kekseksa

Introduction

The world was a relatively calm and peaceful place in 1910. The slow process that would lead with a certain inevitability to the World War of 1914-1918 rumbled on in the background. Both the Austrian and the Turkish empires were in slow dissolution. The independent Kingdom of Montenegro was proclaimed on 20 August 1910 while the Turks put down savagely an uprising by the Albanians. In Mexico, the writing was on the wall for one of the earliest stars of cinema (filmed many times in 1896 by Lumière operator Gabirel Veyre, Porfirio Diaz, ruler of Mexico since 1876 when Francisco Madero and legendary freedom-fighter Emiliano Zapata combined to declare the Revolution. There was revolution in Europe too with the Portuguese monarchy being overthrown on 5 October 1910 and replaced by a republican government.

In the Far East, China moved troops into Tibet in an attempt to put a stop to British encroachment there and the incorporation of parts of Tibet into British India, but the principal rival to the Western colonial powers and an increasingly expansionist US, the Japanese, confirmed their own emergence as a colonial power by the annexation of Korea.

The twentieth-century's technological revolution continued unabated and the focus of attention in this respect in 1910 was probably the aeroplane, whose development was making impressive and which already began to look as though one day it would replace the great beauties of the air, the gas balloon.

The cinema by contrast had made rather sedate progress since its effective beginnings in the 1890s and few would have guessed that it was on the verge of a very important advance (the development of the hour-long feature film). Films had gradually become longer from the one-minute films of 1895 but still rarely exceeded more than about fifteen minutes. Hollywood was a very small town which did not even have a cinema; in fact such the townsfolk there had very wisely
banned such activities. It did however become formally part of the city of Los Angeles in 1910 and the first film was shot there in the year (by D. W. Griffith). The centre of the world of cinema, however, remained France and, more specifically, Vincennes on the outskirts of Paris where Charles Pathé had his studios.

It was Pathé's drive to industrialise the production of films and extend his control over the distribution as well as the production of films that would be largely responsible for the important changes that would take place during the period 1911-1915, but, for the moment, the French giant was more concerned to extend the influence of the company abroad, rather as the Lumières had done in their heyday in 1896-1898. There was already a thriving Pathé subsidiary in Spain and the US branch was established in 1910.

The Newsreel

The newsreel did not begin in 1910 but it is the year in which took root. Topicalities (actualités) had always been a very important part of film-making. To relay news in the form of moving pictures was part of what cinema did (and would continue to do right up until the 1960s when the job had very largely been taken over by television. It was throughout that period a popular and greatly valued service and countless fiction films bear witness to its importance.

There is plenty of evidence to show that, from the very beginning, the makers of films thought of topicalities in "series" or as part of a programme, rarely as individual stand-alone one-minute films (as was often the case with "composed views" and "fiction films"). When they were in a position to do so, when, that is to say, Pathé and its principal rival Gaumont had gained a large degree of control over distribution and exhibition of films, the newsreel (the programme of topicalities) was a perfectly natural development. The Pathé-Journal had started life in 1908 and Gaumont (Gaumont-Actualités) and the other major French companies soon followed suit.

With the creation of Pathé subsidiaries abroad, the newsreel was among the first major import so that Pathé News came both to Britain and to the United States in 1910. The US was slow to take to the newsreel but Britain became its foremost exponent. Even before the arrival of Pathé, Britain had boasted a dedicated newsreel cinema, The Daily Bioscope, which opened on 23 May 1909, but it was British Pathé that would become the busiest of all newsreels and would remain a much loved (and much mocked) institution in Britain until well into the sixties.

Film historians and critics still too rarely pay any attention to the newsreel, often regarding it (quite wrongly) a purely peripheral aspect of cinema. In re-asserting the importance of such footage, and examining a little its contents, one realises the completely falsity of the notion that cinema in some manner "progressed" from a "primitive" form of "cinema of the attractions" to something quite different. This totally manufactured theory depends very largely on comparing one kind of film in the early with completely different kinds of film at the later period (a fairly obvious piece of academic deceit). When one compares like with like (the early topicailities with the newsreel items), what one discovers (unsurprisingly) is exactly the opposite. Not only do topicalities continue to concern themselves with "attractions" (as indeed they do to this day) but the attractions that they concentrate upon remain remarkably constant.

In fact the institution of newsreels tended if anything to increase the "attractions" element by comparison with the mini-documentaries produced as stand-alone films (see below). The very short item on the Coupe de Voiturettes in Boulogne, there is no real report of the race. The intention of the film is purely to give an impression of speed. In the zoo film, we see the animals performing tricks and an elephant "shooting the chutes". We are back in other words with the sort of film made by the US companies in 1896-1897 featuring show stars and attraction parks before the Lumières a rather more austere and artistic approach to the photographic composition of films.

This "attraction" effect is nothing peculiar to cinema. The visual presentation of news has always tended to represent such a trivialisation; it still does to this day. The same tendencies are apparent in photo-journalism and in television news-reporting. It is, however, questionable whether in the age of the sensational press (The Yellow Kid and "fake news" date like the cinema itself from the 1890s), the cinema and the television have proved very much worse than the written press in this regard. And there is a strong link between the sensational press and the newsreel. When the form did take hold, a little later, in the US, it was the press baron William Randolph Hearst who completely dominated the field with Hearst Newsreel in 1914, International Newsreel in 1919, MGM News in 1929 and finally Hearst Metrotone News which survived until 1967.

Although ostensibly the newsreels published what in French are called actualités and were known in English at the time as "topicalites", their news-reporting, like that of the yellow press, was in practice rather thin and the requirement to produce a constant stream of material at relatively low cost meant that they were in practice full of "magazine" items that are often more in the nature of (hastily) composed views than genuine "topicalities",

Since British Pathé has very properly made a wealth of material from its archives publicly available, we are in a position to make the comparison. These are a range of newsreel items from 1910 and below a comparison between their content and that of the very first topicalities and composed views from 1896-1897.

Links here direct to British Pathé films available to all on youtube. For those interested, British Pathé offers a great deal more on its own web site - href="https://www.britishpathe.com/.