Contrasts

After August 1944, the newsreel became a central tool for promoting the new regime and its principles to the population. Authorities quickly embraced the newsreel format as a powerful means of educating and mobilizing the masses in support of the official narrative and the modernization efforts made by the state.

This newsreel segment contrasts two sets of images: one filmed in the suburbs of Paris and the other in a newly developed neighborhood in the town Pașcani. It is a good example of the polarized presentation of material received from exchanges with socialist and capitalist countries, a common practice at Sahia. In a 2004 interview, filmmaker Paula Segall—who worked for the newsreel after returning from VGIK, the film school in Moscow—described the pressure, particularly in the 1950s, to feature negative stories about capitalist countries and present them alongside positive news from within the socialist bloc. This practice was prevalent throughout the 1950s, occasionally persisting into the following decade. For instance, in issue 7/1957 we see “large transformer commissioned in the GDR”, followed by “American scientist presents model of failed space rocket”, and in issue  2/1966: “new bombings by American aviation in Vietnam” is juxtaposed with “the world’s longest natural gas pipeline installed in the USSR.”

This political bias began to balance out towards the mid-1960s, when foreign news started to be more clearly organised into distinct categories: political news, placed at the beginning of the newsreel, and softer, less politically charged stories at the end. There was less of a focus on the contrast between socialist and capitalist countries that had characterized earlier newsreels. (AB)