THOMAS DOHERTY

In 1940, the documentary presentation of real life, whether in newsreel, short subject, or feature-length form, was a subordinate entry in the staple program of classical Hollywood cinema, an attendant-in-waiting to the unchallenged supremacy of fanciful motion picture fiction in categories A or B. By the middle of the decade, however, news on-screen and the documentary contended with the entertainment feature film for impact and import. The war years witnessed the mature prime of the newsreel, theretofore little more than a moving image headline service, and the dynamic re-emergence of the documentary, an option that had lain dormant in the American cinema since the silent era. Yet their elevation in status from the inconsequential to the indispensable was short-lived. Without the spectacle of a world at war and its intimate link to the world at home, attention to the newsreel and documentary waned...