Cecil B. DeMille and the Art ofApplied Suggestibility

Abstract

CECIL B. DE MILLE AND THE ART OF APPLIED SUGGESTIBILITY: VIOLENCE, SEX AND FALSE MEMORIES WITHIN HIS BIBLICAL (AND OTHER) CINEMA AbstractLegendary producer-director Cecil B. DeMille is an unsung auteur who helped co-found both Hollywood and Paramount studios and became America's pre-eminent biblical filmmaker. He employed many artistic strategies, but none as politically astute as the deliberate engineering of false memories in a deliberate act of applied suggestibility. This trademark effort allowed DeMille to achieve desired audience reactions whilst simultaneously avoiding censorship problems and moral vigilantes who thought they saw objectionable things in his movies but which were not actually there. Consequently, selected DeMille films and the associated critical literature were inspected, reviewed and integrated into the text to enhance narrative coherence utilizing humanist film criticism as the guiding analytical lens. It was concluded that DeMille was a master filmmaker and that his cinematic oeuvre warrants a more...