Abstract
Research on American newsreel content has been limited by the difficulties of accessing visual records and by a lack of authoritative data on the contents of issued newsreels in the United States. This chapter introduces an important new data resource developed by the Cline Center for Democracy at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign, USA. This data resource includes a comprehensive record of story summaries for newsreel issued by four of the main titles distributed in the United States: American Pathé News (1915–1957); Hearst News of the Day (1919–1967); Paramount News (1927–1957); and Universal News (1929–1967). It also includes story summaries from The March of Time (1935–1950). Originally collected in the 1980s for use in Jonathan Pollard’s CineScan database, this collection contains over 100,000 story summary records. This chapter serves as an introduction to this new resource, as well as to other available data sources for researchers interested in American newsreel content, including the World Newsreels Online collection assembled by Alexander Street Press.
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- 1.
To the authors’ knowledge, there exists no comprehensive story summary database for the American issues of Fox Movietone. Although ITN Source appears to utilize story summary record information in its descriptions of particular Fox Movietone clips, it is unclear how complete such records might be for ITN Source’s portion of the surviving Movietone corpus. Paper records are part of the University of South Carolina’s Fox Movietone collection, but no complete story summary record is part of its holdings (personal communication with Greg Wilsbacher, 27 January 2017).
- 2.
https://alexanderstreet.com/products/world-newsreels-online-1929-1966 (accessed 7 July 2018).
- 3.
http://mirc.sc.edu/islandora/object/usc%3Amovietone (accessed 7 July 2018).
- 4.
http://itnsource.com now redirects to https://www.gettyimages.co.uk/resources/itncollection (accessed 7 July 2018).
- 5.
https://www.cinema.ucla.edu (accessed 7 July 2018).
- 6.
UCLA’s newsreel holdings are more fully described in https://www.cinema.ucla.edu/sites/default/files/HearstNewsreel.pdf (accessed 7 July 2018).
- 7.
Fielding, R. (2000) The American Newsreel, 1911–1967. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press; Fielding, R. (1978) The March of Time, 1935–1951. New York: Oxford University Press.
- 8.
http://hboarchives.com/apps/searchlibrary/ctl/marchoftime now redirects to https://www.gettyimages.ie/footage (accessed 7 July 2018).
- 9.
http://search.alexanderstreet.com/wnrv (accessed 7 July 2018).
- 10.
http://www.shermangrinberg.com (accessed 7 July 2018).
- 11.
Sherman Grinberg is in the process of digitizing its holdings, and a subset of these newsreel stories can be viewed on Getty Images at http://www.gettyimages.com/search/2/film?p=grinberg+archival (accessed 7 July 2018).
- 12.
https://research.archives.gov/id/100520 (accessed 7 July 2018).
- 13.
https://archive.org/details/universal_newsreels (accessed 7 July 2018).
- 14.
http://search.alexanderstreet.com/wnrv now redirects to https://www.gettyimages.ie/videos/grinberg-archival?phrase=grinberg%20archival&sort=best (accessed 7 July 2018).
- 15.
Jonathan Pollard bears no relationship to the person of the same name who pled guilty in 1987 to spying for the Israeli government. After creating the CineScan database, Pollard worked as an information technology consultant for various companies before becoming a producer of off-Broadway theatrical shows for many years.
- 16.
Nelson, N.M. (1987) Let’s go to a movie … via CD-ROM, pp. 9 in Information Today no. 4 (11).
- 17.
Roberts, J. (1986) Newsreel of fortune in New York Magazine 43.
- 18.
The CineScan database also included early motion pictures, the NASA film and video catalogue, and World Television News records, among others. Although Pollard’s interest extended to newsreel and television news holdings outside the United States, there is no indication that Pollard was aware of similar efforts underway in Britain at that time that would eventually become the British Universities Film & Video Council’s News on Screen database.
- 19.
Personal communication with Jonathan Pollard, 28 September 2011.
- 20.
http://www.prelinger.com/ (accessed 7 July 2018).
- 21.
Althaus would not have succeeded in this endeavour if not for the sleuthing skills of Paul Testa, then a graduate student research assistant working for Althaus.
- 22.
The Cline Center for Advanced Social Research at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign is currently preparing a cleaned and corrected version of the CineScan database records for scholarly analysis. Although these data have not yet been publicly released, we invite researchers interested in working with these data to contact the Cline Center directly.
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Althaus, S.L., Britzman, K. (2018). Researching the Issued Content of American Newsreels. In: Chambers, C., Jönsson, M., Vande Winkel, R. (eds) Researching Newsreels. Global Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91920-1_13
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