ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book seeks to redress the imbalance, to organize and lend momentum to a developing body of work by North American scholars. It explores how news film connects and distinguishes local, national, and transnational audiences. The book focuses on the particular challenges and affordances of the material substrate—celluloid film—and its archival survivals. It explores the related temporalities of live and recorded news in their respective. The book provides the scenic led more directly to the durable genre of the travelogue film than the topical did to the newsreel. It represents a running argument of sorts over the relative importance of the newsreels' informational value versus their entertainment qualities. The book discusses the long weekend of coverage, observing that the reactions of U. S. audiences are unappreciable absent careful attention to what they saw and heard via their TV sets.
