Page 33 - CinemaRecord #84

CATHS

By Ross King

t is just over 118 years since the first
IAustralian subject was cinematographed,
this being the 1896 Melbourne Cup. Shot at
Flemington Racecourse, it would be fair to say
this was Australia's first newsreel.
During the formative years of the moving
picture, most of the film was what would later
be classified as “documentary”. Usually a
number of short segments, each of around 100 The Paparazzi of the day
ft in length, were eventually edited together to
make up a reel of about 600 ft, resulting in an ‘topical’, a Pictorial’, a ‘cinemagazine’ or 1920s, the Australian Talkies Newsreel
on-screen time of six to seven minutes. And ‘gazette’. appeared with the sound recorded on disc.
so began the ‘newsreel’, often called a In the early days, the most notable of these
newsreels were made by the French companies
of Pathé Fréres or Charles Gaumont, and no
visit to the cinema was complete unless one or
two newsreels featured in the program.
It wasn't long before Pathé and Gaumont
established offices in England and in other
parts of the British Empire, includng Australia.
The Australian Gazette was produced locally
and, with the advent of the talkies in the late

Probably the biggest leap forward took place
in the mid 1920s when the American, William
Fox, head of Fox Films in the USA using the
newly patented Movietone sound system,
produced the Fox News. In 1929, Movietone
News appeared, with its laughing kookaburras
on the opening title. By 1931, Ken G. Hall was
engaged by Stuart F. Doyle of Union Theatres
to establish Cinesound Productions as the film
production arm of Union Theatres. Although
feature films were produced, the mainstay of
the company were short subjects and a weekly
newsreel, the Cinesound Review, the opening
title featuring a kangaroo jumping out of the
title. As an aside, Frank Thring's Melbourne
based Efftee Films featured a koala in the
opening logo - all representative of Australian
nationalism.

By this time, all of the major American film
studios were producing a weekly newsreel.
The Fox Movietone International and
Albany Newsreel Theatre, Collins Street, Melbourne

CINEMARECORD # 84 33