Thursday, February 25, 2016

British Pathé News, "Sees All, Knows All"


"The First News Reel - The Real News First"

Before radio, before TV, before cable, before social media, there was the newsreel. This is not a post card, but a card distributed outside the movie theater, I would guess, so that viewers could see the reel from the beginning. This could date from the 1920s. 

It's hard not to be nostalgic for the days when news was not ubiquitous. The upside was not being bombarded with news 24/7. The downside: being in the dark, and not learning about consequential events for days or weeks or months after they occurred. 

British Pathé News was in operation from 1896 to 1976. In 2014, the company uploaded its entire archive -- 85,000 films -- on YouTube. You can browse the archive here.


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