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News
Parade The
American Newsreel and the World as Spectacle
Joseph
Clark
Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2020 Paperback.
263 pages. 21 b&w photos. ISBN 978-1517903688. $27
Reviewed
by Scott Althaus University
of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
The newsreel was part of a global visual
news system that brought the far-flung world into dramatic and flickering view inside
movie theaters across the United States from 1911 until 1967. Over the course
of these 56 years nearly every film screening in every community across the country
was accompanied by a 10-minute newsreel issued twice weekly with fresh content.
Despite the cultural ubiquity of the newsreel, its well-deserved reputation for
ephemeral frivolity along with contemporary difficulties in accessing surviving
footage has left it largely neglected in academic research. Before the
publication of Clark’s impressive volume, there had been only two previous
book-length overviews of the American newsreel system: Raymond Fielding’s pathbreaking
history of the newsreel industry and an unpublished PhD thesis by Adelaide
Hawley Cumming* who had narrated women’s fashion segments for MGM’s News of
the Day newsreel. Against this paucity
of academic analysis, Joseph Clark’s News Parade represents a major contribution:
it is the first sustained effort to place the newsreel in a theoretical context
that captures both its unique role in the cultural experience of generations of
Americans as well as the social significance of its unusual style of re-presenting
the world through the lens of documentary-based spectacle. The book’s five
substantive chapters offer a compellingly fresh and theoretically rich
assessment of the American newsreel, focusing on its system of production and
distribution as well as its twice-weekly presentation of the world as a “news
parade” of sequentially-presented but largely unrelated visual mini-spectacles
(chapter 1); how the newsreel’s unusual visual style combined with its use of
voice-over narration that directly addressed assembled audiences in ways that
positioned the cinema spectator as part of a collective community that
privileged visual experience as a primary way of understanding the world
(chapter 2); the widespread appearance of the newsreel cameraman as an icon of
popular culture in the United States whose imperializing gaze and masculine
form of looking undergirded the visual authority of the newsreel as a privileged
way of knowing about the world beyond personal experience (chapter 3); how
newsreel audiences reacted to these presentations and how they were invited
into an experience of the authoritative spectacular through the architectural
design of specialized theaters—once common in major urban areas—in which
continuous screenings of newsreels was the only attraction (chapter 4); and a
detailed analysis of ways that the task of racial uplift was woven into the All-American
News, which was the only major regularly-issued newsreel targeting
African-Americans during the era of Jim Crow segregation, focusing especially on
its role in the “double victory” campaign during World War II. Among the volume’s
novel contributions and many strengths are its rich architectural analysis of
newsreel theaters, its detailed assessment of newsreel coverage given to the
famous Lindbergh kidnapping trial, its integration of academic work on spectacle
and documentary film reception into the book’s theoretically rich conception of
the “news parade” as a primary mode of cultural influence by the American
newsreel industry, its theoretical understanding of “collective spectatorship”
as a distinctive mode of audience reception for newsreel content, as well as
its nuanced analysis of newsreel references in popular culture. Clark’s
theoretical contributions are entirely original and his cultural analyses
address important gaps in newsreel lore (e.g.,
the newsreels were long understood to have played important roles in
popularizing and contextualizing the Lindbergh kidnapping trial, but to my
knowledge Clark’s is the first sustained treatment of the case that
systematically analyzes extant newsreel coverage). As with any book-length treatment of a
decades-long phenomenon, the volume also has some limitations. The most
important of these is the book’s almost exclusive focus on the newsreel
industry of the 1930s, the decade in which new sound, projection, and
transportation technologies combined to bring the newsreel into its popular
heyday as a distinctive cultural phenomenon. This focus is entirely appropriate
to the book’s theoretical investigation, but as a result the volume offers
little assessment of the emergence of the newsreel in its first two decades of
existence during the silent film era and even less on its long period of
decline starting in the late 1940s. Clark’s masterful
volume is highly accessible to non-specialists and will be indispensable to
scholars interested in locating the newsreel industry within a theoretically
rich and analytically compelling context. This exceptionally important
contribution has at long last situated the newsreel into its rightful role as a
major medium of visual news and cultural interpretation alongside newspapers,
radio, and long-form documentary film. It is a must-read for any scholar who
wants to understand the newsreel’s cultural significance in American media
history. _______________
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