Yesterday's Witness (review)

FILM REVIEWS YESTERDAY'S WITNESS (52 min., color & b/w, 16mm) Blackwood, 1975. Before television created the illusion of understanding the world around us by presenting pictures of 'reality' in our living rooms, there were the newsreels. Begun in 1911 by Pathe (originally called the Vitagraph ), and often accompanied by a 10 to 15 person orchestra in the early days, the newsreels soon spread overseas and remained an important medium of mass persuasion up to the 1960s. As historical documents, the newsreels are invaluable. As a film about the newsreels, however, Yesterday's Witness (1975) avoids a significant number of crucial questions that should be asked about the subject. The movie is a tribute to the newsreel camermen and announcers (like Ed Herlihy and Harry von Zell who are interviewed). They are pictured as daring and resourceful progeny of a Richard Harding Davis, shooting such perilous scenes as those involving the communist riots in Havana in 1935 or the Hindenburgh crash. They cover the arrival in Paris of Lindberg in 1927 where the first use of sound occurred. One sees, for instance, the work of Norman Alley, who shot over 2,000 feet of film during the December 1937 attack on the USS Panay in the Yangtse River of China. Yet, the movie does not explain what was cut or used in theatrical release. Those who want to understand the role of film in history want to know what out-takes were discarded in the cutting room floor and why. This film completely disregards this aspect of the newsreels. Lowell Thomas narrates Yesterday's Witness, admitting that the newsreels were part journalism as well as part show business. He seems genuinely nostalgic for the largely uncritical reception that the medium possessed; after all, immigrants could become adjusted to American customs by watching the newsreels. One catches glimpses of fascinating subjects that are left dangling in time and space in this movie. The newsreel coverage of the Lindberg kidnapping case was a disgrace, the movie intimates, turning the judicial proceedings into a 'circus,' with some newsreels openly advocating the death penalty. New sequence. Many of the riots that took place in Hitler 's Germany during the 1930s were dampened in the newsreels for fear of upsetting audiences. New sequence. Max Markman, the only cameraman to capture the grisly death and destruction wrought by the crash of an airplane into the Empire State Building is interviewed and weeping, relates that he didn't want the horror of his work shown to audiences. Overruled. New sequence. Ultimately the movie reflects the myopia of its subject. 42 The parallels of theatricality between the newsreels of yesterday and the television news of today are alarming. The manipulative quality to which viewers have been subjected and to which they adjust themselves continues . Yesterday's Witness, like Raymond Fielding's book The American Newsreel (upon which much of it has been based), is valuable as a reminder of a past genre. But the subject deserves a more searching treatment. Greg Bush PAPA PEREZ (35 min., color, 16mm) Cecropia Films, 1979. Kathleen Dowdey's Papa Perez is a film about the Perez dynasty of Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana. It is a short film—only 35 minutes—and as a result it can do little more than present a brief sketch of the origins of the Perez dominion and then move on to its economic and ideological results. The economic results are obvious: a vast inequality of wealth legitimized and protected by the Perez' domination of Plaquemines Parish's major political and financial institutions. The ideological dimensions are interesting, though no less predictable. The Perez family sees itself as utterly benign, with the eldest sons, Leander Perez II and Chalin 0. Perez, extolling their selfless virtues and benevolent public service. This sort of self-justification is always amusing—even ..comic-but it is not at all unexpected. Ultimately, Papa Perez never goes beyond the obvious, but neither does it hammer away at it. It always allows the viewer to see the blatant as if it were a discovery, and this is certainly a virtue. The major problem with the film is that it is simply not long enough to really explore the...