Symposium: Rediscovering U.S. Newsfilm

In the twentieth century, U.S. filmmakers generated tens of thousands of hours of newsfilm that was screened in movie theaters or viewed on television sets across the country. This vast output of news coverage, covering the period from the 1910s to the 1970s, has not been matched by a scholarly effort to understand it. To address this persistent oversight, this symposium will, for the first time in the United States, bring together many of the nation’s leading newsfilm scholars and archivists to present new and foundational work that is featured in the new book Rediscovering U.S. Newsfilm: Cinema, Television and the Archive (AFI/Routledge, 2018), edited by Mark Cooper, Sara Levavy, Ross Melnick, and Mark Williams.

This symposium, organized by Ross Melnick and Charles Wolfe, is free and open to the public and begins on Thursday, October 25th at 4:30pm and continues until Saturday, October 27th at 12:30pm. A newsfilm screening event, organized by the UCLA Film & Television Archive and University of South Carolina’s Moving Image Research Collections, will be held in conjunction with the symposium at the Pollock Theater at 7pm on Thursday, October 25th.

Sponsored by the Carsey-Wolf Center, the College of Letters and Sciences, the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts, the Center for Cold War Studies, the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, and the Department of Film and Media Studies.

Photo: Courtesy of Library of Congress