I think that a few of the questions that were being posed at the very end of class – about the pragmatics of Workers Film and Photo League newsreel production, circulation, and screening – might be answered by Russell Campbell's 1977 essay for the leftish film history/theory journal Jump Cut, which has put much of its back catalogue online. Campbell is the author of the best study of the WFPL; this article is a very abbreviated version of a longer study, which is required reading for anyone who wants to know more about the WFPL. (I think it's better than William Alexander's more-frequently-used FILM ON THE LEFT, which is an oral history of left documentary in the U.S. during the 1930s.)
If you blink, you'll miss an important point that Campbell makes: some of the WFPLers worked in the commercial newsreel industry. This pragmatic detail underscores something we noted frequently today: that the sharp opposition historians might like to draw between "mainstream" and "alternative" nonfiction traditions and practices, whether you measure those differences formally, politically, or otherwise, breaks down somewhat when one starts examining the "opposing" sides more closely. The point here might be less that there's no difference between a Movietone newsreel promoting the latest entertainment product from Hollywood and a WFPL newsreel promoting proletarian revolution – and of course there is a big difference at the level of "content"– and more that it's harder than one might think to generalize about those differences, and to make those generalizations stick to any aspect of the material the film historian looks at: the style of the camerawork; the lists of personnel; the audiences who went to one newsreel or another… (A case in point: the endless, excruciating debates in the Soviet Union about whether Vertov's experimental technique is in line with Marxist-Leninist theory or not; although he looks to us today like the very model of the political/artistic avant-gardist, many of his fellow revolutionary artists had no trouble calling him a "formalist," by which they meant a political reactionary.)
Another point to make here – a kind of historiographic, or meta-historiographic one – is whether a tradition or a form can contain its opposite and still be that thing. The Burkhardt film we saw at the beginning of class, for instance, which turns Manhattan into a "strange" place: is that a travelogue, or a parody of a travelogue; and what would be the difference? Is a newsreel that shows what the commercial newsreels won't show still a newsreel? (Pundits are fond of asking this question about The Daily Show.)
One could also ask it of the present-day organization Labor Beat, which one might see as following in the footsteps of the WFPL. Based in Chicago (like many important developments in American liberal and left documentary), Labor Beat disseminates information about workers' and others' efforts for social justice; the short video programs they produce have the size and shape of a newsreel. But are they newsreels? Or short documentary films? (If you look at the site, you can see that Labor Beat is aware of this historical resonance…) It might seem like a trivial distinction. But imagine that you are Raymond Fielding, updating your book for the third time. Do you count this kind of work in or out of the tradition?
jk