Word: newsreel
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Burns' 1990 The Civil War first aired in wartime too, just after Saddam's invasion of Kuwait. Today the most powerful statement of The War is its simple, brutal willingness to show what war looks like. Without wallowing in gore, Burns and Novick combed through archive and newsreel footage to depict the war as GIs saw it: battlefield corpses, bomb-blasted civilians and waves lapping against bodies on beaches. Compare this with the Iraq conflict, during which the U.S. government has suppressed images of coffins, let alone casualties, often with the cooperation of the media...
...contrast is starker when The War presents a newsreel from the battle of Tarawa--issued on President Franklin D. Roosevelt's orders--that shows ghastly images of Marine dead. "This," the newsreel narrator intones, "is the price we had to pay for a war we didn't want." Today the government is loath to lay out a price, or ask one. "People yearn for the memory of shared sacrifice that the Second World War represents," Burns says. "Now we're all free agents. We don't give up nothin'. We were asked after 9/11 to go shopping. It was sort...
...heightened by the polio that crippled him in 1921. He developed the ability to make people forget his leg braces and feel at ease in his presence. Those who met him when he was President, or even saw his million-dollar smile at a distance or in a newsreel, felt heartened. Winston Churchill said being with him was like "opening a bottle of champagne." Good vibes are not in themselves solutions to problems. But at the nadir of the Depression and in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt conveyed the sense that solutions would be found...
...movie world's first clear view of Audrey Hepburn was in a newsreel: the beginning of Roman Holiday showed the young actress, as the ruritanian Princess Ann, on a state tour of Europe. The world's final view of Hepburn was in 1992 TV newscasts of her visit to Africa last October - three months before her death at 63 - as she bestowed first her compassion on starving children and then her modulated anger at the causes of their condition...
...number of tickets sold annually is about five per person, but the demographic skew is much more severe, with the young accounting for a lopsided percentage of the audience. As for moving pictures of current events, TV and the Internet offer as many as anyone could want, but the newsreel is as dead as Free Dishes Night. Thus movies are now more escapist than the old Hollywood product ever was, more reticent to turn the nation's central anxieties into screen drama...