From 1935 to 1951, Time Magazine bridged the gap between print & radio news reporting and the new visual medium of film, with
March of Time: award-winning newsreel reports that were a combination of objective documentary, dramatized fiction and pro-American, anti-totalitarian propaganda. They “often
tackled subjects and themes that audiences weren’t used to seeing —
foreign affairs,
social trends, public-health issues — and did so with a combination of panache and subterfuge that today seems either absurd or visionary.”
(Previous two links have autoplaying video.) By 1937, the short films were being seen by as many as 26 million people every month and
may have helped steer public opinion on numerous issues,
including (
eventually) America’s
entry to WWII. Video samples are available at
Time.com, the
March of Time Facebook page and the entire collection is available online,
(free registration required) at
HBO Archives. [more inside]
posted by zarq
on Aug 22, 2011 -
8 comments
The Personal Photographs of Dr. Vladimir Kosma Zworykin, Television Pioneer. The screen images are time exposure photographs of the picture on the kinescope in the monitoring rack in the main control room. Some were taken with stationary frames of moving picture film projected upon the iconoscope by a standard moving picture machine. Others are actually the pictures transmitted with the iconoscope camera in the studio and outdoors.
posted by tellurian
on May 3, 2010 -
9 comments
"A fedora hat worn by me without the necessary protective irony would eat through my head and kill me." Goodbye to George W.S. Trow, one of the strangest, wisest, disturbingest writer ever to gape at, marvel at, and love his fellow Americans. His 1980 essay
"Within the Context of No Context" (which shared with J.D. Salinger's
last published story the distinction of taking up an entire issue of the
New Yorker) placed television, irony, and distance at the center of the new United States. He also wrote the less well-known (but equally beautiful) short story collection
Bullies, along with a novel and several
screenplays, helped found
National Lampoon, and was a staff writer at the
New Yorker from 1966 until 1994, when he quit in protest of Roseanne Barr's guest-editing stint. He died on November 24, in Naples, at the age of 63. Appreciations from the
New York Observer,
Slate, and
Gawker.
posted by escabeche
on Dec 12, 2006 -
17 comments
Little visual miracles. For more than forty years that most American of photographers,
Chevalier in the Order of Arts and Letters Lee Friedlander, has recorded
modern American urban life -- with its
jumble of
people,
signs,
buildings, and
cars, and
television sets. He likes to turn
a common blunder of amateurs -- photographing something nearby
with one's back to the sun -- into a
leitmotif.
His shadow plays the role of alter ego, sticking to the back of a woman's fur collar, clinging to a lamppost as a parade of drum majorettes passes by, reclining like a stuffed doll on a chair. Clever jigsaw puzzles, his pictures frequently reveal themselves to be
laconic, austere poems to what
Friedlander has termed "
the American social landscape',' meaning mostly ordinary places and affairs. "Friedlander,"
an exhibition of more than 480 photographs and 25 books covering decades of work, runs at MoMA through Aug. 29, before traveling to Europe until 2007. More inside.
posted by matteo
on Jun 14, 2005 -
8 comments
The end of an era? The Miss America crowning had just 12 million viewers tune in this past Saturday, the lowest viewership in the history of the pageant. Are people turned off by this type of competition? Or are there just
better things to do on a Saturday night?
posted by MediaMan
on Sep 25, 2002 -
36 comments
