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. By 1950, both forms were diminished and disparaged-and one was facing extinction from a newly born rival, television.
Nonfiction Film Before World War II
On the eve of the Second World War, "the creative treatment of actuality" on screen came in four main versions-the newsreel, the screen magazine, the travelogue, and the exploration film.1
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