‘Films that explode like grenades’: Newsreel, Third World Newsreel, and California Newsreel

In late 1967, the Newsreel collective was created in New York City as an underground media group producing counter-information films in support of the antiwar movement. As the movement grew, Newsreel chapters were established in major cities across the United States. Within four years, Newsreel produced more than eighty films addressed at the antiwar protest, the Black Panthers, the feminist movement and other anti-racist and anti-imperialist struggles. In 1971, a split occurred in New York Newsreel, leading to the creation of Third World Newsreel. Later, in 1975, San Francisco Newsreel became California Newsreel. Both cooperatives focused on distributing Third World cinema and films made by women. Concluding with the first Newsreel retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1978, this study aims to explore how Newsreel and its successors engaged with the political context of their time and how the collective pioneered a new form of documentary filmmaking. Based on previously unstudied records and interviews, this dissertation lies at the intersection of film studies and political history.