Newsfront

A film about the cameramen who shot cinema newsreels in Australia. The period runs from 1948 to 1956. Television does not yet exist and people watch the news in cinemas, in the short bulletins that play before the feature. Len is one of the men who shoot them: floods, mining accidents, political rallies, sport. The frame is the end of that trade: television arrives and the newsreel business is finished. Len will not accept it; his brother goes to America and joins the new order. The formal idea: the film interleaves real newsreel footage of the period with staged scenes. The fiction sections were shot in black and white so the join would not show. In some scenes the actors are placed inside genuine archive footage. It was Phillip Noyce's first feature and is counted among the foundational films of Australia's cinematic revival in the 1970s. Bill Hunter plays Len. A valuable discovery for anyone who likes Australian cinema and period films built around a trade. For a viewer distant from Australian politics and that period, some of the archive footage stays without context.