Melodrama, Realism, and Race: World War II Newsreels and Propaganda Film

Higashi, Sumiko

doi:10.2307/1225826

Cited by 25 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 12 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…The storyline in such stories is so obvious and so clearly marked by the musical score that the American newsreel editors apparently felt no need to translate into English what the viewers were actually seeing. With war stories, melodrama seemed the dominant motif in newsreel coverage (Higashi 1998;Whissel 1999Whissel , 2002. The distinctively overwrought presentation of newsreel war stories is more difficult to describe than the impression it leaves: the powers of good against the forces of evil, set to a musical score of earnest strings and fulsome horns punctuated with machine-gun fire, narrated by a grandiloquent sports announcer on his second pot of coffee.…”

Section: The Forgotten News Mediummentioning

confidence: 99%

The Forgotten Role of the Global Newsreel Industry in the Long Transition from Text to Television

Althaus

2010

The International Journal of Press/Politics

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Political communication scholars often mark the increasing popularity of electronically broadcast news film as a dividing line between a text-based information culture that survived through World War II and a visually oriented electronic information culture that was in place by the late 1960s.Yet this standard view is incomplete, for it neglects a forgotten but extremely popular worldwide system of visual news reporting based on documentary film shorts. A global system for distributing twice-weekly newsreels was already in place before the First World War, nearly half a century before television news would begin to attract large national audiences and seven decades before CNN would begin distributing news footage once again to all corners of the world. This article aims to reorient political communication scholarship to the historical importance of the newsreel medium and to direct political communication scholars to the rich trove of newsreel film stock that recently became available for analysis.

show abstract

Section: The Forgotten News Mediummentioning

confidence: 99%