Dangerous Ideas by Eric Berkowitz

Author:Eric Berkowitz [Berkowitz, Eric]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

Sexual and other moral questions were front and center as censors contended with the advent of cinema and its uniquely powerful effects on audiences. To hype his new Vitascope, Thomas Edison hired two stage actors in 1896 to recreate for the screen the canoodling from the Broadway show The Widow Jones. Edison’s catalog described the twenty-second film The Kiss this way: “They get ready to kiss, begin to kiss, and kiss and kiss and kiss in a way that brings down the house every time.”12 As expected, it brought howls of outrage. “Such things demand police interference,” fumed one critic.13 The critic’s wishes were amply fulfilled, as cinema soon became the definitive mass entertainment. Film censorship was swiftly imposed in the US and Europe. Writing about Germany, the historian Gary Stark describes concerns behind film censorship throughout the West: it “sprang from upper-class fears of the urban lower classes,” as widespread movie consumption was thought to “deprave and disorient” them, “undermine their attachment to traditionally sanctioned values, and lead to moral, perhaps even to social, anarchy.”14 On the silver screen, a kiss was not just a kiss.

The first American film censorship rules came out of Chicago in 1907, where more than a hundred thousand people were already visiting nickelodeons every day. Under the city’s new ordinance, police could bar a film if it was “immoral or obscene, or portrays depravity, criminality or lack of virtue . . . or tends to produce a breach of the peace, or riots, or purports to represent any hanging, lynching, or burning of a human being.”15 Similar state laws followed, which the US Supreme Court upheld against First Amendment challenges in 1915. The court held that cinema merited no free-speech protections because it was “a business pure and simple,” and films should not “be regarded as part of the press of the country or as organs of public opinion.” Given that movies were “capable of evil . . . the greater because of their attractiveness and manner of exhibition,” and were capable of exciting a “prurient interest,” laws preventing such ills were needed.16 That ruling, which stood until 1952, left movies open to a panoply of actual and threatened government controls that the industry would try to avoid by strict self-censorship.

The tendency of early film stock to explode sparked Britain’s first regulations on film content. The 1909 Cinematograph Act empowered localities to impose safety rules on movie theatres, but it was soon used to govern the moral content of what was being shown as well. Faced with the reality of censorship and a confounding array of local standards, members of the film industry formed the British Board of Film Censors (BBFC, much later called the British Board of Film Classification) to impose a “voluntary” scheme of film censorship. No film would be passed unless it was “clean and wholesome and absolutely above suspicion,” a broad standard that covered subcategories for sex, politics, violence, and derogatory representations of the armed forces and the empire.17 However,

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.