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.

Listen here

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!

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.