On a late summer afternoon in mid-September 1942, Mrs Josephine MacNab took the subway from her home on Riverside Drive in the Upper West Side to New York's Grand Central Terminal. Walking the remaining few blocks to the Trans-Lux theatre on Lexington and 52nd Street, her thoughts turned to the war in the Pacific. The experiences she conjured were starkly real, familiar to any cinemagoer of the twentieth century: the tense disembarkation from an LCC landing craft, the chilling whine of a Japanese bombing raid, the distant stare of an American Marine gazing out at the expansive Pacific. Although she had never personally experienced any of this, she had a good idea of how it may seem. She had seen many of these images before in the newsreels. These prosthetic memories were not lived experiences, but they were, in a certain sense, no less real in their immediacy. Had she attempted the same feat of psychic empathy only twenty-five years previously, imagining the American trenches in Cambrai or the Somme, the grainy mental-reel before her would have seemed far less real – lacking the visual credibility of the vivid Technicolor images of the British and American landing at Bone, or the Battle of the Coral Sea.

Josephine passed over a quarter to the ticket seller for the showing of newsreels that afternoon. Only newsreels and travelogues were shown at the Trans-Lux theatre, satisfying a growing public demand for documentary features, particularly news of war. At this particular performance, Josephine saw ‘photographs taken of the Commando Raid on the coast of Norway, the terrific punishment taken by the Chinese in a bombing by the Japanese and a showing of a film depicting the intensive training our boys are undergoing’.