Newsreels

Before television, moving images of world events lived in movie theaters. Before the main feature, the week's news would run. Some cities even had theaters that showed nothing but newsreels. The form peaked in the 1930s and 40s, and once television started winning on speed, the end came fast. The dates each company folded are on record — the last was Universal, on December 26, 1967. I've placed one full newsreel here: 'News Parade of 1945,' a year's worth of newsreels stitched into one, covering the year the war ended. We now know what happened that year. The people who made this footage didn't — they were still laying events out in order, not yet knowing how it would turn out. It plays straight from the Library of Congress's public copy.