Popular Culture Review Vol. 14, No. 2, Summer 2003 | Seite 20

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Popular Culture Review

In some countries, the Agency operated its own independent newsreel facili
ties, but in others it cooperated with foreign newsreel distributors to supply film
footage to be incorporated into their commercial product. The Agency also prided
itself on distributing newsreels in remote areas of the world. During the 1956 Hun
garian crisis, USIA camera operators shot footage of the streams of Hungarians
who fled their country when the revolt failed. The Agency also produced and dis
tributed the only newsreel devoted exclusively to African affairs and, in 1935, the
U.S. and Soviet governments reached an agreement for American films to be shown
in the Soviet Union for the first time since before World War II. River launchers
were used to transport newsreels in the delta areas of Pakistan, Burma, and Viet
nam, and the Agency’s local posts abroad operated more than three hundred mo
bile units to deliver films to foreign rural areas (Dizard, 1961, 93, 97, 101-102).
Early on, the USIA decided that the ten-minute Associated Newsreel would
be displayed to moviegoers in general without targeting the material for any spe
cific audience. Much of the story content, therefore, had to be of general interest to
diverse audiences. In order to satisfy a variety of audience tastes, the USIA circu
lated three editions of the weekly newsreel: one for Muslim audiences in the Near
and Middle East; one for neutralist nations, particularly in South Asia; and one for
anti-Communist nations in the Far East. In 1953 only, a limited edition was distrib
uted that was tailored to interest viewers in Greece, Israel, and Turkey. The re
gional editions were discontinued in early 1966 in favor of a single edition for all
areas (USIA, 1966a, 5-6).

An Overview of the History of the American Newsreel
From 1911 to 1967, the American newsreel provided a ten-minute potpourri
of motion picture news footage to movie theater audiences each week throughout
the country and abroad. As a form of journalism, it provided mainly photographic
news coverage that was at times shallow, trivial, and propagandist^, yet, as Raymond
Fielding (1972) observed, the newsreel also projected “vivid, unforgettable pic
tures and sounds of the people, events, wonders, and horrors which the free people
of this country did their best to understand and confront” (3-4).
Before 1911, the fledgling American film industry focused primarily on fic
tional movie narrative, leaving journalistic cinema to European production com
panies. However, on August 8, 1911, the French-owned Pathe initiated the first
newsreel series directly targeting American movie audiences. Pathe's Weekly not
only was America’s first newsreel, but also was considered its best until the end of
World War I (Fielding, 1972, 66, 71-72). The philosophy of the American-pro
duced Pathe's Weekly was that the newsreel series would successfully compete
with illustrated periodicals by showing “the important news of the world not in
cold type or in still pictures but in actual moving reproduction” (Fielding, 1972,