Realism and the Politics of Frequency in Filmmaking

In December 1967, a collective of American photographers and filmmakers formed a radical news service called Newsreel with the goal of creating an alternative to the politically biased coverage presented by network television news. One of Newsreel’s earliest films, I.S. 201 and Report from Newark (1968), documents the contentious events around a Malcolm X memorial parade in East Harlem and provides an update on living conditions in Newark, New Jersey, eight months after an uprising there led to violent clashes with police. Shortly after the completion of I.S. 201 and Report from Newark, several Newsreel members traveled to Cuba, where they saw Santiago Alvarez’s film NOW! (1965). Set to Lena Horne’s song “Now” (1963) about the failures of the United States to combat inequality, Alvarez’s film collages together found imagery from American newspapers and other sources to create a powerful statement about racism, police violence, and American hypocrisy. This essay brings Newsreel’s I.S. 201 into conversation with Alvarez’s NOW! to show how the visual and acoustic fields of both move and adjust with their audience, creating a sonic and visual pulse—a vibrational force—that challenges traditional notions of realism and evidence as somehow static or self-evident.