The Voice of America by Mitchell Stephens

Author:Mitchell Stephens
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

10.

The Voice of God

Lowell Thomas soon attracted the attention of a different but equally youthful medium, which was also beginning to dabble in journalism and trying to find its voice.

A few newsreel companies had been distributing silent footage of news events to movie theaters in the second and third decades of the twentieth century. But there aren’t many such events that make a lot of sense without sound. With the exception of brief onscreen titles in these silent films, journalists were deprived of their most important tool: language.

Then, starting in the mid-1920s, the motion-picture studios began experimenting with “talkies.” William Fox was among those who thought newsreels were where sound might be of most value. Fox’s studio had purchased a system that enabled sound to be recorded directly onto the film. That made its system, dubbed “Movietone,” easier to use outside a movie studio—i.e., at the scene of a news event—than those of some of its competitors. In 1927 Fox scored a journalistic, cinematic and commercial triumph: the studio captured the sounds as well as the sights of Charles Lindbergh taking off on his flight across the Atlantic and then being welcomed home. This was just before The Jazz Singer, featuring Al Jolson, demonstrated that sound was to be not just a gimmick but a necessity in all kinds of movies. Fox Movietone News soon dominated the newsreel business.

Not that this studio, or any other, had much of an idea of what sound might add to filmed news. New forms of communication do not arrive with instruction manuals. Events obviously could now be heard as well as seen: the sound of Lindbergh’s plane, the noise of the crowd. Speeches were a natural: President Calvin Coolidge welcoming Lindbergh, Lindbergh thanking the president. And those early Fox Movietone newsreels reveled in any vaguely newsworthy event that featured music: a marching band at West Point, a visit by the Vatican Choir.1

But the idea was slow to arrive that sound might be used to allow journalists to do with moving images what they had long done in print and were beginning to do on the radio: recount, explain, comment upon. Those painfully circumscribed onscreen titles continued appearing in newsreels with sound even into the 1930s. But gradually they began being replaced by a new sound: the voice of a narrator—generally not seen in the picture, often full of facts, even pretending to omniscience, sometimes eager to share an anecdote or a chuckle.

Now, in recent decades the use of this detached narrative voice in documentaries and video journalism—“the voice of God,” it is sometimes called—has often been disparaged. Its critics have dismissed it as condescending, pedantic, pretentious or artificial. They have noted how often the narrating was being done by someone white, male and disconnected from the story. Documentary filmmakers and video journalists have found clever means of abandoning narration—of letting their subjects speak for themselves, of showing, not telling. Cinéma vérité, as this is called, has enjoyed an extended vogue.

Nonetheless, film journalism was in

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