Tag: HJFRT

CALL FOR ARTICLES
“A Newsreel of Our Own”: the culture and commerce of local filmed news
Special issue of the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television.

The international history of the ‘major’ newsreels and their activities in free-market countries has been relatively well studied by film historians. There is also a growing corpus of literature on newsreel production and distribution in ‘closed’ markets that were controlled by authoritarian regimes: “No-Do” in Franco’s Spain, “Luce” in Mussolini’s Italy, “Die Deutsche Wochenschau” in Hitler’s Germany, and several newsreels in the Soviet Union. However, there is a lack of comparative research on local producers’ attempts to break the hegemony of international newsreel companies.

Many small countries without a national film industry or centralized newsreel production were worried about the creeping cultural and economic imperialism (particularly from the United States, Great Britain, and France) that foreign-made filmed news represented. Individual businessmen and organized interest groups (political parties, cultural organizations) therefore tried to create newsreels of their own, which were to ’emancipate’ or ‘enlighten’ their own people. Most of these newsreels were produced without substantial government funding and therefore expensive, which made it easy for international companies to undersell them. In addition, local production companies typically did not have a large catalogues of feature films at their disposal, making it difficult or impossible to sell their newsreels as part of a larger distribution package. These conditions often doomed local newsreels to a short existence and has relegated them to footnotes in film history.