News Parade: The American Newsreel and the World as Spectacle by Joseph Clark

Abstract

Reviewed by: News Parade: The American Newsreel and the World as Spectacle by Joseph Clark Jonathan Dentler (bio) News Parade: The American Newsreel and the World as Spectacle by Joseph Clark. University of Minnesota Press. 2020. 280 pages. $108.00 hardcover; $27.00 paper; also available in e-book. As many tens of thousands of hours of newsreel footage are digitized and made available on platforms such as YouTube, what are historians and the public to make of this immense but disjointed collection of moving images? In News Parade: The American Newsreel and the World as Spectacle, Joseph Clark argues persuasively that however tempting it might be to think of them as transparent windows into the past, in order to be properly understood, news-reels must be contextualized within the system in which they were produced and received. News Parade is a thoroughly researched account of this under-studied media form, which sets it in the historical context of its production, distribution, exhibition, and reception. Using this approach, Clark shows that American newsreels forged a new kind of realism that structured an increasingly visual public sphere during the 1930s and 1940s. News Parade not only updates extant research on the newsreel—as Clark points out, the most recent volume dedicated to it dates from the 1970s— but also contributes an original argument about the newsreel, realism, and the public sphere to the field of cinema and media studies. Using evidence from the trade and popular press, memoirs, newsreel production company archives, and representations of the newsreel in other popular media, such as comic books and film, Clark demonstrates that the newsreel did not simply document the world but shaped how the public related to it. It did so [End Page 202] not only by way of filmic indexicality but also, and more precisely, through its system of production, distribution, and exhibition, which shaped its mode of representation and presented the world as a “passing pageant.”1 Clark refers to this whole system of production, representation, and reception as the “news parade.” Using well-chosen case studies, the book moves through two initial chapters that sketch this production system’s contours and clarify its mode of address. In the 1920s, the major Hollywood studios absorbed most news-reel companies, consolidating production. Yet even under studio ownership, newsreel production remained centered in New York City and structured by editorial departments that resembled newspaper offices or wire services. Distribution occurred largely through the vertically integrated studio system. The “news parade” depended on what Clark calls a “processional mode.”2 Due to its serial appearance, it relied on events for which shooting could be easily planned for in advance—such as beauty pageants, sports, and especially parades. Consequently, it ordered the world as a passing procession of unrelated events. In chapter 2, Clark delves further into the newsreel’s mode of address. The newsreel produced a reality effect by representing events in which the sharing of news itself was a crucial aspect of the story. It constantly referenced the power of its own production system as an argument for its realism, privileging “the experience of watching the news over the news itself.”3 Using the trial of Bruno Hauptmann for the kidnapping of celebrity aviator Charles Lindbergh’s infant child as a case study, Clark further argues that the newsreel benefited from a tension between “display” and “evidence.”4 The newsreel not only exploited film’s indexicality to offer evidence about world events but also reveled in its ability to display this evidence, to make it visible for the spectator. It thus allowed viewers to feel that they could judge the visual evidence themselves. Clark writes convincingly on interwar debates about realism and how the newsreel related to them. Especially after the advent of sound and voice-over narration, many in the press faulted the news-reel for misrepresenting reality and adding bias to its filmic representation of the real. Others meanwhile (prominently the documentarian John Grierson) faulted the newsreel for the opposite reason, questioning its refusal to create an artistic or narrative structure that would penetrate beneath the surface of appearances to illuminate social totality. Clark argues that the newsreel was neither a...