1. From a series of interviews with Newsreel members in Film Quarterly 20, No. 2 (Winter 1968-69), 47-48. [BACK]

2. Author's interview with Larry Daressa, 22 December 1983. [BACK]

3. See Bill Nichols, Newsreel: Film and Revolution , unpublished master's thesis, UCLA, 1972. Nichols has, to date, produced the most valuable and extensive scholarship on Newsreel. In addition to the fine master's thesis cited here, see his Newsreel: Documentary Filmmaking on the American Left (New York: Arno Press, 1980). [BACK]

4. Newsreel was but one of many Movement manifestations of the "Great Refusal." Identifying with the dispossessed, the relatively affluent first-generation Newsreelers cast their lot with those systematically excluded from privilege. By the end of the decade, the lumpen ranks were swelled by middle-class youth who rejected their birthright in order to effect meaningful social change. [BACK]

5. Interview with Norm Fruchter in Film Quarterly , 44. [BACK]

6. Author's interview with Deborah Shaffer, 19 August 1986. [BACK]

7. A particularly striking index of the shift of organizing focus and radical sensibility from 1965 to 1969 is provided by contrasting two films by Norman Fruchter, one of the central figures of Newsreel's "first generation." Troublemakers (Fruchter and Robert Machover, 1966) chronicles an SDS organizing effort (the Newark Community Union Project led by Tom Hayden) that brought the skills and energy of middle-class college students to a black ghetto of the urban north. The film's brilliance lies in its willingness to consider the Movement's shortcomings and limitations in the period preceding the outbreaks of violence and confrontation. For further discussion of this phase of New Left realpolitik, see Wini Breines, The Great Refusal: Community and Organization in the New Left: 1962-69 (New York: Praeger, 1982). The second film, Summer '68 (Fruchter and John Douglas, 1969), focuses on the several facets of cultural and political struggle within the ranks of a foundering New Left coalition (the G.I. coffee-house movement, the underground press, draft resistance organizing) which culminated in the August 1968 confrontation on the streets of Chicago at the Democratic National Convention. The shift is from community organizing to mass agitation, from fighting small battles using non-violent tactics to waging mass-mediated war with Daley's shock troops. [BACK]

8. Interviews with two founding New York Newsreel members, Allan Siegel and Norm Fruchter. [BACK]

9. This political/aesthetic bifurcation, though significant, obscures the relative homogeneity of the class, race, and gender composition of both factions. Neither women nor people of color tended to occupy positions of leadership in the organization prior to 1971. [BACK]

10. Nichols, Newsreel: Film and Revolution , 73. [BACK]

11. Interview with Marilyn Buck and Karen Ross in Film Quarterly , 44. [BACK]

13. Interview with Robert Kramer in Film Quarterly , 46. [BACK]

14. Interview with Marilyn Buck and Karen Ross in Film Quarterly , 44. [BACK]

15. Author's interview with Norm Fruchter, 18 June 1985. [BACK]

16. Author's interview with Allan Siegel, 18 June 1985. [BACK]

17. Author's interview with Fruchter. In addition to the ideologues and the underground film-makers, another smaller faction of Newsreel producers existed—still primarily male—composed of those who raised funds necessary for production through illicit activities, principally drug-dealing. Pot was the ritual cornerstone of the counterculture; funds generated by its sale, when turned to the public good, were viewed as a fully legitimate source of income. The fallout from that method of fund-raising was a small but painful rate of attrition as Newsreelers were sent to prison on drug charges. [BACK]

18. Author's interview with Christine Choy, 20 August 1986. Choy noted that her first Newsreel paycheck was not drawn until 1981, a full ten years after her arrival. A two-year CETA grant, welfare, and unemployment compensation furnished her means of survival for a decade. [BACK]

19. See my "The Imaging of Analysis: Newsreel's Re-Search for a Radical Film Practice," Wide Angle 6, No. 3 (1984), 76-84. [BACK]

20. Author's interview with Siegel. [BACK]

21. Author's interview with Ada Gay Griffin, 8 August 1986. [BACK]

22. See in particular Herbert Marcuse's An Essay on Liberation (1969), which contains the following succinct formulation of the "aesthetic ethos" of the sixties, a theoretical position that validated the realm of the creative imagination independent of quotidian (and frequently neglected) efforts toward mass base-building: ". . . the development of the productive forces beyond their capitalist organization suggests the possibility of freedom within the realm of necessity. The quantitative reduction of necessary labor could turn into quality (freedom) . . . But the construction of such a society presupposes a type of man with a different sensitivity as well as consciousness: men who would speak a different language, have different gestures, follow different impulses . . . The imagination of such men and women would fashion their reason and tend to make the process of production a process of creation." Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), 21. [BACK]

23. Fredric Jameson, "Periodizing the 60's," in The 60's Without Apology , 208-209. [BACK]