SIGHTS UNSEEN:
a Discourse on the History of Mass Mediated War (Cont.)

The 1930s saw important advances in nonfiction media as state-supported documentary film making flourished in Britain, the U.S. and emerging Nazi Germany. The artistry and force of the classic 1930s documentaries was communicated in rich black and white 35mm, projected on large screen in darkened theatres. Though seeking to present truths, the works of John Grierson or Pare Lorentz never claimed immediacy. German propaganda proclaimed only the unyielding power of the Nazis. The development in the 1930s of 16mm cameras, still without synchronous sound, brought much greater ease of information captures. It was possible to get far closer to real-time action and to move the camera into a variety of situations. Had it been in wide use, broadcast television advances in the same decade could have made similar leaps in media’s ability to transcend time and space, but television experiments in U.K and U.S. were short-circuited by WWII. 16 mm filming became very common however, as especially the Allied Forces used it for reconnaissance, training, and for the first time significant close-up combat shooting. Even though 35mm motion picture cameras were still being carried into combat, 16 mm cameras of the Kodak cine-type were used widely in camera guns on Spitfires and in other air situations.

Jim Bates shooting the Eyemo-Q, 165th Signal Photo Company, US Army, Europe. International Combat Camera Association.

All of the movie cameras of that war were bulky, cantankerous machines. A 35mm Mitchell NC and the Reeves magnetic 35mm sound recorder it needed for audio weighed about 70 pounds. It was only called portable because it had handles on it. The hand-held spring-driven Bell and Howell Eymo cameras, also widely used for gathering war footage, had 100 feet film loads which ran for just one minute. Their longest take without rewinding was 15 seconds. Sustained, uncut images were nonexistent. Such technological limitations, along with the high level of light needed for the film stock to be exposed, limited maneuverability for WWII cinematographers. Interestingly, the wartime innovations and postwar boom in 16 mm use was limited mostly to the United States, Great Britain, and to some extent Western Europe, although it was Nazi Germany that pioneered magnetic sound recording. The Eastern bloc countries did not give up on the 35mm cinematic tradition, even for documentary. This resulted in very different paths for filmic reportage between East and West during the Cold War years.

Murrow with “This Is London” changed the previous distantness of war into the intimacy of immediacy. With radio he had the first instantaneously transmittable information machine, other than the hieroglyphic dots and dashes of Morse code, which reached an audience of only one at a time. Other mass media followed. (Note that almost no mass medium, once introduced to the public has ever gone completely away, though it may have mutated into a variation of its original form. OK, stereopticons, eight track audiocassettes, and BETA are collectors’ items only.) We still look to newspaper, photographs, first-person accounts, radio and recorded music to inform and move us about all sorts of events, including war. Passing decades have multiplied, not reduced the presence of reality recording machines and electronic devices.

During WWII, battle scenes continued to be shown to the public in movie theatres, generally weeks after the events, and in the carefully constructed sequences of newsreels or government sponsored documentary films. A few of the combat cameramen from this era are still alive and their stories of the tribulations of getting footage shot and ready for public consumption are legion. Most people who remember watching those theatrical newsreels for the first time cannot conceive of what it would have been like to recognize the face of someone they knew in a picture. It was unlike the link between family and soldier in Iraq II, when a neighbor telephoned a war mother and exclaimed, “Go look! Your son is on TV, pulling down a statue of Saddam!” No WWII wife sitting in the neighborhood Fox or Warner or Grand theatre expected to recognize her husband. Voice over narration may have identified the fighting unit, but there was little intimacy. The shots were too far away from soldier’s faces, the places were far away too, and by the time the footage was projected fleetingly in a movie theatre, the battle it depicted had long been decided.

As with the photographs from the Civil War, the images of WWII live on with startling intimacy in numerous documentary compilations. In films both excellent and mediocre, billions of pairs of eyes have screened and rescreened the footage of “dubya, dubya, I, I.” A particular 1940s black and white, grainy version of the reality of war became so ubiquitous that The History Channel had for years to endure the sobriquet “The WWII Channel”, or worse, “The Hitler Channel.” My father, a foot soldier in the European ground war following the D-Day invasion, once remarked to me, “If I have to see that same poor son-of-a-bitch die on the Beach at Normandy one more time, I’ll shoot myself.”

The Korean War.

By the time of the Korean War, combat photography was well established as an expressive art that could document moods and feelings, as well as battles and machines. 35mm still cameramen created powerful imagery even under fire, witness the legendary work of Robert Capa, but moving pictures were hampered by the size and weight of the equipment necessary. Portable 16mm continued to be silent; there was no technology capable of capturing a sustained moving image that had synchronous sound. One thing that changed with the Korean War was the availability of television as a distribution medium. Television, as has been exhaustively if not definitively discussed, presents a very different emotional experience of reality to the viewer than does theatrical film. While debates still plague academia about precisely what those differences are, there is general agreement that TV can be much more up-close, personal, and consumed alone, rather than in public.

Television war coverage of Korea began by relying largely on maps, approved U.S. military film footage flown in from Japan, and verbal accounts. Most broadcasts were uncritical of U.S. policy, and American casualties were not discussed in detail, although the war was brutal for ground troops. Television showed that the struggle was against a stereotyped Asian enemy (much like the Japanese in WWII coverage) who could be killed without guilt but whose numbers and fanaticism made him seem impossible to defeat. 1950s television technology meant that the Korean War reality was apprehended through visual and aural distortions very different from the ones employed in earlier war coverage. 1950s TV was nothing like cinema. Shrunk to the then standard 13-inch set, muted to black and white tones, these usually reduced by broadcast to shades of gray, filtered through static, snow, and fuzz, subject to horizontal warping and vertical rolling, the public first saw television’s version of war. (CBS introduced color broadcasts in five cities in 1951, but it was another decade before color saturated American TV.)

Television was the opposite of the larger than life war iconography that previously filled movie screens. Pictures were tiny, but brought into homes. Jet planes could transport film footage more quickly, but there was still no satellite transmission, no video feeds. Time still put action “then” not “now.” Another commonality between the ways that TV and the cinema presented war, was that the information flow was centralized. Hollywood studio newsreels makers and armed-forces documentary makers were fully pledged to support WWII. Nonfiction films were largely produced by the armed forces, and according censored. The most famous instance of this was probably John Huston’s “Battle of San Pietro” (1945), which with its mud and blood of the Italian campaign was deemed too gory and depressing for stateside audiences to see until after the war. In 1950 there were only two viable U.S. television networks, both owned by large corporations. Still there was criticism of the boldness of CBS coverage of a 1950 landing by U.S. infantry, when a news announcer reported the action as it was in progress. On the whole, television did not seem to have a particularly large impact upon public perceptions of the Korean War, perhaps because in1950 television ownership had penetrated less than 10% of A merican homes. By 1966 it was in over 90%.

Edward R. Murrow eventually recognized the power of immediacy inherent in television, though before that he was quoted as saying, “I wish goddamned television had never been invented.” Even if 1950s technology was not as easily instantaneous for visuals as it was for sound, his producer Fred Friendly pushed him toward TV. After WWII Murrow and Friendly created a series of aural recreations of historical events on record, using music, sound effects and spoken word called “You Hear It Now.” It evolved into a weekly CBS radio series, entitled “Hear It Now,” using the same principles to cover current events. By 1951 Murrow translated “Hear It Now” into “See It Now,” the legendary magazine series that shaped television journalism for the next fifty years. Using its own crew of cameramen (still tied to a relatively big camera/sound rig), the show bypassed the movie newsreel approach with unrehearsed interviews and no background music. The series included a one-hour report on the realities from the ground of the Korean War during the 1952 Christmas season that sought to evoke the frustrations and confusions of everyday soldiers. One contemporary critic described this as “the most graphic and yet sensitive picture of war we have ever seen.” Yet in 2003, fifty years after its end, the Korean War remains one of the least visually examined of 20th Century American armed conflicts.

The American War in Vietnam.

The opposite is true of American involvement in the Vietnam War, for all the rules changed with this “Living Room War.” Innumerable historians, critics, and analysts have poured over television news and documentary film coverage of Vietnam for over thirty years. Most focus on how immediate, intimate, and ultimately repugnant the picture of war became as close-up shots of bloodied and dying young Americans beamed into every home in the country. Telstar communications satellites first made the international relay of television pictures possible in 1962. Soon the time gap between guerilla warfare in Southeast Asia and family dinners in front of the set shrank to almost nothing. As important as these almost instantaneous distribution advances were, it was another dramatic shift in moving image technology that enabled new kinds of combat coverage to fill TV screens. Cinema verite or direct cinema experiments with portable, lightweight 16mm film equipment capable of capturing synchronous sound occurred almost simultaneously in Canada, France and the U.S. in the early 1960s.

In the United States a combination of chance and passion quite consciously led to cinema verite when Drew Associates was formed. Robert Drew’s theory of bringing the “picture story” journalism of his “Time” magazine photo editorial experience, coupled with his ability to raise corporate money was fused with Ricky Leacock’s desire to shoot ever closer and faster and more unobtrusively than was technically possible. (He had been frustrated in this goal long before filming the surrender of Japan to China in Nanking in 1945, and remains frustrated today at the limitations of even the tiniest digital camera. These two met when Drew crashed a Flaherty Film Seminar seeking Ricky. They soon teamed highly with the personal social inquiry approach of Al Maysles and the technical grasp of equipment of D.A. Pennebaker. Cinema verite in America was born in 1960 with “Primary” their collaborative effort, documenting the 1960 Wisconsin Presidential primary between Hubert Humphrey and John Kennedy, televised locally in New York on ABC. Each of these documentarians are distinguished in their own right, and each posses skills in all areas of film making, but in 1960 it was the combination of their abilities that transformed the way that reality could be captured in moving image media and broadcast on TV. It was with the tools they pioneered, and with ever-faster films from Eastman Kodak, that combat cameramen could cover the Vietnam War in the way they did.

The Vietnam War was central to the Golden Years of 16mm filmmaking, both in combat and on related domestic issues. As testament to this fact, there is a compilation of film and television documentaries about this war at the Library of Congress. Although not comprehensive, it includes many of the relevant titles held there (only as of July 1989) and runs approximately to 400. The collection reveals how Vietnam War coverage on television ended much of the complacency that distance and time had kept in place around the subject of war. The first commercial international telecommunications satellite, “Early Bird” was put into use in 1965, just as the size of the American military in South East Asia expanded dramatically. Suddenly, images and sounds shot on the battlefield could be sent from one stationary satellite station to another in a matter of hours rather than days or weeks. This meant that sometimes American soldiers were shown fighting in battles to which no one knew the outcome. Most of these images originated in 16mm, which offered great visual depth and now the advantage of the portable synch sound Nagra tape recorder.

There was still a lag time caused by shooting 16 mm film and the need have it processed elsewhere in a laboratory and edited later. Even though the first videotape recorder was demonstrated as early as 1956, it wasn’t until 1968 that a portable mini-cam was used in broadcast television, and that was limited to the U.S. presidential nominating convention. The 1/2” open reel portapak became available to consumers around the same time, but it wasn’t until 1973 that a time-base corrector made 1/2” tape pictures acceptable for commercial broadcast. There was however, very high quality high-speed Kodak color film stock and a large proportion of TV sets in the U.S. were now in the home, in color. Vietnam became up close, personal, and violently beautiful. The 16mm image, even transmitted via television, had powerful artistic and emotional depths that amplified the anti-war movement’s calls for peace.

As always, there were cameramen willing to report in the thick of war. Neil Davis, one of Australia’s most distinguished war cameramen was the subject of documentary by David Bradbury that describes the experience of shooting war with a camera better than almost anything else. “Frontline” (1979) tracks Davis (killed covering a Bangkok coup in 1985) who was in Vietnam shooting for 11 years, from the time of the American buildup through the fall of Saigon. With both stills and moving pictures he told the story of people on the ground, the combatant and the noncombatants alike. His personal face-to-face journalistic approach became the type seen almost nightly by millions of television viewers around the world. Davis’ work is emblematic of the way that much of the Vietnam coverage had the power to touch audiences. It seemed to quickly become an archetype for television war documentary. The Southeast Asian images of human pain and societal devastation that crowed into every American television newscast were still mediated by broadcast transmission, editing, commentary, and the natural fragmentation of network television, broken up by commercial breaks and promos. Despite this, they had undeniable emotional and political force.

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