Reconstructing the news: British newsreel documentation and the British Universities Newsreel Project

Abstract

Film & Video Council (BUFVC), where he ran the British Universities Newsreel Project (BUNP). Luke McKernan is the current Head of Information at the BUFVC and is running the BUNP programme of newsreel documentation digitisation. The BUNP Database is located at www.bufvc.ac.uk/newsreels.

The Forgotten Role of the Global Newsreel Industry in the Long Transition from Text to Television

“…Because of rota pools, reciprocity agreements, and film exchanges, "only a very limited number of subjects [i.e., unique news stories] are now in circulation throughout the world" (Baechlin and Muller-Strauss 1952: 25). This tendency gave rise to regular complaints about the homogeneity of newsreel content within and across countries (e.g., Hiley and McKernan 2001). And because the largest international newsreel companies provided so much of the raw imagery distributed around the world, the high degree of American leverage over the global newsreel industry was a subject of enduring controversy (e.g., Baechlin and Muller-Strauss 1952;Priestley 1948Priestley /2002, much as CNN's dominant position in the global satellite news industry would become a matter of controversy half a century later.…”

“…Because the online collections for British Pathe and British Movietone mix outtakes and unreleased footage with the finished newsreel stories that were actually shown in theaters, a random sample of film library holdings will not yield a random sample of stories actually seen by newsreel audiences. Identifying the population of issued newsreel stories requires using the online British Universities Newsreel Database (BUND), recently renamed the News on Screen database and maintained by the British Universities Film & Video Council (Hiley and McKernan 2001). The BUND database is available online at http://bufvc.ac.uk/newsonscreen/search/.…”

Larga vida a las actualidades. La difusión de imágenes del pasado en los archivos en línea

“…En Portugal, las revistas de actualidades del Estado Novo , Jornal Português (1938)(1939)(1940)(1941)(1942)(1943)(1944)(1945)(1946)(1947)(1948)(1949)(1950)(1951) e Imagens de Portugal (1953Portugal ( -1970, convivieron con una producción y exhibición variada de noticiarios cinematográficos, algunos más informativos desarrollados por periódicos nacionales o con la colaboración de estos, junto con otros de carácter más comercial (Braga, 2005;Matos-Cruz, 1989;Piçarra, 2006), cuya proyección perduró hasta finales de los años 80. Si ampliamos nuestra mirada a otros contextos, podemos mencionar casos internacionalmente reconocidos e investigados como el de las atualidades de Vertov (MacKay, 2018), las francesas (Huret, 1984;Sorlin, 2004), las alemanas (Ferro, 1993;Kracauer, 1943;Lehnert, 2018Lehnert, , 2020 y las británicas (Hiley & McKernan, 2001;McKernan, 1992McKernan, , 2017, el noticiario del Instituto Nazionale Luce (Coronado Ruiz, 2016;Sorlin, 1994), el Noticiero ICAIC Latinoamericano (Johnson, 2013;Shefer, 2016) o el Newsreel norteamericano (Nichols, 1972(Nichols, , 1978Shefer, 2016), entre otros.…”