Film Censorship Research Articles

<em>Introduction</em>: Cinema During the Great War

A vast amount has been written about this war. I was recently in Toronto University library, one of the world’s major research libraries, whose books on the World War fill some thirty bays of shelving: equivalent to a couple of hundred linear metres of books – just on this one war. So much has been published on the theme that one might be forgiven for thinking that little more of originality could be written about it, and yet new and fresh interpretations of all aspects of the war continue to appear on the shelves, on diverse areas of military, diplomatic and social history. One might mention, just considering English-language books, the general histories by Strachan, Stone and Ferguson; military histories such as the book by Alexander Watson; diplomatic histories like the influential volume by Hamilton and Herwig; and social histories such as Chickering’s on urban life in Germany during the war and Richard Holmes’ study of the British regular soldier. There have also been recent important works of bibliography on the War, and books covering such subjects as media representation and propaganda, as well as countless journal articles. In this issue of Film History we add to the Great War literature, looking at the film industry strictly during the period 1914–1918. This circumscription by date means that there is nothing here on later cinematic reflections of the War (The Big Parade, All Quiet on the Western Front, etc) – after all, a large literature already surrounds such cinematic reimaginings, Kelly’s aforementioned book being a leading example. Of course, a good deal has also been written about film within the 1914–18 period itself, but much remains to be done, as this issue demonstrates. For one thing, many of the articles here are about the situation in non English-speaking countries, whereas most of the existing writings in English (certainly in this journal) have dealt with British or American aspects of the War. This issue opens with Richard Abel’s examination of a spate of “feature” documentaries about the World War that were shown in the United States as the conflict was taking place. His principal sources are newspaper ads for the films, and from these it seems that many of them took a partisan line, with a striking number having a pro-German tone. Cooper Graham and Ron van Dopperen investigate the film career of Edwin F. Weigle, war cameraman for the Chicago Tribune, who filmed aspects of the defeat of Belgium in 1914, and also in Germany in 1915. Laurent Veray has studied film and the First World War for many years, and has published much on this theme, mainly in French: his paper in this issue summarises several aspects of his earlier work about official production by France during the war. Sabine Lenk’s article, based on documents in the Dusseldorf municipal archives, examines film censorship in that German city during the conflict. Then follow two papers on the situation in the Netherlands, which remained neutral in the War. Karel Dibbetts and Wouter Groot look at the exhibition of The Battle of the Somme (1916), as well as war Film History, Volume 22, pp. 363–365, 2010. Copyright © John Libbey Publishing ISSN: 0892-2160. Printed in United States of America

‘Blue is the Pervading Shade’: Re-examining British Film Censorship in the 1970s

Much has been written about film censorship in Britain, with a particular focus on the 1970s (Phelps 1975; Dhavan and Davies 1978; Robertson 1979). While fully acknowledging the work carried out by James Robertson and Anthony Aldgate (Robertson 1985, 1989; Aldgate and Robertson 2005) in laying the ground for further debates on British film censorship, my own research examines hitherto unexplored aspects of film culture and censorship in Britain in the 1970s. In studying over 100 film files from the British Board of Film Classification (which represent only a fraction of the films submitted for classification in this period), I have begun the painstaking work which is needed in order to contribute to a long-overdue reevaluation of British film censorship in this much misunderstood decade. However, utilising the material from the files at the BBFC is not without problems. There is evidence that in the earlier part of the period, the files were badly organised; some offer nothing more than the official documentation, while others are empty or missing altogether. However, despite their extreme variability, the files do offer an intriguing perspective on film censorship in the period, particularly when material relating to overlooked films and genres is considered alongside well-documented cases. Causes celebres such as A Clockwork Orange (1971) and The Devils (1971) have been the obvious test cases for examining film censorship in the 1970s and James Robertson (1989) refers in detail to both these examples. However, the detailed scrutiny accorded to these well-known cases often obscures the larger censorship debate and for this reason I have chosen to examine less well-documented examples. Selected case studies are included here but have been carefully chosen to illustrate the organic relationship which many films had with the wider policy and actions of the BBFC in this period.

Culture Policy and Film Censorship in 1950s

Culture Policy and Film Censorship in 1950s

Serving a stir-fry of market, culture and politics – on globalisation and film policy in Greater China

This article examines film policy in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan in the context of globalisation. The three markets face a similar set of challenges posed by globalisation, and they equally see the need to promote the local film industry through policy-making. The rhetoric of their film policies converges in embracing free-market ideas and a strong economic logic. However, their specific measures diverge when it comes to the extent and nature of government intervention, restraints posed upon foreign film businesses, vigour and objectives of government film censorship and emphasis given to the cultural imperative of film policy.

The miracle case: film censorship and the Supreme Court

The miracle case: film censorship and the Supreme Court

Joe Breen, The Ayatollah Khomeni, and Film Censorship

For admirers of the emerging Iranian film industry under the Shah, the Islamic Revolution of February, 1979 was obviously a cause for concern if not outright pessimism. Indeed, the May issue of Var...

A Landmark Decision

A Landmark Decision Rodney Hill Laura Wittern-Keller and Raymond J. Haberski, Jr. The Miracle Case: Film Censorship and the Supreme Court University Press of Kansas, 2008 233 pages; $35.00. Anyone familiar with the history of American film censorship is at least nominally aware of the “Miracle Case” of 1952, in which the U.S. Supreme Court finally extended free-speech protection to motion pictures. Prior to that time, the high court had not ruled on this particular issue since 1915, when it concluded in Mutual Film Company v. Ohio that the movies were “entertainment, pure and simple,” and as such did not fall within the purview of the First Amendment. The court’s decision in the “Miracle Case” (more properly known as Burstyn v. Wilson) ended decades of prior-restraint censorship and helped to usher in a period of greater freedom in American cinemas, in terms of the international films that could be shown here, as well as the kinds of subject matter that Hollywood studios and independents could broach in their films. What many of us might not know about the “Miracle Case” is the history of the man who brought it about. Joseph Burstyn (1901 – 1953) was a Polish immigrant who got into the film business in the 1930s as a distributor of European motion pictures. After World War Two, he and his partner, Arthur Mayer, introduced American audiences [End Page 101] to the Italian Art Cinema, with such acclaimed and successful titles as Rome: Open City (1945), Paisan (1946), and Bicycle Thieves (1948). Burstyn’s contributions to the way we have come to understand the international art cinema cannot be overstated. When he began his career in the 1930s, the total American market for international screenplays consisted of roughly 500,000 people. By the time of Burstyn’s death in 1953, the U.S. art-house audience had ballooned to over 7 million, thanks in large measure to his efforts. Burstyn’s greatest notoriety came with Roberto Rossellini’s Il Miracolo (The Miracle, 1948), which he combined with two other short photodramas—Jean Renoir’s A Day in the Country (1936) and Marcel Pagnol’s Jofroi (1933)—into an omnibus film which he titled, Ways of Love (released in 1950). The film opened at New York’s Paris Theatre, to critical acclaim and enthusiastic audiences. The City License Commissioner, however, found The Miracle to be “personally and officially blasphemous.” Subsequently, the New York State Board of Regents withdrew the film’s license, effectively banning it from New York screens. As Burstyn, together with the brilliant young attorney Ephraim S. London, fought the case all the way to the U. S. Supreme Court, he garnered the support of organizations such as the New York Film Critics, the ACLU, the American Jewish Congress, and the American Book Publishers Council. Burstyn and London’s victory in the case rocked the film industry and indeed shaped the future of American film history, as the Supreme Court declared, “expression by means of motion pictures is included within the free speech and free press guarantees of the First and Fourteenth Amendments.” Authors Wittern-Keller and Haberski are legal historians, offering a fresh angle on their subject that film scholars should welcome enthusiastically. One of the book’s greatest strengths is that it explains the legal intricacies and far-reaching ramifications of Burstyn’s case without getting bogged down the slightest bit in legalistic jargon. As such, it offers an account that is at once rigorous and highly readable. Furthermore, the book goes to great lengths to contextualize Burstyn’s individual legal struggle within the larger history of American film censorship—going back to the first local moving pictures censorship board, formed in Chicago in 1907, and looking forward to the era of Jack Valenti’s ratings system, self-imposed by the industry and still in effect today. Wittern-Keller and Haberski also do a commendable job of situating Burstyn v. Wilson within larger American cultural contexts, such as the changing attitudes towards freedom of expression in the 20th century, especially during the McCarthy era. However, the fact that the authors are not film scholars does present a few problems here...

The Miracle Case: Film Censorship and the Supreme Court

The Miracle Case: Film Censorship and the Supreme Court

<i>Sexuality, Politics, and Social Control in Virginia, 1920-1945</i> (review)

Reviewed by: Sexuality, Politics, and Social Control in Virginia, 1920-1945 Leisa D. Meyer Sexuality, Politics, and Social Control in Virginia, 1920-1945. By Pippa Holloway (Raleigh: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. xi plus 258 pp.). Pippa Holloway begins her book with a deceptively simple premise-that interrogating the ways in which Virginia legislators sought to regulate sexuality (including marriage, reproduction, sexual behavior, and sexual images) during the first half of the 20th century can tell us a great deal about the development of southern government during that same period. From this premise the author moves to a sweeping and detailed investigation of the meanings of state governance, its relation to conventional hierarchies of race, class, and gender, and the critical part played by sexual regulation in Virginia leaders' vision of a "modern" commonwealth. Holloway's book both adds to our understanding on the micro level of how states approached the vital early 20th century, and makes abundantly clear the critical place the history of sexuality occupies in the larger American historical narrative. As significantly, Holloway's work intervenes directly to revise the models of state action that have emerged from studies that have focused predominantly on the Northeastern and Midwestern United States and argues against those that have suggested that the southern governments were characterized by unabated hostility toward centralized state authority.1 The most powerful aspect of this book is Holloway's scrutiny of the ways in which Virginia's white elites used their statutory authority and community influence to reproduce their specific culture by reinscribing and maintaining existing relations of race, class, and gender through sexual regulation. To do so Holloway builds on the work of cultural theorist Siobhan Somerville to interrogate the ways in which the policing of racial boundaries informed the construction of categories of sexual identity (and vice versa) and how in general sexual regulation operated as a means of protecting the preexisting boundaries of race and class.2 As Holloway states in her introduction, the "distinction between sexually 'normal' and 'dangerous' followed and justified the distinction between 'citizen' and 'non-citizen' " and such distinctions more broadly configured and maintained the boundary demarking the "governing classes" from the "class that was governed." (p. 6) Holloway's persuasively argued and well-researched study is situated at a moment when Virginians embraced some limited expansion of centralized state government power in the name of economic growth, and utilized sexual regulation as the means to promote such growth. Through movie censorship, anti-interracial marriage provisions, involuntary sterilization of "mental defectives," [End Page 1076] and statewide venereal disease control efforts, Virginia's General Assembly, its storied governor Harry Byrd, and a coalition of "business progressives" targeted sexuality as the main means of regulating and controlling those populations that they believed offered the greatest threat to a "modern" Virginia: lower class and poor whites and African Americans. In doing so, Virginia's governing classes "built a state that reflected their commitment to political dominance based on race and class." (p. 1). This massive undertaking was by no means monolithic or uncontested. One of the main strengths of Holloway's study is her detailed analysis of how the governing class resolved differences in its ranks through the enactment of public policy. In one example, the author details the debate between censorship board members over whether any representations of interracial marriage in films were acceptable to make visible the deep connections between Virginia's Racial Integrity Act, depictions of sexuality in film, and film censorship.(pp. 71-72) Holloway also draws on the work of philosopher Michel Foucault to call attention to the ways in which social regulation as social control was not only prohibitive but also productive. Thus, a growing taxonomy of sexual deviance worked to shore up and more precisely define sexual normativity in ways that served the interests and supported the power base of Virginia's elites at the same time that it presented possibilities for intervention into this system by and for non-elites.3 (p. 5) Multiple actors participated in producing and maintaining this expanding classification system, including a growing professional class whose "expertise" was critical in the crafting and implementation of regulatory policies. Here...

The Hindu Right and the Politics of Censorship: Three Case Studies of Policing Hindi Cinema, 1992–2002

The Hindu Right and the Politics of Censorship:Three Case Studies of Policing Hindi Cinema, 1992–2002 Nandana Bose In the 1990s Hindi cinema was firmly entrenched in the contentious sphere of the political. India's Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC, also sometimes referred to as the Censor Board), historically considered a primary regulatory mechanism of Hindi cinema and the custodian of public morality by both the citizenry and the state, found itself at the center of a maelstrom of moral panics, escalating Hindu right-wing protest politics, primarily under the aegis of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the extremist right-wing party the Shiv Sena, and repeated state interventions.1 I argue that the 1990s was marked by a gradual alignment of the right-wing nationalist agenda with the historically existing regulatory concerns of the state over the deleterious "effects" of cinema on vulnerable audiences, resulting in an unprecedented "censor-wave" (Bose xxxix). Exemplifying this temporal alignment, each of the three case studies discussed here—Khalnayak (The Villain, 1993), Bombay (1995), and War and Peace (2002)—represents the censorship of a "sensitive" issue for the Indian state—sex, religion, and national security—in a prevailing climate of reactionary right-wing politics, anxieties over cultural invasion by globalizing forces, and unstable coalition governments. It is my contention that censorship as a selective process was an intrinsic principle of Hindu nationalist discourse predicated on a series of exclusions in terms of religion, gender, class, and caste that led to the narrow remapping of the national imaginary, resulting in the "miniaturization" of the nation (Sen 46). The first case study, of Khalnayak, reveals how female sexuality was considered a threat to traditional Indian culture and Indian womanhood by the patriarchal alliance of the state, Hindu nationalist discourse, and the viewing public, resulting in moral panics and the demand for stringent obscenity regulations. The protracted censorship controversy surrounding Bombay, the second case study, foregrounds the state's anxieties about the cinematic medium engendering Hindu-Muslim communal tensions, prompting preemptive measures, the extraconstitutional power of Bal Thackeray, the leader of the Shiv Sena, and the direct involvement of the police as censor and arbiter. The third case study, of the documentary War and Peace, exemplifies the overlapping power relations between the Hindu Right and the BJP-led state. It represents the nadir of partisan political interventions under the pretext of safeguarding law and order and the attempted stifling of pluralistic voices in a shrinking public sphere. Through these three vignettes of landmark censorship controversies, "which reveal how deeply political the whole exercise has become in post-colonial India" (Pendakur, Indian Popular Cinema 79), I attempt to map the field of power relations that existed among the CBFC and the state, the Hindu Right, the viewing public, and various interest groups at a historical conjuncture and to locate various competing yet hierarchical, shifting, and diffused sites of political pressure and influence in the public sphere. As Lee Grieveson suggests, such "a struggle over culture and cultural space is, indeed, virtually a defining feature of democratic societies, which almost inevitably involve a complex negotiation between public authority and the dissemination of facts, ideas, and representations in public" (Policing Cinema 13). In order to contextualize the persistent regulatory concerns of the state apparatus over "obscene, indecent and/or immoral" cinematic material a brief overview of the media effects–based logic prompting direct state interventions, regulation, and the state-instituted codes of censorship is required. "Why Is Film Censorship Necessary?" (CBFC, "Annual Report" 1) According to Monika Mehta, "censorship has been a key point of contact between the post-colonial Indian [End Page 22] state, the Bombay film industry, and the Indian citizenry" (170). It is interesting to note from a historical survey of cinema and censorship the astonishing fact that at no stage has there been any concerted action for the abolition of censorship per se, despite the film industry's prolonged resentment of the CBFC's discriminatory policies and practices. A cursory look at the history of Indian cinema reveals a continuous and unequal battle between the censors and the Hindi film industry. In fact, "fear of the censor has caused producers to exercise...

T. van Oort, Film en het moderne leven in Limburg. Het bioscoopwezen tussen commercie en katholieke cultuurpolitiek (1909-1929)

Film and Modern Life in Limburg. Cinema Exhibition between Commerce and Catholic Cultural Politics (1909-1929) The aim of this book is to provide a deeper understanding of the development of a local and regional infrastructure of cinema exhibition as an element in a larger process of modernization that at the same time stimulated that modernization process. The main focus of the book is on the dynamics of cultural adaptation and resistance accompanying the rise of the cinema exhibition industry in the Dutch province Limburg. How did the cinema integrate into the everyday life of the - predominantly Roman Catholic - inhabitants of this region? The empirical basis for this study stems from painstaking historical research of municipal and other archives, newspapers and magazines, surviving business records, etcetera. For this research I have made use of the concept of the cultural intermediary or broker. In brief, cultural brokers negotiate the appropriation of meaning. More concrete, in this research the most prominent intermediary is the cinema owner. He acted as a gatekeeper deciding in what manner and circumstances and in what dosage his audiences were exposed to an international film culture consisting predominantly of foreign products. The exhibitor chose marketing strategies and constructed the social image of his theatre. He balanced the demands of his audiences against for instance the interests of his suppliers, the distributors, or the pressures of government and church authorities. Besides the entrepeneurs, another category of intermediaries that played a major role in the integration of cinema in Limburg were the local and regional government and officials and religious leaders. The Catholic authorities responded cautious to the growing consumption of commercial entertainment in which the cinema appeared as a pivotal institution during the 1910s. Shortly after World War I the Netherlands Cinema League (Nederlandsche Bioscoopbond), a newly founded professional organization for entrepeneurs in the national cinema industry, succesfully blocked the aspirations for independent Catholic film exhibition. A key struggle took place in the so-called Venlo Cinema War of 1921-1922, during which all cinemas remained closed for almost a year. After that, Catholic authorities shifted their attention to the distribution instead of the exhibition branch of the industry, by setting up a regional, Catholic film censorship organization. This organization regularly came into conflict with the Netherlands Cinema League, culminating in a regional clash in 1929, when the cinemas in numerous cities in the Catholic South of the Netherlands closed for months. Both parties were forced to a settlement by personal interference of the Prime Minister. After this agreement, the relations between the cinema industry and the Catholic authorities gradually became less strained. The regional censorship arrangement safeguarded a sense of regional Catholic identity, guaranteeing at least a degree of control over cinema culture. Simultaneously, the vast majority of films passed the censors, and were as a result implicitly sanctioned by the Catholic authorities. In spite of the repeated reassurance that films were only 'admitted', not 'approved', in this way the censorship stimulated the integration of film culture into Limburg society.

Kuhle Wampe, Leftist Cinema, and the Politics of Film Censorship in Weimar Germany

Kuhle Wampe, Leftist Cinema, and the Politics of Film Censorship in Weimar Germany

The Future of U.S. Film Censorship Studies

The Future of U.S. Film Censorship Studies

How to Cope with the Death of Film Censorship

How to Cope with the Death of Film Censorship

"I Know It When I Hear It": The Case of the Blind Film Censor

"I Know It When I Hear It": The Case of the Blind Film Censor

Visual Delights Two: Exhibition and Reception (review)

Reviewed by: Visual Delights Two: Exhibition and Reception Beth A. Kattelman Visual Delights Two: Exhibition and Reception. Edited by Vanessa Toulmin and Simon Popple. Eastleigh, UK: John Libbey Publishing, 2006; pp. vi + 266. $29.95 paper. This collection of essays, drawn from the second Visual Delights Conference held in 2002 at the University of Sheffield, covers an extensive range of topics from the visual and popular culture of the late Victorian and early Edwardian periods. The result is a sampler that offers glimpses into a wide array of subjects, but not a deep analysis of any particular area. This is not necessarily a fault of the contributors, however, since conference papers, by necessity, are not as in-depth as longer essays written specifically for publication. The volume includes papers on such disparate topics as film censorship, stereoscopic viewing, the life of a traveling photographer, lantern-slide marketing campaigns, a habitat panorama, and the visual iconography of childhood death. While all of the eighteen essays are competently written, a few stand out for their combination of insightful commentary and unique subject matter. Kaveh Askari’s essay on “Trilby’s Community of Sensation,” for example, is a particularly interesting exploration of the commercial circulation of this famous George du Maurier 1894 novel about Svengali and his unfortunate protégé, as well as the visual techniques that were used to promote Maurice Tourneur’s 1915 film adaptation of the same. By examining theatrical productions, tableau vivants, illustrations, posters, and photographs, Askari demonstrates how “mesmerism becomes a catalyst for visual tricks involving translation from one medium into another” (67). William Merrin’s essay, “Skylights Onto Infinity: The World in a Stereoscope,” provides a fascinating look at the role of the stereoscope in Victorian society and how it reflected and reasserted the separation of the public and private spheres. In addition to exploring circulation of the stereoscope in the Victorian home, Merrin also provides an interesting and concise history of stereoscopic viewing, which he traces from the discovery and development of perspective in the early 1400s to the Victorian era. For those interested in the technical aspects of early screen use, there is John Plunkett’s “Optical Recreations, Transparencies, and the Invention of the Screen,” which gives detailed accounts of how screens and transparencies were created and how they were used in such entertainments as the phantasmagoria and the diorama. Peta Tait also continues her fascinating exploration of aerial artists in “Viewing Deadly Targets for Feminine Identity: Alar, the Human Arrow,” which discusses the difficulty of trying to learn about a dynamic aerial performance when the only remaining record consists of textual descriptions and static visual resources. Film historians will also find many interesting essays in this anthology. In “Early Political Film in Britain,” for example, Alan Burton explores the beginnings of British political cinema. Although often thought to be an interwar development, Burton argues that film was being used for propaganda purposes as early as the general elections of 1906 and 1910. Another fascinating essay on film history is Charles Musser’s “The May Irwin Kiss: Performance and the Beginnings of Cinema,” which discusses the interplay between the 1896 film The May Irwin Kiss and the stage play The Widow Jones, exploring the historiographic paradigms that this relationship animates. Helen Walasek’s “Punch and the Lantern Slide Industry” should also be of particular interest to those who study how visual iconography is used in marketing campaigns and the symbiotic effects that can occur between print publications and visual performance. In it, Walasek, former curator of the Punch Archives and Collection, examines how Punch’s proprietors used lantern-slide lectures to entice new subscribers. In anthologies of conference papers, the writing can be very uneven from one essay to another, and this is the case here. Just as the essays mentioned above are of particularly high quality, the book also contains a few that are not so impressive. Ine van Dooren and Amy Sargeant’s “Dead Babies: Representations of Infant Mortality Before the First World War,” for example, is a litany of photographs and drawings showing childhood death, with little accompanying analysis. While this essay deals with a fascinating and unique subject and is accompanied...

The development of the film censorship during Colonial Period in Korea

The development of the film censorship during Colonial Period in Korea

In movies?

Should film censors give ‘pro-smoking’ films an 18 certificate? we asked our readers panel

Freedom of the screen: legal challenges to state film censorship, 1915-1981

Freedom of the screen: legal challenges to state film censorship, 1915-1981

Pre-censorship of Film Censorship and Korean Film Comedy in the late 1960's

Pre-censorship of Film Censorship and Korean Film Comedy in the late 1960's