The Brooklyn Rail

There has been a cinematic spectacle haunting New York recently. It has promoted a vision of fascistic state overreach, organized revolutionary action, and vanguard movements long since scattered to the wind. On big screens throughout the city, armed leftists are shown in a rare sympathetic light, and cabals of shadowy industrialists are scrutinized with a fiery mix of rancor and rigor. Machine guns rattle rhythmic. Battles are fought, lost, fought again.

This specter is not made up of any Hollywood blockbuster, but of the blistering dispatches of the film collective Newsreel, which have been beautifully restored and screened as part of recent retrospectives at BAM, Anthology Film Archives, and Maysles Documentary Center throughout November. These films, produced during the political ruptures of the late 1960s and 1970s, may be the closest the United States has come to a homegrown revolutionary cinema. In their approach to financing, filming, and distribution, Newsreel embodied a genuinely counter-hegemonic method that moved beyond revolutionary aesthetics to incorporate an entire framework counterposed to the commercial apparatus that dominates US film culture.

Newsreel first emerged from the complex topography of the 1960s US counterculture, specifically the loose affiliation of radicals and activists that came to be known as “the New Left.” This movement, broadly united by an anti-establishment politics and energized by opposition to the Vietnam War, provided the basis for Newsreel’s politically engaged filmmaking; in fact, the collective was unofficially formed in response to the the October 1967 antiwar March on the Pentagon, in which filmmakers Robert Kramer, Allan Siegel, and Norm Fruchter had all participated. Later, comparing experiences at a meeting organized by Jonas Mekas at Film-Makers’ Cinematheque (now Anthology Film Archives), the filmmakers found that the brutality of the police crackdown on protestors, which included tear gas and beatings, had not been reflected in the news media’s framing of the protest. “The reality of the experience,” Siegel wrote in 2003, “contrasted so completely with what was seen on the nightly news or reported in the press” that the group felt compelled to set about countering the biases of the nightly news with their own brand of agitprop cinema. Kramer, in 1968, put it succinctly: they wanted to make films that “explode like grenades in peoples' faces, or open minds up like a good can opener.” These were not going to be neutral broadcasts—they were going to the opening salvos in a war against the audiovisual hegemon.

The film that came out of the Pentagon protests, No Game (1967), was one of Newsreel’s first, and it established the hallmarks of the collective’s style. The film is shot on grainy black-and-white stock; the camerawork is often shaky and handheld, weaving its way through the amassed crowds of protestors and marchers as they descend on the National Mall. The most distinctive formal element of this film, however, is the sound: an overlapping panoply of unseen speakers, archival speeches, and broadcasts. There is little in the way of “voice of god” narration that you might find in documentary newsreels put out by broadcast companies or the government. The narration in No Game, and indeed in most Newsreel shorts, does not lay out the state of affairs with an objective journalistic distance, but is rather directly implicated in the events onscreen. Newsreel narratives offer a first-person plural view of events, stitched together from an array of inputs and signals that combine to produce a chorus effect of agitation. These stylistic elements give Newsreel films an unvarnished verisimilitude, placing the viewer much closer to the heart of the action than a standard documentary might. But they also reflect the filmmakers’ material realities: these were low- or no-budget productions, shot on handheld cameras often without sync-sound capabilities. A multitude of voiceovers is an effective evocation of the sociality of a protest—it is also a convenient solution for not being able to record the sound of a crowd when you’re in it.

While No Game captures the foundational spirit and stylistic elements that would define the Newsreel, it has a certain meandering aimlessness, conveying the mood of the protest while muddling the material aims of the wider movement. As the 1960s wore on, however, and the collective’s purview expanded to include films on women’s rights, the Black Power movement, and global liberation struggles outside of the US, their films began to include more rigorous, analytic approaches. A host of shorts that played at BAM in November, including El Pueblo se Levanta (1971), The Wreck of the New York Subway (1969), and Revolution Until Victory aka We Are the Palestinian People (1973), exemplify how the collective was increasingly able to marry their brash, assaultive approach to more mature analyses of the social problems they were documenting. El Pueblo, for example, features electrifying footage from inside an East Harlem church taken over by the Puerto Rican action group the Young Lords, where they were providing free breakfast programs and health clinics for the surrounding neighborhood. It’s striking to watch police break through the front doors of the church and arrest the Young Lords leadership, especially since our vantage is situated not outside in the street but inside, among the crowd that is facing arrest, brutality, or worse. (In a post-screening Q&A, Newsreel filmmaker Bev Grant described how the film crew had enmeshed themselves with the Young Lords during the occupation, even helping wash the dishes.) But the film intersperses sophisticated discussions of the Young Lords program throughout, situating this individual event within a specific social context and allowing the subjects to articulate a worldview. Wreck of the New York Subway does something similar, intertwining footage of fare evasion actions with illustrated explanations of complex transit funding and interviews with MTA employees, and Revolution Until Victory, produced by the San Francisco branch of the Newsreel, pairs unblinking footage of Palestinian refugee camps and revolutionary groups with sober analyses of Israel’s roots in Western imperialism and suppression of Arab self-determinism.

The breadth of subject matter in Newsreel’s oeuvre is a testament to its continually-evolving, non-hierarchical structure. Members assisted each other in producing films, and when a given project was finished, the group would then collectively vote whether to distribute the work or not based on the film’s political potency. “We are not together merely to help each other out as filmmakers,” wrote San Francisco Newsreel founders Marilyn Buck and Karen Ross in a 1968 article. “But we are working together for a common purpose: to make films which shatter the image and reality of fragmentation and exploitation in this society.” The group’s collectivism helped focalize its political aims, but it also connected to broader refutations of commercial cinema’s individualist framework that were emerging in the late 1960s. In France, for example, well-known auteur directors like Jean-Luc Godard and Chris Marker were attempting to break out of their brand-name popularity by modelling politically engaged, collectivist cinema—Godard with the Dziga Vertov Group, in which he made collaborative films full of rigorous Marxist analysis and deconstructive approaches to sound-image unity; and Marker with the Medvedkin Group, which encouraged factory worker subjects to participate in the film production process itself. All of these groups, emerging from a Western cinematic culture obsessed with marquee stars and box office success, found that their radical politics could be more effectively expressed through authorial anonymity and collectivized production.

It wasn’t enough to highlight radical subjects and institute collective modes of filmic production, however. For Newsreel to effectively counteract the hegemony of Hollywood and mass media, they had to circumvent profit-based distribution models, too, which could only serve to reinforce dominant capitalist ideology. To this end, the Newsreel looked to the past—namely the Bolshevik “agit-trains” of Soviets like Dziga Vertov and Alexander Medvedkin, who worked in railroad cars retrofitted with screening equipment to show propaganda films to the rural working class—and also to the postcolonial periphery, where movements like the Latin American Tercer Cine were theorizing how to transform film from capitalist entertainment into an effective tool for decolonization. Of particular importance was Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino’s 1969 essay “Towards a Third Cinema,” which outlined an adaptive, context-based screening culture:

Each projection of a film act presupposes a different setting, since the space where it takes place, the materials that go to make it up (actors-participants), and the historic time in which it takes place are never the same. This means that the result of each projection act will depend on those who organise it, on those who participate in it, and on the time and place; the possibility of introducing variations, additions, and changes is unlimited.

For Newsreel, that meant showing films at a vast constellation of non-commercial venues: churches, student clubs, encampments, sides of buildings. “We take the films into the street,” wrote Buck and Ross in 1968. “We stop people on the street, and confront them with our films. Involve them as participants.” The act of viewer participation was key: it was not enough to just show a film and then leave, but rather to position the work, in Solanas and Getino’s terms, as a “detonator or pretext.” Newsreel members often traveled with the films themselves, which helped ensure that their screenings were followed up with discussions that would inspire further organizing.

Here, then, is the inflection point at which cinema becomes revolutionary. The subject matter may be politically agitating, and the distribution system may evade the multiplex and its inherent profit motive. But if, when the reel runs out and the lights come up, the viewer is as disconnected and passive as they were when watching, then the film itself is still just entertainment—a passing spectacle soon to be absorbed back into daily life. Cinema must eventuate into action, not just spectatorship. Newsreel’s method provided an organizational infrastructure that was ready to receive the newly alive audiences and convert them to politically engaged actors. This is useful when theorizing the mobilizing power of the audiovisual form, especially as documentarian glimpses of atrocities across the world inundate platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter. Those images, though frequently outrageous, exist as pieces of algorithmic flotsam in a distribution network facilitated by corporate conglomerates. They are consumed largely in isolation, and are quickly subsumed back into the endless scroll. They eventuate in nothing but glum, glazed-over stupefaction—a far cry from the participation that Newsreel aimed for.

For a time, Newsreel operated quite successfully as a protean, multi-pronged radical collective. They formulated tactical films, provided agitprop coverage of the era’s revolutionary actions, and operated a far-reaching guerilla distribution network that promoted not only their own work but also the work of filmmakers in Cuba, Vietnam, Palestine, and beyond. They were so successful that many members were placed on FBI watchlists—the imprimatur of American left seriousness.

As the 1960s waned and the long 1970s set in, Newsreel went the way of many other groups associated with the New Left, with leadership fracturing as the largely white, male, middle-class contingent of early members left the collective and membership became more cosmopolitan in terms of gender, race, and class. They continued to produce guerilla work about revolutionary action, but their focus expanded beyond the United States, instead prioritizing struggles outside of the imperialist core. Today, the organization is spread across two loci: the Third World Newsreel in New York, and the California Newsreel on the West Coast. Both maintain a commitment to championing revolutionary cinema from across the globe.

It’s easy to view Newsreel’s films now through a lens of wistful leftist nostalgia—both for the radical ferment they documented, and for the rigor of their extra-filmic infrastructure. That nostalgia can be passive, regressive, its own form of spectatorship. Or it can be, as Frederic Jameson formulates, “a lucid and remorseless dissatisfaction with the present on the grounds of some remembered plenitude.” Newsreel exemplifies the plenitude of a film culture that was zealously opposed to the existing audiovisual hegemony. They knew that it was not enough to dress a blockbuster in berets and bandoliers, nor was it enough to let viewers absorb atrocities on their screens in total isolation. As fervor continues to mount on city streets and campus quads countrywide, Newsreel provides a useful template: the revolutionary film is brash, authoritative, and proudly propagandistic. It is also only a pretext—a detonator, a grenade.