Newsreels

The March of Time: Newsreel Journalism
(Film Daily, 1939)

The attached magazine article first appeared in the long-forgotten Hollywood trade rag Film Daily and concerns the 1930s newsreel production company The March of Time:

Since the beginning of the motion picture, the newsreel has been recognized as a vital medium of public information. Movie goers demand it. But, by the very nature of its technique and the swiftness with which it brings today’s events to the screen, the newsreel can give little more than headline news. And so it has created among movie-goers a desire to see more.

It was this desire ‘to see more’ that led the founders of ‘The March of Time’ to launch their new kind of pictorial journalism…The first issue appeared in some 400 theaters throughout the United States on February 1, 1935.

Newsreels at the Movies
(Stage Magazine, 1936)

The journalist who wrote this 1938 piece saw much good in theater newsreels, believing that the newsreel encourages a keener sense of the present and imprisons it for history. He doesn’t refer to any of the prominent newsreel production houses of the day, such as Fox Movietone, Hearst Metrotone, Warner-Pathe or News of the Day but rather prefers instead to wax poetic about the general good that newsreels perform and the services rendered. This newsreel advocate presented the reader with a long, amusing list of kings, dictators and presidents and what they thought of having their images recorded.

Click here to read articles about Marilyn Monroe.

Fake News?
(New Outlook Magazine, 1934)

A writer warns that since the advent of sound in movies, the journalists involved in the production of newsreels had grown absolutely giddy over the possibilities of the new technology being used to bend the truth any way they wanted, and frequently did.

The March of Time: Newsreel Journalism(Film Daily, 1939)

Newsreels at the Movies (Stage Magazine, 1936)

Fake News?(New Outlook Magazine, 1934)

The March of Time: Newsreel Journalism
(Film Daily, 1939)

Newsreels at the Movies
(Stage Magazine, 1936)

Fake News?
(New Outlook Magazine, 1934)