What is Cinema Journalism and Why it Matters Most for New Generations
“The stories have really brought worldly conflicts to the table and have shown the disparities of diverse human views”, 22-year old Steffi from the Phillipines told the Guardian newspaper.
[This article falls of the back of my PhD investigating a form of news storytelling that is as old as cinema, which is being revived]
You’d be forgiven for thinking Steffi, like other interviewees, are debating Victor Orbán’s endgame with the EU or the global pandemic but, no. She’s referring to the world’s most profitable movie Marvel’s Avengers Endgame.
“Why is it young people will watch fictional cinema of an event but they won’t bother with the same one in news?”, asks 25-year-old Wenwen from China. Why is it that cinema or gaming and its schema is rarely used as a narrative for news?
And if your starting point is to ridicule the last para, then you’ve forgotten news making is itself a conscious patterned construct derived from cinema. The news pioneers were cognisant of this, but there’s was a new medium competing for attention against a behemoth fictional cinema and this burgeoning industry neither had the capital, cashflow and cinema personnel to push their form.
For instance if you think the idea of having one cameraperson assigned to a subject/journalist’s story is an editorial decision, then you’ve been hoodwinked. TV News outfits largely emerged from radio stations who could ill afford the ‘extravagance’ of purchasing TV equipment. There are other reasons for TV News’ direction that may surprise you. I spent more than two decades working in the industry, becoming one of the UK’s first official videojournalists.
In 2005, I led a team of international journalists through Nato’s simulated war games program. It was a high profile project in which we travelled from Northolt’s military base to Sweden on her Majesty’s Royal jet. You can see the insignia above the headrest on my seat. Outside the plane a fighter jet accompanied us in British airspace.
The military wanted to know more about how the media might cover asymmetric wars.
We’re in a ditch trying to report on a car full of injured people. But surrounding us are snipers who’ve trained their laser scope on us. What do we do? This is gaming at the level of realism, and for me it‘s not the first time. I told brass about an emerging phenomenon in journalism and how a generation related to news through a cinema experience.
“It’s not entirely new” I said, “you could go back to Star Wars which represented the conflict between super powers in fictional metaphor”. But something else was happening amongst the socially media literate. This dates back to the 1920s, before, in the 1960s, Robert Drew called it Direct Cinema. So you see it was always there. It’s just news pioneers chose to ignore it.
They couldn’t see past cinema not being entirely fictional. Furthermore it was too visually complicated, too expensive to produce and the news pioneers needed a new format to take on fictional cinema shown in halls. That’s how capitalism works. Tech creates a new platform and early entrepreneurs and adopters reshape how content works. You’ve seen it in TikTok, Instagram, Mobiles etc.
TV did steal cinemas language, they just parred it down. A decade later the father of Direct Cinema Robert Drew would accuse the industry of taking his equipment but abandoning his style and technique ( see video below).
But before you dig your heels into any notion that cinema means sensationalising events, I’d advise reading cinema journalism from Russia, Cinema (journalism) verite from Robert Drew, and books on Personal Cinema. The Cinema you know from Hollywood’s model IS not the starting block. In this model cinema is a perception of the film’s surface framed by what the journalist/ author’s intentions of producing the film. And No! It doesn’t need dramatic music. Read on.
When Cinema met Journalism
At the World Editors Forum in Sweden to a gathering of hundreds of people I said the innovative one man/ woman crew as video journalists were driving this new style. It wasn’t focused on equipment per se. Video, Mobile, Drone, have all acquired styles of journalism in themselves but attached to modes of equipment. Video that could become cinema journalism was more meta.
A cinema journalist approaches a story like a director on a movie set. What can I use to best tell this story, to let the audience into the story? It’s a mindset. This was made in 2005 way before TikTok. Cinema journalists collapse multiple disciplines around their endeavour and the means to and end is a creative, purposeful, emotive and factual. It’s everything from langue, mise-en-scène, location, sound, voice and style.
In the UK working with the Press Association over five years I’d transformed Britain’s regional journalist from writers to video journalists. It was a success in conversion, but new practitioners easily defaulted to styles they lifted from traditional journalism seen on television, particularly the BBC. One attendant wrote:
At a summit at CUNY in New York of I joined twenty of the world’s leading media. Vice.com had caught the media by storm and was about to go on Television. I wrote How Vice had become the Voice of a Generation which aligned with this new universe of styles in cinema and something I called the Outernet.
I knew Cinema Journalism worked. One of the US’ most sought after awards and its judges said so as I stood at the lectern at one of their august institutions. I was talking at the National Press Club in DC as the Knight Batten Awards gave me first place for innovation, beating Newsweek, CNN et al. They said it ( cinema journalism ) and the platform heralded the future.
A year later, International judges in Berlin thought the same way too, for a feature I made on the UK’s first regional newspapers turned videojournalists after 8 days of training them.
Apple would give me engage me three separate times at their flagship store in London, with an accompanying profile.
In 2016 as a judge for the Royal Television Society Awards we all watched in awe a documentary which was cinema-documentary par excellence, For Sama, but prior to that its maker Waheed had filed piece after piece of journalism for Channel 4 News aping cinema’s language in shot continuity. Four years earlier on the Syrian border I was working with young Syrian videojournalists who were also adopting cinema tropes. Waheed, I discovered when I met her knew key members of the group.
Trust in news over the years has hit low points. It is compounded by news execs telling the same old stories in the same styles as competing media such as Netflix, TikTok, YouTube and Snapchat aggressively compete for attention. Illiberalism has also thrown a spanner into the works.
The issue for a TiKTok is a generation acknowledging the powerful reception of cinema and styles and at the same time abrogating any journalistic values.
Fictional cinema continues to borrow from an array of medium including news to forge its narratives whilst experimenting with different ways to tell a story. Meanwhile, newsmakers steadfastly refused to see what cinema ( factual) and cognitivism could offer.
It sounds confusing, even alarming that any mention of journalism or factual storytelling should include cinema, or gaming in the same breath. People immediately think of its fictionalisation. But cinema in factual storytelling is as old as the hills. Remember it was cinema’s superficial rendering of events on in the 1920s/30s that led to the establishment of documentary.
Some of the world’s leading figures don’t see confusion. Documentary maker Michael Moore says stop trying to make a documentary and make a movie. Martin Scorsese sees the fusion in this short clip. It’s a question of self control. Cinema by way of framing is how best to use an array of creative and congnitive tools to tell a story.
Sixty years ago the pioneer of the mobile news camera Robert Drew posed the question in the overlap of forms. In an interview with him in 2010 he would repeat that whilst TV News people took his equipment they largely ignored his techniques. Reporters, for instance, talk over strong pictures but a generation will uncover future forms that build on his work, he told me (below). Robert Drew was called the father of Cinema Verite or Direct Cinema. He was an out and out newsman.
Movements have a life of their own. In 1994 the birth of videojournalism in the UK really took off when five years later the BBC provided it with critical mass. There have been many breakthroughs in documenting this new form of journalism, fit for our times. Last week was a significant significant breakthrough in the relationship between journalism and cinema when one of the UK’s most respected journalists and his camera man won Television Journalism’s highest awards from The Royal Television Society (RTS).
The BBC’s Clive Myrie with his camera operator David McIlveen were independently awarded in their respected categories Best Television Journalist of the year and Best Camera Operator of the Year. Clive also won Best News Presenter of the Year.
Working on stories as diverse as COVID-19 and Trump’s America during the election, they produced television that was compelling viewing. It fired up twitter with resounding praise and left some journalists wondering how the team had done it.
I saw the news films when they were broadcast last year. They looked nothing like you’d usually see on television news.
I carried out an experiment with my Masters students. I showed them two films of similar length and theme around Covid-19. Both made by senior BBC Reporters, one of whom was Clive Myrie. I asked the students a series of questions. Here’s a snapshot. The evidence they overwhelmingly were drawn to report 2 by Clive Myrie
On Twitter, here’s a snapshot of what viewers were saying:
Then I interviewed Clive whom I’d met at previous events. We’d been exchanging emails. Asking open questions, Clive provided answers that referenced cinema. That research remains to be produced at large but listen here to what he says as part of three-part question.
So 76 young people I’d met for the first time studying to become journalists, validated the connections. From open questions almost all agreed it was cinema or nearer to cinema.
For me as a journalists of thirty years standing, who’s won a couple of awards, the revelation is broadly the way news is produced at large doesn’t work with audiences. There’s a fresh way of producing which lands, but the news industry is so wedded to its conventions, it neither sees this or understands it. A piece of cinema/ drama about an event will imvariably impact audiences more than its news equivalent, unless you have talent like Clive.
I’ve only scratched the surface in this article. I’ve spent more than five years for my PhD researching this. By the way for this piece I can’t get into the weeds of cinema, but there is no essence of the form. There are trends throughout history of emerging forms and practitioners and perhaps it’s time I wrote a book. It would include talent like Clive, Raul Gallego Abellan and many others.
I t’s not a matter of if, but when, and I wager that Clive’s work, coupled with others I’ve researched will give further impetus to this form. It needs to be recognised for its nuanced approach and how it’s accepted by young and mature generations.
We’ve found that by using a langue of cinema journalists cut through misinformation in the lens. Why doughnut a gathering which gives the illusion the conference is full when a wide shot of a lone figure tells a more accurate story.
It also opens up a new expansive world of reportage, because it starts with this premise as the camera gate opens, what’s the problem I’m trying to solve? How effective can I be across a spectrum of styles ? And what can I use to bring deeper meaning to the audience? Let the training continue…
Over the last two decades I’ve trained scores of people and outfits, such as the Financial Times in cinema journalism. As attention become an increasingly contested commodity, only those individuals who understand the dynamics of word-image association will win over audiences, and that’s cinema.
Let’s connect! Gyimahd@Cardiff.ac.uk
