Documentaries and Newsreels

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Abel, Richard. “Charge and Countercharge: ‘Documentary’ War Pictures in the USA, 1914–1916.” Film History: An International Journal 22, no. 4 (2010): 366-388.   

Alexander, William. Film on the Left: American Documentary Film from 1931 to 1942. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981. 

Atkinson, Nathan S. “This is Crossroads: How Newsreels Made the 1946 Atomic Tests at Bikini Atoll Public.” PhD dissertation, Carnegie Mellon University, 2009.

Atkinson, Nathan S. “Newsreels as Domestic Propaganda: Visual Rhetoric at the Dawn of the Cold War.” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 14, no. 1 (2011): 69–100. 

Barnouw, Erik.  Documentary: A History of the Nonfiction Film. New York: Oxford University Press, 1974.

Barsam, Richard.  Nonfiction Film- A Critical History. New York: Dutton, 1973.

Bradshaw Jr., John Elliot.  “Projections of the Fatherland: Representations of Germany in the Hearst Newsreels, 1929-1939.” MA Thesis, University of Southern California, 2005.

Clark, Joseph E. “‘Canned History’: American Newsreels and the Commodification of Reality, 1927–1945.”  PhD dissertation, Brown University, 2011.

Clark, Joseph.  News Parade: The American Newsreel and the World as Spectacle.  Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020.

Cooper, Mark Garrett, Sara Beth Levavy, Ross Melnick, and Mark Williams, eds.  Rediscovering U.S. Newsfilm: Cinema, Television, and the Archive.  New York: Routledge, 2018.

Devlin, Erin Krutko. “”It’s Only Convincing If They Say It Is”: Documenting Civil Rights Progress in the USIA’s Nine from Little Rock.” Film History: An International Journal 30, no. 4 (2018): 22-47.

Fielding, Raymond.  The American Newsreel: A Complete History, 1911-1967.  2 ed.  Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2006.

Girgus, Sam B. America on Film: Modernism, Documentary, and a Changing America. Cambridge NY: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Graham, Cooper C., and Ron van Dopperen. “Nelson Edwards and the Newsreels: An American Life.” Film History: An International Journal 24, no. 3 (2012): 260-280.

Hanssen, Eirik Frisvold. “Symptoms of desire: Colour, Costume, and Commodities in Fashion Newsreels of the 1910s and 1920s.” Film History: An International Journal 21, no. 2 (2009): 107-121.

Klotman, Phyllis R., and Janet K. Kutler, eds.  Struggles for Representation: African American Documentary Films and Video.  Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999. 

Musser, Charles. “Carl Marzani and Union Films: Making Left-Wing Documentaries during the Cold War, 1946–53.” The Moving Image 9, no. 1 (2009): 104–160.

Naida García-Crespo. “Picturing ‘the Tightest Little Tyranny in the Caribbean’: The March of Time and a 1936 United States–Dominican Diplomatic Crisis.” Film History 29, no. 4 (2017): 89–111.

Ramírez, Gracia. “The March of Time: News Documentaries and the Dramaturgy of History.” Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal 54, no. 2 (2024): 39-58.

Snyder, Robert L.  Pare Lorentz and the Documentary Film.  Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1994.

Stamm, Michael. “Watching News in Public: The Rituals and Responses of Newsreel Theater Audiences.” Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 63, no. 2 (2024): 96-118.

Thomas, Ellen S.  “Scooping the Local Field: Oregon’s Newsreel Industry, 1911-1933.” Oregon Historical Quarterly 90:3 (Fall 1989): 229-304.

Wagner, Terry. “America’s Civil Rights Revolution: Three Documentaries About Emmett Till’s Murder in Mississippi (1955).” Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television 30:2 (2010): 187-201.

Warren, Shilyh.  Subject to Reality: Women and Documentary Film.  Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2019. 

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