News of the World "A"
1953 · 8m · Canada
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative
A world newsreel moves from Spanish marshland reclaimed for rice and Indian efforts to destroy locust swarms to salt harvesting in Italy, a Venetian gondola regatta, and royal children watching the Changing of the Guard.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A newsreel from 1953 sounds like the opposite of subversive until you realize it's a time capsule of the world actively reshaping itself—locust swarms, reclaimed marshes, salt beds—and nobody's narrating it like a conquest story; it just *is*, which somehow makes it weirder than any experimental film trying too hard.
This is the newsreel form at its most formally assured: a curator's eye moving across global labor and spectacle with the same measured attention, collapsing the hierarchy between productivity and pageantry through pure juxtaposition—the kind of structural restraint that's become invisible precisely because it works so completely.
The decision to hold each tableau—marshes flooding, swarms darkening the sky, salt pyramids—without editorializing or cutting away lets the image's own texture do the argument; it's a formal choice that transforms what could be propagandistic promotional footage into something genuinely observational.