ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the historical use of newsfilm in relation to televisual “liveness” in three case studies of rare recorded footage: a kinescope of the inaugural episode of the Today program on NBC (14 January 1952); a kinescope of the inaugural episode of KTLA’s Newspicture 5:30 (14 September 1963); and an example of unedited and perhaps unaired archival KTLA newsfilm, that documents a largely forgotten public demonstration in June 1979 that protested the police killing of Eula Love in Los Angeles—sound footage documenting an intentionally silent demonstration. Each text demarcates intricate and situational ontologies of newsfilm representation. From this perspective, these texts can be recognized to perform compound temporal registers that figure and determine conditional relations between and across such concepts as news, timeliness, newsfilm, history, “live,” archive, duration, and memory. The chapter also develops methods of analysis that pursue the dynamics of Bakhtin’s notion of the chronotope in newsfilm studies, and what we might call the critical interval in historical media studies.
