ARTICLE: On the 'March of Time' Newsreels and Documentaries
Incredible fodder for those teaching about representations of history / truth / reality. From The New York Times...
Time Marches ... Backward!By NEIL GENZLINGER
Published: September 2, 2010
Best paragraphs...
It’s hard to know today even what to call these films. (Raymond Fielding, a retired college educator who wrote a book about the series, told me that roughly 290 were made.) “Newsreels” seems inadequate; they are longer, more detailed and much more opinionated than the standard-issue newsreels that preceded them. “Documentaries” is closer, but the blaring orchestrations and outlandish voice-overs sound nothing like a modern documentary.
It’s tempting to give up and label these whats-its a mass-media Neanderthal — an evolutionary dead end; an attempt to merge the tools of newsgathering and filmmaking that had its moment but died out. Except that, once you watch a few and learn about how they were made, you start to see a little “March of Time” in almost everything: Fox News, “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart,” the History channel, schlocky reality shows of the “I Shouldn’t Be Alive” variety, PBS’s “P.O.V.” “The March of Time” series, a creation of the folks at Time magazine, began as a radio broadcast but made the leap to film in 1935. It often tackled subjects and themes that audiences weren’t used to seeing — foreign affairs, social trends, public-health issues — and did so with a combination of panache and subterfuge that today seems either absurd or visionary.Read the full article HERE
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Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Tony O'seland on
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I am old enough that I remember some of these from their first time around, as well as the Movie-ola newsreels. I've often wished that there were an online, free to teachers, source for these little gems. Talk about teachable moments!
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Permalink Reply by Ryan Goble on
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Yeah, that would be cool but I think Time Warner has them on lockdown!
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