ABSTRACT
Peterson’s chapter develops our understanding of the attitude to place encouraged by newsreels by considering their generic and stylistic debts to and departures from other nonfiction film genres such as travelogues and industrial films. Specifically, Peterson looks at a group of films from the Fox Movietone News Collection (spanning the years 1920–35) at the University of South Carolina and the Hearst Metrotone News Collection (from 1929–34) at UCLA in order to parse the relationship of the aerial view to popular film and modernist aesthetics. As such, early sound newsreels continued some but not all of the conventions of the early travelogue or “scenic” film, which was a hugely popular film genre in the silent era. Films such as Anghor Wat (1930) continue many of the old travelogue conventions by presenting generalized views of natural scenery and Scenery of Rocky Mountains—outtakes (1934) presents a series of images of mountains composed with traditional picturesque framing devices such as trees on the left and right side of the frame. However, these early 1930s newsreels present more specificity of place than films from a generation earlier, including names of specific locales, names of people shown, and some historical context for what they show. This increased detail is most obviously a direct result of the addition of sync sound, but it is also characteristic of this different historical moment, both stylistically and in terms of politics and the increasing mechanization of modern life. The more complex presentation of information in early sound newsreels was amplified by the genre’s disjunctive form in which up to ten subjects were crammed into individual ten-minute issues. Aerial views, which appeared often in newsreels of this era, also contributed to the genre’s modernist aesthetic style.
