Continuity and Change in the Belfast Press, 1900–1994

This chapter examines the political and textual transformations of the Belfast Telegraph, the Irish News, and the Belfast News Letter in the twentieth century. It discusses the creation and expression of separate forms of national and editorial identities in regard to the northern Unionist-leaning Telegraph and News Letter, and the nationalist Irish News. All three would eventually be transformed by their reportage of the World War, and the later Troubles. Describing the enduring popularity of all three papers as platforms for political expressions across the spectrum of twentieth century Irish history and politics, it argues that their longevity speaks to the success of their readjustments during these tumultuous years. Drawing on archives in the National Library of Ireland and the Belfast Central Library, the chapter includes case studies focusing on how each paper reported the failure of the Boundary Commission in 1925, the Belfast Blitz in 1941, and the IRA Ceasefire in 1994.

Letters

Renaissance humanists classicized their letters so as to approximate the familiar style of sermo—but they also inherited the medieval tradition of ars dictaminis, which had shifted letters toward the public realm. Humanist letters therefore continued to depart from familiar style in practice—and in Erasmus’ theory, he explicitly acknowledged that letter-writing was no longer entirely a genre of familiar communication. The Renaissance humanist letter became a mode of communication mediating between conversation and oratory, and firmly oriented toward the public world. One descendant of the humanist letter would be the newspaper—that genre that Habermas took to constitute the public sphere. The newspaper, by way of the news letter, preserved aspects of the style of familiar communication, but, as it shifted in medium toward print, transformed into a distinctly persuasive communication between anonymous correspondents and anonymous recipients. Conversation had shifted in theory to be able to address the public world; the newspaper would be the genre that embodied a familiar conversation, universal and anonymous, that discussed all the subjects of the world.

The British Documentary Film Movement (1926–1946)

The British Documentary Film Movement refers to the film units pioneered by John Grierson. With the benefit of state sponsorship, Grierson and the filmmakers that gathered around him experimented with avant-garde film techniques to develop a socially conscious cinema. Grierson’s film units and the documentary culture they created were also an important part of the debates around aesthetic innovation and political commitment that circulated throughout Britain in the 1930s and 1940s. Grierson’s group disseminated their ideas and theories in publications such as Sight and Sound, Cinema Quarterly, World Film News, and Documentary News Letter. Grierson coined the term "documentary" in a review of Robert Flaherty’s film Moana in The New York Sun in 1926. In this first use, documentary was nearly synonymous with the French documentaire, which typically refers to expedition films. In the coming years, Grierson would theorize documentary in more specific terms. His most famous and most lasting definition comes from an essay in a 1933 edition of Cinema Quarterly. Documentary, he claimed, was "the creative treatment of actuality." Grierson believed documentary could borrow formal techniques from the great Russian filmmakers (Eisenstein, Vertov, and Pudovkin) to dramatize scenes and practices from everyday life.