It was ironic if surely not a coincidence to be watching this film just upstairs from the ACMI's most successful exhibit ever, celebrating 50 years of television with the world's largest wall of TVs, simultaneously showing dozens of programs from the last 50 years at once -- none of which you can, of course, hear or follow. A fantastic concretization of Todd Gitlin's "media torrent." Newsreels seem an innocuous trickle by contrast.
Saturday, September 23, 2006
Newsfront
Just saw a terrific film, Philip Noyce's "Newsfront" (1978) at ACMI, the Australian Center for the Moving Image at Federation Square (which isn't quite so bad when you're inside). The film looks back at the cameramen who shot the newsreels shown in Australian cinemas until the arrival of television in 1956, and seamlessly weaves together historic and fresh footage shot and edited to look like film and filmreels c. 1948-56. It's remarkable how Noyce recreates scenes with his fictional characters not only in domestic and work settings but at the arrival of great ships full of immigrants after the war, at an around-Australia motor race, at the devastating flooding in a place called Maitland in 1955, and at the Melbourne Olympics of 1956 when the Soviet invasion of Hungary unfolding at the same time led to a violent brawl in a water polo match between Hungary and the USSR. (How come I forgot that Melbourne was an Olympic city, and well before Sydney?)
It was ironic if surely not a coincidence to be watching this film just upstairs from the ACMI's most successful exhibit ever, celebrating 50 years of television with the world's largest wall of TVs, simultaneously showing dozens of programs from the last 50 years at once -- none of which you can, of course, hear or follow. A fantastic concretization of Todd Gitlin's "media torrent." Newsreels seem an innocuous trickle by contrast.
It was ironic if surely not a coincidence to be watching this film just upstairs from the ACMI's most successful exhibit ever, celebrating 50 years of television with the world's largest wall of TVs, simultaneously showing dozens of programs from the last 50 years at once -- none of which you can, of course, hear or follow. A fantastic concretization of Todd Gitlin's "media torrent." Newsreels seem an innocuous trickle by contrast.
