Newsreels

Origins

Before there were newsreels, there were news films—individual motion picture records of newsworthy events, presented in theaters as isolated attractions whenever opportunity allowed. Among the many individual stories covered by the early news films were sports events in 1894, the Boer War in 1899, the funeral of Queen Victoria in 1901, and the San Francisco earthquake and fire in 1906.

In 1909 the French firm of Pathé combined several news film stories into single issues, released serially. Titled the Pathé Journal, it was a regularly released collection of timely and newsworthy scenes, with weekly changes in content. Pathé's newsreel was introduced in France in 1909 and in England in 1910. On August 8, 1911, Pathé introduced an American version under the title Pathé Weekly. Ten days later, an indigenously produced series was introduced in America by the Vitagraph Company, titled The Vitagraph Weekly of Current Events. In the years that followed, more than 50 different newsreels went in and out of business in the United States alone, on national, regional, or local levels. Only a handful survived for long.

Economics

The newsreel was part of a package of two or three short subjects that accompanied feature films, furnished at low cost by major film distributors to their exhibitors. Short subjects included newsreels, comedies, travelogues, cartoons, informational films, and sports events, each running about ten minutes and presented between the screenings of the feature film(s). Whatever a [Page 992]particular package of short subjects might include, it always contained a newsreel, the screening of which became a permanent part of the motion picture exhibition business into the 1950s before declining and disappearing by the mid 1960s.

By the early 1930s, five major motion picture companies monopolized the American film industry: Paramount, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Warner Bros., RKO Radio Pictures, and Twentieth Century Fox. Exhibitors (theaters) were obliged to contract for a block of feature films in advance of exhibition, without the opportunity of viewing them and sometimes before the films were even produced. To some extent, this monopolistic influence extended abroad as well. World War I had destroyed much of the European film industry, leaving an economic vacuum into which American studios and their films soon moved. For decades thereafter, the American film industry achieved preeminence worldwide, both artistically and financially.

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