Newsreel: A Polyphonic History of 1968
In 2019, filmmakers, scholars, and activists Giulia Gabrielli and Matt Peterson began researching the experience and legacy of Newsreel, a radical anonymous film collective founded in New York in 1967. Known as the “propaganda arm of the New Left,” Newsreel saw itself as more than an independent production and distribution company, but as a national political network and infrastructure of radical media, revolutionary life, and full-time protest that was embedded in the most insurrectionary trends of its time.
Gabrielli and Peterson realized while beginning their project that although Newsreel seemingly involved more than 100 people, only a handful of (male) names involved in the collective’s founding appeared in the few texts that were available. Hoping to meet with as many participants as possible, they initiated an oral history project, speaking with more than 50 surviving members to date.
Newsreel’s films were considered recruitment tools for activism, and a basis for political education, debate, and organizing. The screenings were activated by the collective with presentations and discussions, seen as the most crucial part of the filmmaking process. Newsreel’s starting place, and the core of its practice, was a critique of mainstream media as neutralizing opposition and reproducing the status quo. The collective wanted to force us to rethink what was news, what was visible in American society, which events deserved documentation, and which social groups and political leaders needed to be recorded.
Between 1967-1972, Newsreel expanded beyond New York City, with the formation of chapters in San Francisco, Chicago, Boston, Detroit, Los Angeles, and Kansas City. In Gabrielli and Peterson's interviews, they sought to trace each member’s singular trajectory, focusing not just on their direct experience in Newsreel, but on their familial and intellectual background, as well on the directions their life and work took after leaving the organization. In short, Gabrielli and Peterson decided to focus on the people of Newsreel more than the films. This polyphony, if not cacophony, looked at both the potencies and legacies of this mythologized time in American cultural and political history, as well as the gendered, racialized, and class-based limitations of this utopian collective experiment in filmmaking and collective living. This oral history project became Gabrielli and Peterson's way to reflect on what was and became of the New Left, beyond its heroes and slogans, to study how it is that a movement rises and falls.
Giulia Gabrielli is an artist and researcher, currently completing a PhD in Philosophy at the Fine Art Academy in Vienna, where she is writing about the relationship between women, labor, and film production. Since 2014, she has worked as a teaching assistant at IUAV University in Venice, and for the last decade she has been a practitioner of collective research and communal art practice.
Matt Peterson is an organizer at Woodbine, an experimental space in New York City. He directed the documentary features Scenes from a Revolt Sustained (2015) and Spaces of Exception (2019), and co-edited the books In the Name of the People (2018), The Mohawk Warrior Society (2022), and The Reservoir (2022). Since 2014, he has collaborated with Malek Rasamny on “The Native and the Refugee,” a multi-media documentary project on American Indian reservations and Palestinian refugee camps.
