The Politics of Performance: From Theater Licensing to Movie Censorship in Turn-of-the-Century New York

Abstract

THE MOVIES WERE BORN IN THE CITY. WHILE HISTORIANS OF EARLY film have begun to pay more attention to special issues such as technology, patent wars, industrial practice, and the movies' aesthetic debt to earlier forms of cultural expression, there has been little analysis of the specifically urban world that made motion pictures the most popular form of commercial entertainment by World War I. The political, legal, and economic wrangles surrounding the nascent movie business in New York City established the template for the ownership and control of the mature industry, as well as the basic pattern for film censorship. In the first center of movie production and exhibition during the early part of the century, the especially knotty issues involving the licensing and censoring of movies -who could show them and what could they show -were fiercely contested. These battles over the regulation of representation need to be understood against the historical backdrop of urban cultural politics. Movies reinforced and reconfigured a set of controversies that, since the mid-nineteenth century, had been fought out largely over the licensing and regulation of theatrical space. These issues included the alleged dangers commercial entertainments posed to children, disputes