. THE ARRIVAL OF TELEVISION At the end of World War II, audiences for American newsreels, estimated at some 200 million worldwide, were at ...
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THE ARRIVAL OF TELEVISION At the end of World War II, audiences for American newsreels, estimated at some 200 million worldwide, were at their peak. But in the United States and Britain, the film industry itself was about to enter a period of steep decline. In 1945, U.S. Census figures showed that 85 million Americans went to the movies each week. By 1960 the number had dropped to 40 million. By 1980 it had dropped again to under 20 million. British surveys gave comparable figures as approximately 32 million in 1945, under 10 million in 1960, and 1 million in 1980. Television is usually blamed for this decline and the new medium probably contributed to it. But more significant were demographic changes to America’s poorer inner cities. The demolition of the old neighborhood movie theaters ended a way of life.
The cinema newsreels disappeared with them: March of Time and This is America in 1951, Pathé News, owned by Warner Brothers, in 1956, Paramount 15 News in 1957, Fox-Movietone News in 1963, MGM-Hearst News of the Day and Universal News in 1967 (Barnouw, 1993). Regular television services began in Britain in 1936 and in the United States in 1939 but were suspended during the war. When they resumed after the war, the medium grew rapidly, soon establishing itself as the most popular leisure activity for most Americans. Television transformed the documentary landscape. Broadcasting networks provided the finance and the distribution outlets, two obstacles that all documentary filmmakers had difficulty surmounting. Holding the airwaves as trustees for the public the networks offered documentaries as a public service. Television also transformed the public’s perception of reality. “The medium itself insists on the actual,” Grierson had written of the cinema. Television, however, brought the actual world live directly into the home. The studio became a setting for live broadcasts on all kinds of information-based subjects while outside broadcast cameras turned public events into dramatic spectacles that could be watched in more detail at home than in the crowd at the event itself. Announcers, news readers and commentators spoke directly out at the audience from the television screen, updating the lecturer model of public address. The psychological effect of the new medium challenged cinematic representations of the actual world. Current affairs redefined the documentary arena with subjects that bore on public concerns and the human condition. This television genre habituated viewers of documentaries to close-ups of human faces speaking on camera, a style that was derided by some filmmakers as “talking heads” and “sound bites,” but which has remained the medium’s most common audio-visual form. A. News Related Documentaries The networks’ commitment to public service determined the news-related content of early television documentaries. The lead came from radio and print journalists with the program See It Now, featuring the distinguished broadcaster, Edward R. Murrow, and jointly produced by Murrow and Fred Friendly. See It Now was a studio-based program, with Murrow speaking live to the audience and introducing live or film material in the course of his half hour time slot. In the opening broadcast on November 18, 1951 Murrow switched between live cameras in New York and San Francisco, the first use of the two-way coast to coast link. It was a display of television’s technological progress. See It Now, announced a voice over opening shots of the studio control room, was: “a document for television based on the week’s news and told in the voices and faces that made the news. ... A public service of the CBS Television Network.” See It Now ran through the middle of 1958 and is best known for a broadcast in March 1954 that questioned the motives and methods of Senator McCarthy’s anticommunist campaign. In 1959 CBS followed See It Now with CBS Reports, a one-hour news based documentary that appeared every two weeks each season for 4 years and then every month for the next 20 years. NBC White Paper, which ran less frequently, began in 1960 and NBC Reports in 1972, while ABC, a relative newcomer to the network business, introduced the monthly ABC Close-Up in 1973. CBS’ 60 Minutes, the brainchild of Don Hewitt, was first broadcast in September 1968.
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