Word: newsreel
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Four local film-makers are currently shooting a pilot film and raising funds for a fortnightly Boston-area newsreel scheduled to begin next September...
...film deals with much more provocative material than it possibly can cover in an hour and a half. The depression, socialist labor movements, a consumer oriented society, Chaplin's life, Paulette Goddarde--Modern Times covers all this ground, but as a newsreel might, quickly, and superficially. Certain images remain provocative, certain moments captivating, but the variety of subject matter indicates that the film is a transition from the sentimental to the political, and so leaves the audience at once satisfied and perplexed...
...writers mix comedy and cruelty more offhandedly or more effectively. Witness a redneck farmhand's wife contemplating the Polish family's broken English: "They can't talk. You reckon they'll know what colors even is?" As her hostile speculations grow deadlier, she recalls a newsreel showing bodies stacked in a concentration camp, then thinks of -"ten billion of them pushing their way into new places over here...
...make superficially and still score emotional points. Audiences have always been gulled by it, even 'sophisticated' ones, so Kramer's influence must not be simply scoffed at. In fact, the only alternatives offered to it by the few American films dealing with contemporary social ills have been 16mm Newsreel formlessness, the terrorism of ex-Weatherman Robert Kramer's Ice, the varying documentary techniques of Wiseman, De Antonio et al. None are really interested in getting at the conceptual root of an issue, and then advocating viable morality or actions. None really operate to aim at the heart of the film...
...Antonio relies on the generally available newsreel footage and television kinescopes to tell his story (and also material not so generally available, to judge by bits like a series of commercial out-takes Nixon made in '68). The result is a kind of modern-day equivalent of Citizen Kane. For Millhouse takes one step further Pauline Kael's argument that Kane's News of the World search for the meaning of "Rosebud" is a conscious parody on the Henry Luce operation that had supplanted Hearst's more idiosyncratic satrapy: in Millhouse, electronic journalism has become the dominant mouthpiece...