Nostalgia Trap Podcast

I was on the Nostalgia Trap Podcast. The Nostalgia Trap podcast features weekly conversations about history and politics with some of the left’s most incisive thinkers, writers, and extremely online personalities, exploring how individual lives intersect with the big events and debates of our era. Nostalgia Trap is hosted by historian David Parsons and produced by Peter Sabatino.

Joe Clark is the author of News Parade: The American Newsreel and the World as Spectacle (University of Minnesota Press, 2020). In this conversation, he tells us how the newsreel developed in the 1930s and 1940s as both an aesthetic object and consumer product, as figures like Charles Lindbergh became focal points of an immense transformation in the relationship between current events, entertainment, and an audience increasingly positioned as passive consumers of history.

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Pop This! Podcast

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I was on Pop This! A Podcast where two women talk about pop culture. Pop This! is hosted by Andrea Warner and Lisa Christiansen, and produced by Andrea Gin.

“When was the last time you invited death into your car?” This week we invite Joseph Clark, author and film scholar (and husband of Andrea Gin) on the podcast to talk about Ida Lupino’s classic film noir The Hitch-Hiker. Buckle up, because we also discuss pandemic beans, Betty, and Andrea Warner’s long-lost crush.

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Book Launch Thank Yous + video

Thanks to everyone who came out for the virtual book launch for News Parade: The American Newsreel and the World as Spectacle. I really appreciate the great questions, support, and kind words. Special thanks to Zoë Druick for her careful reading of the book and incisive questions, and to Selina Crammond and all the folks at DOXA Documentary Film Festival for inviting me to program newsreels for the festival and hosting the Q+A.

For those who couldn’t make it to the launch, DOXA has posted the video recording of the event, so you can relive the excitement!

Virtual Book Launch

Thursday, June 25 at 6pm PDT

As part of DOXA Documentary Film Festival, I will be holding a virtual book launch online. The event is free and open to all. Join the livestream here.

Join me for a live Q+A with Professor Zoë Druick discussing News Parade: The American Newsreel and the World as Spectacle and a selection of newsreels I have programmed as part of the DOXA festival. See the films here.

Featuring films from archives across North America, this program includes several rarely seen films and some never-before-screened footage of Vancouver in the 1930s. The films trace the history of news film before World War II and point to its social and political consequences. In the age of fake news, and the profound changes to journalism and documentary film brought on by the Internet, the history of the newsreel demonstrates how new technologies and media reshaped the public’s relationship with the world almost a century ago.

  • Fox Movietone News, Vol. XVIII, No. 11 (USA, 1935) 

  • “Lindbergh in Paris,” Fox News (USA, 1927) / “Lindbergh’s Triumph,” Kinograms (USA, 1927)

  • “Alexander Murdered,” Universal Newsreel (USA, 1934)

  • “Movie Comedians See the Big City,” Hearst Metrotone News (USA, 1932)

  • “Bombing of USS Panay,” Universal News Special (USA, 1937)

  • All-American News (USA, 1945)

  • Canadian Universal Newsreel (Canada/USA, 1942)

  • “Forest conservation in Vancouver—outtakes,” Fox Metrotone News (Canada/USA, 1935)

  • “Oarsmen limber up for 1934 season—outtakes,” Fox Metrotone News (Canada/USA, 1934) 

Joseph Clark is a lecturer in film studies at Simon Fraser University. His research and teaching interests focus on archival and non-theatrical media, including newsreels, home movies, and sponsored film. He is a long-time member of the DOXA Documentary Film Festival Programming Committee and part of the organizing committee of the Vancouver Podcast Festival presented by DOXA.

Zoë Druick is Professor in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University. Her primary areas of teaching and research are media studies, gender studies and cultural theory. Her research considers histories, theories and trajectories of documentary and reality-based media with an emphasis on their intersection with biopolitical projects. Her most recent books are The Grierson Effect: Tracing Documentary's International Movement and Cinephemera: Archives, Ephemeral Cinema and New Screen Histories in Canada.

Coming Soon

News Parade: The American Newsreel and the Mediation of the Public Sphere, 1927-1945 will be published by the University of Minnesota Press.

The book examines the history of an overlooked film form and its importance in the development of 20th Century media culture. Focusing on the sound newsreel of the 1930s, this work brings together an historical examination of the newsreel’s modes of production, distribution, and reception with an analysis of the form’s aesthetic and representational strategies. It argues that the newsreel represents a crucial moment in the development of a spectacular society where media representations of reality became more fully integrated into the looking relations of commodity culture. By emphasizing the mediated watching of reality – and by framing that reality as a kind of parade – the newsreel privileged spectatorship over other forms of knowledge. For the first time, the commodified experience of watching the news became as important as the news itself. In doing so the newsreel helped redefine the public through spectatorship and the public sphere as a site of identity formation and participation mediated by the screen. The book pays particular attention to the ways in which discourses of race and gender worked together with the rhetoric of speed, mobility, and authority to establish the power and privilege of newsreel spectatorship.

News Parade  intervenes in key debates in film history and media studies. By providing the first sustained examination of the American newsreel since the 1960s, it broadens our understanding of pre-war film culture, its organization, and its audience. This varied history is especially important at a moment when screen culture is expanding into virtually all aspects of contemporary life. By looking at representations of diverse newsreel makers, subjects, and audiences, this study reveals the extent to which spectatorship and mass media had already begun to transform the public sphere in the United States before WWII.