The value of newsreel libraries
On May 1, 1935, thousands of New Yorkers took to the streets in honor of May Day. Some held signs demanding the release of the labor leader Tom Mooney from jail, other signs challenged the policies of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, still other signs simply read, “United Front.” As the march approached the Manufacturers Trust Company, a young man paused briefly, his right fist raised in defiance — of the bourgeois, the police, the bank before him? This moment was captured on film by a newsreel cameraman.
A still photographer could have snapped this image. However, in this case it is but one frame of the thousands that make up this newsreel story. Motion-picture film evidence provides historical information that eludes the still photographer. Was the young man confident in his stride? Did anyone in the crowd react to his gesture? How long did he hold his pose? What was happening left of frame that drew so much attention? Unlike the photographic records of their Speed Graphic-carrying colleagues, the records left by newsreel crews provide diachronic narratives: 24-frame-per-second sequences of an event.
The film of this young man and the May Day march was never used to craft one of the short, filmed news compilations that were once a standard offering for moviegoers before the main feature. As was the case with more than 90 percent of the film submitted to newsreel offices, this footage went into the vast film library of the newsreel’s parent company, be it 20th Century Fox, Warner/Pathé, Hearst/MGM, Paramount, and Universal.
American newsreels have been treated rather dismissively by most historians. If they are remembered, they are regarded as a collection of staged, somewhat hokey stunts featuring a seemingly endless series of animal stories, dance crazes, and posing politicians. On occasion, the newsreel cameramen would get lucky and catch a dirigible exploding or a Lindbergh taking off.
Although some news events were staged, most newsreel stories (even the hokey ones) depict ordinary people (even if they only exist in the margins of the story) doing entirely ordinary things. The value of such film as an image-and-sound reference library was not lost on motion-picture companies. Need a shot of a small New England town square at Christmas time? Search the newsreel library for a story shot in a New England town during the Christmas season. Ultimately, this practice deteriorated into the commonplace stock-footage market where the evidentiary value of individual images gave way to generic descriptions.
Newsreel libraries were enormous — the Fox Movietone News library was estimated at 100-million feet of film when the organization ceased newsreel production in the early 1960s. After the newsreels folded, these libraries were as much a liability as an asset to the corporations owning them. Paying the rent on the land and buildings required to store them outweighed their commercial value.
The Warner/Pathé and Paramount libraries were sold off to the Sherman Grinberg stock-footage company and are now in the hands of SPPN Images (the extent and condition of this historically valuable film is unknown at this time). Universal (the least sophisticated of the reels) donated its entire library to the American people — sadly, the outtakes were destroyed in a catastrophic fire at the National Archives and Records Administration vaults in 1978.
In 1979, 20th Century Fox famously promised to donate its entire 100-million-foot library to the University of South Carolina. After donating 11 million feet, Fox halted further donations when the company changed ownership. About the same time, the remaining elements of the Hearst/MGM library were donated to the University of California at Los Angeles. For a very brief time, it seemed that newsreel libraries would finally be recognized for their historical importance by the university community. Yet historians remained distrustful of the archival value of newsreels — too many hands wielding too many scissors, editing and re-editing.
Even when footage has been edited, however, film archivists can work with historians to ascertain its evidentiary value. Foremost, scholars must understand the relationship between the viewing copy and film material from which that copy was made. Most newsreel footage was filmed in 35mm, a format capable of carrying far more visual information than standard-definition video.
As a material object, film carries with it the evidence of its own production and use. Film archivists know how to interpret that information as an aid to the historian. Uncut original camera negative, for example, provides the highest evidentiary value of an event. If it has been cut, archivists can use edge codes printed onto stock by the manufacturer to conform the film to its original state. Where variant copies of film exist, a process not unlike manuscript stemmatics can be used to reconstruct the relationship between copies and suggest the generational distance between the copy and the original negative.
As a striking but now forgotten newsreel subject, the young man poised before the police on May Day is not alone. At the University of South Carolina Newsfilm Library, camera negative material exists from Berlin, shot on May 5, 1924, election day. It shows three young men (probably less than 17 years of age) standing in front of a polling place surrounded by at least seven young boys under the age of 10. The boys are reading or singing from a script. Their posters and armbands unashamedly brandish the swastika of the then-banned Nazi Party. The cameraman, whom we know only as “Wahl,” shot lots of activities that day but paused over this rather motley crew. As was the policy for most newsreel submissions, this film was sent undeveloped to Fox News in New York and was in all likelihood never used or copied. For historians, however, Wahl’s forgotten footage provides clear evidence of open politicking by the Nazis on an Election Day on which, despite the formal ban, they won 6.5 percent of the vote.
In another example of historically interesting but unused footage, a Fox cameraman filmed more than 40 minutes of the African-American men of the 10th Cavalry as part of a rejected 1925 documentary submitted to Fox. These camera negatives from Fort Huachuca in Arizona, as well as the scrapped short documentary with intertitles, are also in South Carolina’s Newsfilm vaults. Most intriguing, two sets of title cards exist for the short, perhaps documenting a final effort to salvage the project.
Unlike his Warner Brothers competitors, William Fox devoted his new synchronized sound-on-film system to his news division. Fox Movietone News crews fanned out all over the globe in specialized trucks, recording in many cases the first synchronized sound films of cityscapes, folk artists, and foreign lands. The historical importance of these “visual sound recordings” is now the focus of Emily Thompson, an aural historian at Princeton University.
The Newsfilm Library’s early sound films hold many other surprises. My favorite might be the casual encounter between Albert Einstein and Carl Laemmle, the founder of Universal Pictures, after an awards ceremony in 1931. The two are speaking softly in a corner, glancing at the camera and perhaps wondering if the microphone can pick up their voices. Yes, there are pole sitters and dance marathoners on the shelves, but we should always remember that they are a part of the American story, too.
Film archives are now finally coming into their own as integrated parts of American universities. While South Carolina and UCLA hold large deposits of newsreel footage, additional material will continue to turn up in other collections. Substantial archival and historical work remains to be done on old news and actuality films as well as the ephemeral odds and ends of filmic history that can be found in many archives. The vaults at South Carolina alone could support a decade’s worth of dissertations if we remember they contain more than caricatures of our past.
Greg Wilsbacher is director of the Newsfilm Library and curator of the Fox Movietone News Collection at the University of South Carolina.
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 55, Issue 21, Page B12