Making the news reel


Jonathan Sale cranks the handle of camera history back to when moving pictures made the news


T


he first television news wasn’t on television nor was it necessarily very newsy. That is, the first chance for the British public to see anything like today’s TV


news, current affairs in moving pictures plus sound, came on June 9 1929 – but only if the British public put on its coat and went to the cinema. There, before the feature films, would be a newsreel made by Movietone News in the shape of a short documentary film with several items of news or topical interest. Television transmissions did indeed occur


that September but, since the single transmitter could transmit only sound or vision – and not at the same time – there were two-minute snatches of shadowy pictures in complete silence, followed by crackly noises plus a blank screen. Not something you would want to stay in for. Particularly if, like everyone apart from a few geeks, you didn’t have a television. Meanwhile, waiting for you at the cinema, was the real world on a big screen with recognisable people doing real things. Film sound systems had improved. Until recently, the dialogue had been delivered by gramophone records which coincided only roughly with the lips of the speakers on the film; now the more accurate ‘sound on film’ technique was being used. Much was made of seldom heard noises; goats chewing on laundry got a big hand, or hoof, from Movietone audiences. Movietone’s rival Pathé News was already


screening newsreels in cinemas but they were silent; soon, it added soundtracks and both companies were bringing before the very eyes of cinema-goers a host of movers, shakers and stars of the early 20th century, literally larger than life. Admittedly, if you came back next day, those movers and shakers were liable to be making the same moves and shakes on the screen as before, since a newsreel was repeated several times and changed it only twice a week. It was no wonder


18 | theJournalist


that the newsreels had a static feel; the first Movietone cameras needed three strong cameramen to heave them around. The idea of pointing a movie camera at something important which was happening had been earlier put into practice by Birt Acres, who had designed his own hand-cranked photographic device. Clearly, there wasn’t much happening in Britain on 20 June 1895, to judge by the fact that he went to Germany and recorded on film the opening by the Kaiser of the Kiel Canal; one of the highlights was the laying of a foundation stone. Not many laughs there, you might say, but Birt then got rather more dramatic footage by asking the Uhlan Lancers to charge at him, with


IT WAS the Kennedy assassination that is presumed guilty of killing off the newsreels, those short – initially very short – shorts consisting of several mini-documentaries crammed into a package to be screened in cinemas before the main attraction. The Dallas drama has


been described as the first 24-hour news event and the television offered nightly coverage, unlike the Movietone and Pathé newsfilms, which were shipped to cinemas twice a week.


The writing had been


on the wall, or screen, in Britain when the BBC started its first daily news programme in 1954, presented by the late and much-loved Richard Baker. The plummy,


stiff-upper-lip voices of the newsreel


horses, sabres and their trademark lances. (Twenty years later, German horsemen could be seen charging at the British for real.) These cinematic milestones did not receive a public screening until the January 1896 meeting of the Royal Photographic Society back in Britain, by which time their topicality was a little tarnished. The first news film shot by the pioneering Birt


(or anyone) in Britain had its premiere at a Royal command performance in Marlborough House during the following year. This involved royalty and the action – if that’s the word for the Prince and Princess of Wales arriving at the Cardiff Exhibition premises – was better off camera than through the viewfinder. The deal with the Wales-es was that Birt could film so long as he could not be seen. Unfortunately, he could not see either, being behind a canvas screen; this had a hole but only for the camera, so he had to wait for a flunkey to tip him off when the moment came for him to turn the camera’s handle in the hope that someone royal would walk in front of the lens, as indeed they did. This was in June and the result was shown in July, all of three weeks later. After this rather modest start in the UK, it was the French who launched the world’s first newsreel for general distribution, Pathé-Journal, in 1908. Two years later, the Pathé Animated Gazette started on our side of the Channel with cameramen who were actually allowed to look through their viewfinders, and, as Pathé News, it continued to grace our cinema screens until 1970.


Celluloid cuttings


commentaries had an authoritative, no- nonsense air but this sounded increasingly like echoes of the Ritz in the Blitz instead of the tones of the Swinging Sixties. Pathé News was a


French export to Britain and its first offerings


here began in the era of silent movies. After 60 years of screenings, it turned off its projectors in 1970. British Movietone


News, an offshoot of the US’s Fox News, had clocked up half a century when it came to the end of its last reel in 1979, well after its American parent had mothballed its newsfilm cameras. Both brought current


events to British audiences in pre-television times. Now those same films in the archives of Associated Press give us moving snapshots of past events – a sort of visual cuttings library.


EVERETT COLLECTION HISTORICAL / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO


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