News Real ?

By the 1930s, newsreel audiences would rarely question the authenticity of the images presented to them on the ol' silvers. Viewers outside of Germany and Italy were thus unaware that all film coming from these countries had been produced by accredited alum of the Reichsfilmkammer, nor that the vast amount of footage of goose-stepping Italian troops had been filmed by LUCE cameramen. No-one, spare for a small minority of radically left-wing filmmakers, expected the newsreels to offer anything but additional entertainment in tandem with the weekly feature film. All of the major American, British and French newsreel outfits (Hearst Metronome, Fox Movietone, Pathe, Paramount, Gaumont British, Freres and Gaumont) did, in fact trade stock footage with Ufa and LUCE film crews.

       

The politicians were among the first to exploit the value of sound news, and in the process making themselves available for carefully vetted 'interviews' which usually gave the politician a golden opportunity to state a policy without any fear of criticism ensuing. When Germany abandoned post from the League of Nations in 1933, Goebbels did not even condescend to speak into Movietone's microphone - he basically sat at a desk while his interviewer would state Germany's reasons for leaving the League. Equally, when an interviewee chose to intimate something out of line with government policy, the American umbrella companies could be relied upon to suppress the offending passages at the request of the relevant European ambassador. A ' quiet word', for example, ensured that no film of the Duke of Windsor's wedding would make it's presence on the British screen.

              March of Time were notorious for sugarcoating topics and biased edits.



Throughout the Thirties, Americans and non-fascist European newsreels were anxious not to 'rock the boat.' Demonstrations and strikes by the scores of unemployed were largely ignored. Official censure, local government banning or private lawsuits would surface whenever anything of  political or moral controversy was shown. None of this would excuse, however, the newsreel companies' failure to report what was happening to the Jews in Nazi Germany. 

                      The Hearst of the Matter






Newsreels were complacently covering 'action' and when Mussolini invaded Abyssinia in 1935, an event that would instigate the Second Italo-Abyssinian War, the newsreels outrageously illustrated a seemingly festive vibe. The mood changed to one of more responsible journalism as civil war wrought havoc in Spain, although the 'Reds' came in for less objective criticism than the Nationalist forces. Actuality footage of disasters was still what the average newsreel cameraman desired and occasionally got ; moments like the assassination of King Alexander I of Yugoslavia in 1934, the explosion of the zeppelin Hindenberg in May 1937 and the bombing of the US gunboat Panay by Japanese aircraft in December 1937.







The regular output of American and British newsreels in the Thirties was criticized by several ( including Dr Goebells). for being trivial, ephemeral and often frivolous in it's commentary and content. The American March of Time series always aimed to take it's provocative stance in its treatment of contemporaneous events. At first each monthly edition considered two of three hard new topics in depth; later each was devoted to a single subject to censorship. But the March of Time was able to avoid Nazi controls on location shooting by shamelessly reconstructing or faking the events under discussion.

Inside Nazi Germany (1939), perhaps the most famous of March of Time's reportage of this period, entailed vivid shots of people in prison and of Jewish scientists being barred from their own laboratories, with no indication or slightest hint of backstory on the commentary or that in reality, that these 'authentic' scenes had been filmed entirely on location - in American studios that is.


On both sides of this impending struggle, film could be now used as an open forum of propaganda and as a subtle means of inspiring public opinion. But the problem was also one for the moviegoer - of how to discern when a film was actually conveying the truth.