Depending on the year it was produced and the events of the week in question, a newsreel could cover one or multiple topics (and sub-topics), each between app. one and four minutes long. Occasionally, a major national-political event would result in the production of a longer newsreel (app. 20’-25’) covering a single topic, or in the addition, at the last minute, of a ‘breaking news’ story.
The content of the newsreel saw constant changes for reasons such as the professionalisation of the production team, ideological pressures that came and went, and competition with the emerging TV factual. We can notice slight shifts in the tone and style of the newsreel from one decade to another: from the stiff political rhetoric of the 1950s to the more candid footage and laid-back commentary of the 1960s, and back again to ideological rigidity in 1970.
The structure of the newsreel is also in constant flux: the titles of the sections are often changed, sometimes with multiple versions of a title used concurrently within a period of time. Nevertheless, aside from the different topics and events covered each week and the aforementioned variation in the titles used for various sections, the stories included in a newsreel are usually arranged in the following order: political news, social and cultural reportage, and a final section of soft news.
Between 1950 and 1974, the Sahia studio produced over 1000 newsreels, each covering an average of 5 subjects: that’s about 5000 subjects during its lifetime. Faced with this material, when putting together the selection of newsreel topics included on this platform has been, we aimed to provide a model of the newsreel throughout its 24 years of production. We have organised the stories included here into the following eight categories: IN THE NEWS; WEEKLY DIGEST; CULTURE REVIEW; REPORTAGE; FROM THE ARCHIVE; THE COUNTRY IN COMPETITION; WORLD NEWS; MISH MASH. You can explore the categories by clicking on the expanding coloured boxes at the bottom left of the screen.
Similarly to the section focused on the documentaries produced by the Sahia studio, our goal for this section of our online platform is to shed light on the newsreel as a source of historical knowledge which may help the general public better understand the communist era, as well as inspire researchers from various fields to turn their attention to this body of material from the studio’s output.
Many of the important names on the Romanian documentary scene cut their teeth working at the newsreel in the early days of their careers: ex. the film-makers Alexandru Boiangiu, Iancu Moscu, Paula Segall, Ion Visu, and Mirel Ilieșu, and the cameramen Willy Goldgraber, Doru Segall, Francisc Patakfalvi, Jean Michel, Nicolae Marinescu, and Kiamil M. Kiamil.
Unlike the section of the platform dedicated to the documentary films produced by the studio, this section does not include details about the teams that produced each newsreel story – the reason being that newsreel credits do not specify which teams worked on what section, but rather includ everyone who worked on the newsreel in one long list (we have included this long list at the beginning of each story). As such, without production records, it is difficult to determine who produced what, with the exception of the years where the cameraman’s name was listed at the beginning of each story.
