A new digital resource from BUFVC examines the entire output of the global television news agency UPITN for one month. Linda Kaye, BUFVC Research Executive, explores the significance of the agency in our understanding of television news and the value of its content.
About the Author: Linda Kaye is the BUFVC's Research Executive and is resposnsible for the News On Screen web resource and is part of the team behind the Channel 4 and British Film Culture project (www.c4film.co.uk/). Her publications include Projecting Britain: The Guide to British Cinemagazines (2008), co-edited with Emily Crosby.
On 11 September 1973 the democratically elected government of Chile, and its Marxist President Salvador Allende, was brutally overthrown in a military coup led by the commander-in-chief of the army, Augusto Pinochet. It cost Allende his life and replaced his government with a military junta that remained in power until 1990. It was a seminal event in the history of Chile and the Cold War that was reported on television screens across the globe. Some of those images are now part of our collective memory of the event but the process that delivered them to our television screens is still a largely hidden one. Who filmed this event? How was the film transported out the country? When did it reach Britain? How much of the original footage did people end up viewing?
It is a well-known axiom that you can only truly understand a film if you have a working knowledge of the production process that gave rise to it. The same surely applies to television news raising questions about the production and supply of content on a global scale. The new BUFVC resource UPITN – September 1973 tries to answer some of these questions by looking at the entire output of the global television news agency UPITN for one month. It focuses our attention on the beginning of the news supply chain in order to inform our understanding of the final output as broadcast news.
UPITN and its Role in the News Supply Chain The roots of UPITN go back to 1948 when the news wire agency United Press joined up with the newsreel company Fox-Movietone to form United Press Movietone (UPMT). They anticipated a step change in demand for news and pioneered a transformation its provision. They were aware that the arrangements that resulted in newsreels viewed twice a week on cinema screens would be inadequate for the more voracious demands of this new industry, television. With television stations springing up across the United States UPMT established a newsgathering service dedicated to providing them with newsfilm. In doing so the shifted the supply from one predicated on production and exchange between companies to a centralized source of content provided by an agency. This happened gradually but within a few years the company became the first television news agency to operate on an international basis when the BBC became their first European client.
As the market boomed in the 1950s and 1960s the company underwent a fundamental change with United Press International switching partners, losing Movietone in 1963 and gaining ITN in 1967 to form UPITN. In the 1970s UPITN, along with Visnews, dominated the television news agency landscape with extensive networks of foreign bureaux stretching across the globe. Stationed here were cameramen, primarily freelance, using light, compact 16mm cameras to film events. The filmed stories were then transported by whatever means available for processing at UPITN HQ either in London (Europe, Asia, Africa content) or New York (North, Central and South America, Asia content). The editors that day would then decide which stories were syndicated with London and New York exchanging material appropriate to their own clients. These were roughly edited down to a couple of minutes or less, duplicated and sent to clients. Some stories were syndicated immediately, others might wait a day whilst others were never syndicated and sent straight to the library. A subscribing station received a daily selection of ten to twelve stories with shotlists, these contained contextual and technical information as well as a shot by shot description.
... in the 1970s UPITN, along with Visnews, dominated the television news agency landscape
The important point here is that a significant amount of selection has already taken place before broadcast news companies received the footage. Stories were chosen for syndication and those distributed had already been edited, with shots chosen and assembled. So if we want to understand what made the news agenda and why, then an awareness of this pre-selection element is necessary and a working knowledge of the role of television agencies in the news supply chain vital.
An Initial Rough Cut of the World’s News The 362 stories in UPITN – September 1973 represent the entire agency output for the month. This snapshot encompasses the full spectrum of content with international diplomacy, conflict and its resolution occupying the same space as sport, technology and fashion. The form that they come in, however, is far from the polished stories that audiences would have viewed as part of News at Ten on ITV.
The material, drawn from multiple sources, is fragmentary by nature mainly consisting of raw colour footage, either mute or with ambient sound. Mixed in with this are odd black and white items, some items with commentary and the occasional edited background item. Most of these stories do spill out of the camera and can be more powerful for it as we see an event through the cameraman’s eyes. Mute footage of armed children ready to fight in Cambodia and the removal of bodies in the aftermath of the coup in Chile are more affecting to view. Stripped of the drama that editing and commentary lend a news story these images are all the more striking because they seem normal and everyday. The mobility of the camera and ambient sound that accompanies demonstrations and marches gives a sense of both the euphoria and the more mundane elements involved in this form of protest. So although these items are not the finished broadcast product they do possess qualities that lend a different perspective to historical events.
Chile Coup Case Study One of the most challenging aspects about using this collection is to how to approach such a diverse and fragmentary collection of content. The Chile Coup provides a clear example of a major international news story breaking and developing over three weeks and as such is a perfect case study for exploring ways into the material. In this developing section of the resource we have created an interactive timeline with tips on how to trace this footage to its broadcast output and a visualization of the global impact the Chile Coup had. A resources section details online archives with additional material to extend your research on Chile.
How to Find the Footage is an interactive timeline that takes you through some basic steps on your research journey including where to look and how to understand your results from BBC and ITN online archives. Visualising Global Impact is an interactive data visualization of all the stories related to Chile. Data visualisation can stimulate us to ask different questions of the material and explore new avenues of enquiry. This visualisation plots stories related to Chile against location (dateline field) and time (date field), charting the global impact of the coup. By designating these stories as either neutral (event), official response (at government level or higher) or unofficial response (broadly popular) we gain a sense of how the world responded both to initial events in Chile and more specifically to coverage of them. For example, two (unofficial) stories on prisoners held in the football stadium (23 September) contributed to an official response allowing press into the stadium (25 September).
A Necessary Corrective to Collective Nostalgia? When I was studying history in the 1980s there was a maxim that the subject only started forty years from the present day, anything more recent was politics. Historians only studied what they had no lived experience of, bridging that distance primarily through textual sources. Indeed, one of the challenges of the discipline is continually learning how to traverse that distance. The events of September 1973 are now history but for anyone interested in it that distance is now perhaps more difficult to negotiate. Although there are far more resources to draw upon, in terms of moving image and sound, there is also a potent nostalgia to contend with.
Skip through the television schedules and you could be forgiven for thinking that any archive footage of 1973 comes hardwired to its own contemporary soundtrack of David Bowie, Elton John and Pink Floyd. It is a very effective gateway into the content because it forges an emotional connection but by the same token it can imbue it with a sense of nostalgia and diminish the role of the content to illustration. Couple this with repeated stock footage use and we have a received visual digest that all too often is swallowed whole.
UPITN – September 1973 can act as important corrective to a collective recollection fuelled in this way by providing a contemporary assessment of what was newsworthy. Viewed as a whole, the collection clearly reflects the diplomatic axes on which the world turned as the Cold War played out across the globe. Every day brings high-level meetings indicating shifting positions in this complex series of international relationships: France and China; Cuba and India; Romania and Peru; Egypt and South Vietnam and crucially the USSR and USA. This key meeting took place at the United Nations (UN), highlighting the core role it occupied during this period. Its leader, Kurt Waldheim is also shown meeting various parties in relation to the Middle East crisis reflecting its position as broker. At its headquarters in New York, the UN acts as a forum for international opinion, the ongoing debate in relation to the Chile coup is a case in point.
The substantial coverage of the Conference for Non-Aligned Countries in Algiers reminds us of an important movement established in reaction to the Cold War. It consisted of states not formally aligned with or against any major power bloc and although it struggled with internal contradictions it fills a significant position within international relations at this time. The arrival and press conferences of participants highlights the key players including Fidel Castro (Cuba), Muammar Gaddafi (Libya) and Yasser Arafat (Palestine Liberation Organisation). This diplomatic activity took place against a backdrop of conflict as the war in Vietnam continued to de-stabilise the region with both Cambodia and Laos increasingly drawn in and violence, as the hostage siege at the Arabian Embassy in Paris demonstrates.
Closer to home the collection highlights a curious blank in our own collective memory of Britain at that time. This is the extent of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) mainland campaign and the impact it had on the day-to-day lives of those living in major cities and beyond. A basic chronology of related stories highlights the frequency of bomb blasts:
8 Sept – Victoria station, London
9 Sept – Shops, Manchester
10Sept – Kings Cross station, London (also one at Euston station)
12 Sept – Prudential offices, Oxford Street, London
13 Sept – Servicemen’s HQ, London
17 Sept – Army tents and office, Surrey and Birmingham
These are bookended by the Prime Minister Edward Heath’s speech on the IRA on 4 September and his interview on 18 September after visits to Belfast and Dublin, providing the context for the concerted nature of the campaign in September. It is worth emphasizing that UPITN were an international agency so these stories are by no means definitive and do not include the firebombs discovered at Liberty’s in London and Sutton Coldfield, Birmingham on 10 September or the Bank of England and Oxford Street blasts on 15 September, for example. They do, however, indicate the significance of these domestic stories within an international news market.
... UPITN – September 1973 gives us a thirty-day snapshot of the world and its concerns
Whilst the depth of the collection can reveal the day-to-day development of a news story, it can also lay bare the ‘wallpaper’ of the time. These are the elements that require no explanation because they are intrinsic to the day-to-day experience of the time. They could be acronyms such as OPEC, GATT and NATO or part of long-running stories, such as the items on Iceland that relate to the fishing dispute, or Cod War, with Britain. The prevalence of seemingly mundane items, such as the reopening of the Moscow Technical Institute, are stories because they give viewers a brief glimpse behind the Iron Curtain, revealing how little was known about life in the Eastern Bloc. There are also stories that gain significance with time because the future depicted then is now part of our present. Models of the Channel Tunnel and the innovative use of television surveillance to aid the fight against crime are good examples of this.
Ultimately UPITN – September 1973 gives us a thirty-day snapshot of the world and its concerns. For a small island used to viewing the world in relation to itself, this international dimension might provide the greatest corrective of all.
Linda Kaye