Social Media and the New Newsreel
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Abstract
The online circulation of raw footage from live streams, cell phones, and police dash-cams has fueled much political dissent in recent years, from Occupy Wall Street to the protests surrounding the deaths of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Sandra Bland, and others. This essay looks at experimental moving image works made in response to these contemporary dynamics of protest. It offers a comparative analysis of short digital videos by Jem Cohen and Alex Johnson, both of whom embrace the newsreel as a radical genre, making direct reference to earlier generations of filmmakers who did the same. Cohen’s Gravity Hill Newsreels (2011) offer a series of immersive observational studies of the Occupy demonstrations and Zuccotti Park encampment. In a more directly referential mode, Johnson’s Now! Again! (2014) appropriates Santiago Alvarez’s Now! (1965), a Cuban newsreel made by animating photographs depicting the civil rights struggle. Johnston juxtaposes this imagery with media coverage of protests in Ferguson, Missouri after the death of Michael Brown in August 2014.
Fifty years ago, radical filmmakers of Alvarez’s generation urged newsreel audiences to recognize themselves as a social body, sharing a stake in the struggles depicted on screen. Today, the currency of “newsreel” as a political mode of experimental media is less certain. Although the experimental videos at issue here could be read as nostalgic for conditions of cinematic exhibition long since eclipsed by the dominance of social media, I argue instead that they engage the current mediation of political unrest in order to explore the indeterminacy of the social body to which it gives rise. Calling attention to rifts in the visual field and the seams that bind one historical moment to another, these works are guided by a desire to grasp the historicity of newsreel as a form enlisted to play a participatory role in social protest. In each case, newsreel provides new forms for responding to urgent events that cut against the temporality and visual codes of social media, opening up new space to share the world differently.
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References
A UNESECO report from 1952 catalogs a list of typical newsreel fare used as filler between reports of more timely news: “items dealing with local customs and traditions, pictures of bathing beauties and ‘‘pin-up girls,” religious of traditional festivals, ceremonies, and political or economic reportages without an obvious topical bent, such as ‘surveys of the year.’” Peter Baechlin and Maurice Muller-Strauss. Newsreels across the World. (Paris: UNESCO, 1952), 18- 9.
Al Baker and Joseph Goldstein, “Officer’s Pepper-Spraying of Protesters is Under Investigation” New York Times, September 28, 2011, accessed August 2, 2016, http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/28/police-department-to-examine-pepper-spray-incident/”.
Artforum.com, “Jem Cohen,” November 14, 2011, accessed Aug 15, 2016, http://artforum.com/words/id=29529.
Author, phone conversation with Alex Johnston, March 21, 2016.
Bennet Schaber observes how films such as Lost Book Found “make the constructed, built environment speak” in order to reveal it as “an emblem (in another vocabulary, a dialectical image) in the actuality of a moment pregnant with its own alterations, alternations and alternatives.” See “Film Democracy: Jem Cohen @occupywallstreet” Scan Journal of Media Arts Culture 10, no. 1 (2013), accessed September 1, 2016, http://scan.net.au/scn/journal/vol10number1/Bennet-Schaber.html.
By 1930, up to three-quarters of the American population saw newsreels weekly as part of the program of shorts screened before the feature film. These numbers remained more or less consistent through to the end of the Second World War. By comparison, the size of television news audiences during the height of its “golden age” in the 1960s was about one-third of American households. Scott L. Althaus, “The Forgotten Role of the Global Newsreel Industry in the Long Transition from Text to Television,” International Journal of Press/Politics 15, no. 2 (2010): 202-3.
Chris Marker: Notes from the Era of Imperfect Memory, “Letter to Theresa by Chris Marker – Behind the Veils of Sans Soleil,” accessed March 1, 2016, (The letter cited in this post include all subsequent quotes from Chris Marker on Sans Soleil.)
Chun distinguishes the complex temporality of “imagined networks” from the consistently “homogenous time” that Benedict Anderson associates with the formation of imagined communities in the era of print mass media. Ibid., 74
Chun, Updating, 17
Chun, Updating, 27
“Declaration,” Now! A Journal of Urgent Praxis, accessed March 1, 2016. http://www.now-journal.com/declaration/.
Helen Margetts, “Social Media Has Made Politics Impossible to Predict,” Zocalo Public Square, November 17, 2015, accessed September 1, 2016, Also see Helen Margetts, Peter John, Scott Hale, and Taha Yasseri, Political Turbulence: How Social Media Shape Collective Action (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2016), 43-4. Eli Saslow, “For Diamond Reynolds, Trying to Move Past 10 Tragic Minutes of Video,” The Washington Post, September 10, 2016, accessed September 12, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/stay-calm-be-patient/2016/09/10/ec4ec3f2-7452-11e6-8149-b8d05321db62_story.html.
Holly Rogers, Music and Sound in Documentary Film (New York: Routledge, 2015), 47.
Homay King, Virtual Memory: Time-Based Art and the Dream of Digitality (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2015), 172.
Ibid.
Ibid., 259
Johnston is one of the co-editors of the journal along with Kelly Gallagher and founding editor, Travis Wilkerson. The journal’s editorial board includes Thom Andersen, Nicole Brenez, Toshi Fujiwara, John Gianvito, Minda Martin, Jurij Meden, Vanessa Renwick, Can Tuzcu, and Billy Woodberry. Wilkerson was inspired in part by Johnston’s film to establish a new online venue for exhibiting timely work beyond the limits of social media, on the one hand, and the schedule bound time frames of film festivals, on the other. Author, phone conversation with Johnston.
Joshua Matlitsky, Post-Revolution Non-Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 124.
Macfarlane, Cohen Interview
Maeve Connolly, The Place of Artists’ Cinema: Space, Site, Screen (Chicago: Intellect Books, 2009), 10.
Martin Berger, Seeing Through Race: A Reinterpretation of Civil Rights Photography(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2011).
McKee, Strike Art, 216-7
New York Newsreel, “Initial Statement of the Newsreel (1967)” in ed. Massimo Teodori, The New Left: A Documentary History (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969), 387–388.
Peter Rist, “Agit-prop Cuban Style: Master Montagist Santiago Álvarez” Offscreen 11, no. 3, March, 2007, accessed March 2, 2016, Also, see “Albums by Lena Horne, Randy Weston Banned by South African Government,” accessed, May 3, 2016, http://www.randyweston.info/randy-weston-resume-pages/randy-weston-uhuru-afrika-banned.html.
Pew Research Center, “Social Media Conversations About Race,” August, 2016, accessed August 23, 2016. http://www.pewinternet.org/2016/08/15/social-media-conversations-about-race/.
Powell borrows the term “surrogation” from Joseph Roach. Kashif Jerome Powell, “Making #BlackLivesMatter: Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and the Specters of Black Life—Toward a Hauntology of Blackness,” Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies 16, no. 3 (June, 2016): 255.
Powell, “Making #BlackLivesMatter,” 258
Quoted in Michael Renov, “Newsreel: Old and New: Towards an Historical Profile,” Film Quarterly 41, no. 1 (1987): 24.
Raymond Fielding, The American Newsreel: A Complete History, 1911-1967, 2nd Edition (North Carolina: McFarland & Company, 2006), 82.13. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media, eds. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2008), 54. For an extended analysis of this passage, see Samuel Weber, Mass Mediauras: Form Technics Media, (California: Stanford University Press, 1996), 76-107.
Robert Kramer, “Newsreel,” Film Quarterly 21, no. 2 (winter 1968-9): 46.
Screenings of work that appears in Now: The Journal of Urgent Praxis online have been programed at the Interference Archive in Brooklyn and Other Cinema in San Francisco.
See Russell Campbell, “Film and Photo League Radical cinema in the 30s” Jump Cut 14 (1977): 23-25 and Bill Nichols, Newsreel: Documentary Filmmaking on the American Left. (New York, Arno Press, 1980).
Steve Macfarlane, “Interview with Jem Cohen” The White Reviews, October 2014. accessed March 1, 2016. http://www.thewhitereview.org/interviews/interview-with-jem-cohen/.
The newsreels were installed as a multichannel installation at the TIFF Bell Lightbox in Toronto, February 22 – March 23, 2012, in conjunction with the Reel Artists Film Festival. The series has also screened as a theatrical program of shorts at various international film festivals and art centers, including Viennale Vienna International Film Festival, Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival (Czech Republic), Seoul International Film Festival, Doclisboa, and EMPAC in Troy NY.
These visually inventive short films, produced with limited means and under great time pressure, made a formal virtue of necessity. Each tract was the length of a single roll of 16mm film, edited in camera to simplify the process of production. The mode of filmmaking required careful planning, as a result, the remediation of existing photographs and other media was privileged over footage shot in the midst of unfolding conflict. Évelyne Sullerot, “Transistors et barricades,” in Ce n’est qu’un début (1968), eds. P. Labro and M. Manceaux (Paris: Maspero, 1968): 131. Also see, Viva Paci, “On vous parle de…ciné-tracts (2008)” in Chris Marker et I’imprimeire du regard, eds. Viva Paci and André Habib (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2008), 167-77.
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media, (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2016), 3. Also see Pew Research Center, “News Use Across Social Media Platforms 2016,” May, 2016, accessed August 20, 2016, http://www.journalism.org/2016/05/26/news-use-across-social-media-platforms-2016/. The report finds that 6 out of 10 Americans report using social media as a news source and analyzes the different platforms and demographics that make up that figure.
William F. van Wert, “Chris Marker: the SLON Films,” Film Quarterly 32, no. 3 (Spring, 1979), 38-46.
Yates McKee, Strike Art, (New York: Verso, 2016), 85.