ABSTRACT
In “News’ Electric Circuits,” Levavy looks at the ways newsreels displayed and interacted with radio during the latter’s cultural expansion in the mid- and late 1920s in order to underline each medium’s inherent intermediality. Newspapers, newsreels, and radio each served a more complex role than simply reporting what now might be called headline news. In the interwar years media defined and redefined the nature of news itself through their commonalities and the singularity of their formats. The resulting hybridity of reportage was developed around this triad of the visual, the verbal, and the aural. Traditionally understood as competitors, radio and newsreels in fact worked together for mutual benefit. Radio invites the listener to imagine himself elsewhere during moments of live transmission. By illustrating a link to electric wires and radio transmission, newsreels simulated immediacy while delivering visual information of comparable breadth. “News’ Electric Circuits” takes the example of a 1924 Kinograms story depicting the regular operation of the Chicago radio station WJAZ as indicative of newsreels’ larger relationship to radio in the 1920s. In the complex of reportage media established in the 1920s, this chapter demonstrates, newsreels put forth a technology of showing for which simulated immediacy provided a governing imperative.
