacular, circus-like aspect of an event such as a fire, where the fearsome, decorative movements of the flames are the main thing shown.
Almost at once, of course, the newsreel people would, with their aim of showing a more abundant and down-to-earth view of human activity, run into all kinds of legal difficulties, the kind of difficulty suggested by the signs you see in various places prohibiting the use of cameras inside them. I can think of all kinds of reasons for shooting the activity inside of an average night club, but I can think of as many reasons why a night-club owner would kick at the idea. The legal point would finally have to be made as to just what the newsreels can look at, and I can’t see that their view should be more restricted than that of a daily newspaper. As it stands now, the newsreel’s fear of what they can look at is as great as it could possibly be, and their vision almost as limited.
October 16, 1944