They Changed the Face of Journalism News with Cinema.
Flying near upside down in a helicopter is no way to start a day. Yet as we took to the skies, half leaning out overseeing battleships, a thought! Our videojournalists had little sense how Nato chiefs would take a view of the news films being produced.
News journalism is journalism, right! Equipped with the unfailing qualities of a journalist, find yourself in the right place, film and ask questions. That much the military brass expected, which is why their senior officers were put up for interviews.
We’re three days into Nato’s global simulation war programme off the coast of Norway where they’re engaged in new war strategies of asymmetric attacks.
As journalists, we’re here to provide added reality in this closed off environment. But for some of the videojournalists true to the discipline’s oft-forgotten form they’re delivering a film form fresh, you might even say radical, to contemporary times. It’s 2005.
What about the use of cinema in journalism and news making? “No, no!”, says a very senior BBC exec when years later I ask about reforming news making for an audience using cinema.
“We don’t do fiction”, she replies. In 2014, I’ll be invited to a BBC news executive meeting, as Vice.com is causing consternation amongst execs seeing Vice swallow up young news consumers. I’ll explain the nuanced offerings cinema provides and how it was historically castrated from news.
But the earlier BBC response is one that is prevalent in the industry and it underlines a lack of understanding of a visual language and form that was the building blocks of all moving images.
Cinema, one framing goes is about the synergy of pictures and words to best interpret an event. More often than not its architects engage in intensified continuity for coherence.
When TV news in the 1940s was taking off there were many reasons to choke off cinema’s involvement. It was as much strategic, as it was financial. You can’t create a new industry with its sister breathing down your neck. Cinema, to news people experimenting to create tv journalism, had become a juggernaut industry attracting some 60m people weekly into a dark room where stories were dreamt up. ( Italics my own).
Yet this view of cinema wasn’t the half of it from the text of André Bazin, Gilles Deleuze, and later Hitchcock who called Grierson, the father of documentary making, a great cinema maker.
In the Soviet Union some twenty years earlier, Ukrainian born David Kaufman, later Dziga Vertov, viewed cinema as a factual truth, calling his newsreel Kino-pravda (“Film Truth”). Its renewed influence would emerge in the US in the 1960s.
On board rigid raiders, fast assault crafts and, filming special forces evacuating refugees, our videojournalists in Norway were creating a series of innovatory films in what was in effect a made-up war, yet it might have escaped many that in a real war, WWII, American brass would put cinema into the war effort to create a series of films.
Whilst many of the films could be described as propaganda to counteract stirring Nazi documentaries like Leni Riefenstahl’s The Triumph of the Will (1935), and bolster US forces’ morale, two Oscar winning filmmakers William Wyler and George Stevens would provide a glimpse of how understanding cinema could create absorbing factual journalism films.
Wyler a Major in the US signal corps was behind widely praised Oscar winner Mrs Minerva (1942) — a war film depicting a stoic British family hunkering down against the German. He would go on to direct The Memphis Belle: A Story of a Flying Fortress (1943), a film he partially shot by accompanying daring-do war sorties in a B-17 over Germany in which the crew thought he was courageously mad.
George Stevens, a director much sought after for his comedy touch in More the Merrier (1943) would create a wide variety of films and shorts that merged cinema and journalism, including filming at the Dachau concentration camp.
But that said as the two directors eventually returned to Hollywood their legacy of cinema and journalism would be obscured in the burgeoning television world which sought newspapers reporters as its primary hire.
Newsreels which were the staple diet for cinema goers to learn about the world were gradually on their way out. But as television news was taking hold in the 1960s, an innovative photojournalist editor Robert Drew would team up with filmmakers David and Albert Maysles (who’d served in the US Army as an army cinematographer), British filmmaker Richard Leacock and American D. A. Pennebaker, to create Direct Cinema.
It upended the market, providing not only new film gear that could record sound compared to the soundless Bell & Howell 70DR "Filmo" 16mm Cameras of the war, but create cinematic scope with synched sound onto the film, as Drew would help me understand in this short I made with his involvement.
It was life as it unfolded. Drew Associates contribution to the form earned him and the team several accolades. Amongst them Primary (1960) which documented John F. Kennedy’s campaign that would take him to the Oval Office.
Cinema and Journalism again became co-joined twins, yet its influence in news was limited as Drew told me. In 1994 in the UK it would reappear but under the guise of a new art, videojournalism, confusing news execs.
The launch of Channel One TV in the UK signalled a new era in news making. For the first time one person was officially recognised by the National Union of Journalists to be able to shoot, produce, edit and report on film.
And since many of the news intakes were not dye-in-the-wool newsmakers who’d learned their craft from the BBC, they gravitated towards cinema. They included talent such as Dimitri Doganis the founder of Raw TV, an indie that created the smash hit The Imposter (2012).
By 2005, as we launched viewmagazine.tv, one of the UK’s first video multimedia platforms, we would come across a growing number of videojournalists who were using cinema and winning major awards. It would be the basis for a film 8 Days that documented training that was offered to UK newspaper journalists, attracting wide press from the media, such as the Press Gazette.
By 2014 as Vice.com was producing news that blended cinema with journalism, a six year international PhD study across four continents would confirm its impact.
Among its interviews were figures like Deborah Turness who in Setempber becomes the CEO of BBC News.
Since then working with scores of media we’ve trained journalists to become videojournalists or otherwise understand how to make compelling journalism reports with cinema, such as the Financial Times and Chicago Tribune, and groups in Russia, China, India, Egypt, Lebanon and across Europe.
But there’s a bigger question that’s now being asked and it’s being driven by Gen Z. Cinema is not a one-size fits all. Its style and form is as much cultural as it can be the domain of auteurs.
Why it truly matters in our time. Done well, it probes into stories that traditional productions have become blunted via disinformation and gaming via sleight of hand. Stay truthful, as the coterie of videojournalists in the research have, but find creative ways to tell stories that stick in the memory.
The profound news is that small groups of television practitioners within branded media e.g. BBC are adopted its form and are winning major awards, with audiences showing their appreciations. You’ve not noticed perhaps because it’s not labelled as such, but it passes the three pronged test. They mention it — albeit quietly, audiences recognise it, and an expert also sees the threads.
Almost eighty years, the industry is finally awakening to the diversity of storytelling in more ways than one.
But the real challenge is that cinema journalism is a living visual language, which unlike TV was strait jacketed. There’s more cinema to evolve.
Dr David Dunkley Gyimah is a leading authority on news and cinema journalism. More on him here. He’s behind Viewmagazine.tv
