Censorship and Regulation

Abstract

Research Article| April 01 2018 Censorship and Regulation Ellen Scott Ellen Scott Ellen Scott is an associate professor and head of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research focuses on the cultural meanings and reverberations of film in African American communities. Her book Cinema Civil Rights (Rutgers University Press, 2015) exposes the classical Hollywood–era studio system's careful repression of civil rights issues and Black critics’ revelation of these muted signifiers. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences named her an Academy Film Scholar in 2016 for her project Cinema's Peculiar Institution, a production, censorship, and reception history of images of slavery on-screen from Uncle Tom's Cabin (1903) to the present. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Feminist Media Histories (2018) 4 (2): 44–50. https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2018.4.2.44 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Ellen Scott; Censorship and Regulation. Feminist Media Histories 1 April 2018; 4 (2): 44–50. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2018.4.2.44 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentFeminist Media Histories Search Keywords: African American film, feminism, film censorship, film regulation, Production Code Michel Foucault intended the method he called “genealogy” to challenge the linear and rationalizing impulses of historical design. Genealogy was meant to embrace the marginal, accidental, and failed as constitutive of what “was” and “is.” Perhaps it is fitting, then, that a genealogy would explore a subfield fairly obsessed with the value of what is lost, cut, missing, or strays from the path: that of media regulation. The earliest studies of film censorship were exposés or how-to manuals, including Hollywood's Movie Commandments (1937), written by Hollywood self-regulator Joseph Breen's secretary, Olga Martin.1 First-generation academic studies of film regulation broadly accounted for censorship laws, providing telling examples of enforcement. Neville Hunnings's Film Censors and the Law (1967), for example, divides into chapters by country, and Garth Jowett's Film: The Democratic Art (1976) places state and local censorship and industry self-censorship in the context of the film industry's growth and development.... You do not currently have access to this content.