TY - JOUR
AU - Wittern-Keller,, Laura
AB - Sheri Chinen Biesen has crafted a brief summary of the control of American movie screens. Her book is structured as most censorship studies have been, starting with the problematic American movies of the era before the passage and enforcement of the 1930 Motion Picture Production Code (1929–1934), moving to the forces pushing Hollywood studios to police their filmmakers with the enforcement arm of the code—the Production Code Administration—beginning in 1934 to federal control efforts from the Office of War Information to post–World War II factors weakening Hollywood's control to the code's eventual demise in the 1960s. An epilogue encourages readers to contemplate new forms of censorship such as the current ratings system, media conglomeration deals, and the role of prestigious film festivals. The book is at its best summarizing how the code administrators kept producers in check. In telling that story, film censorship studies tend to mention a common list of films such as The Birth of a Nation (1915), The Outlaw (1943), The Miracle (1959), and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), but Biesen goes beyond them, sharing her substantial research into the Motion Picture Association of America archives to describe films not often mentioned. In so doing, she reveals interesting correspondence between the Production Code Administration and producers as they negotiated censorship issues. Also helpful is a section on the Office of War Information and how it undercut the code's restrictions on violence. Biesen effectively couples that development with the rise of film noir as a one-two punch that began the weakening of the code's iron grip. Blacklisting in the red scare years as a form of censorship also receives substantial attention. Part of Wallflower Press's Short Cuts series, Film Censorship is intended as an introduction for students and film history novices, and its length is circumscribed, but the crazy quilt of forces affecting movie content in the United States was so complex and changed so much over the century that a short volume such as this will necessarily exclude some matters that other censorship historians might think important. The underlying principle of governmental movie censorship—prior restraint—is not explained. For many years, the statutory censorship in six states and dozens of municipalities (along with pressure group activity) underwrote Hollywood's self-censorship. Prior restraint gave governmental censors their power. In a process unlike any other medium, movie distributors had to prove their product was not harmful. That reversed burden of proof was allowed to stand until 1965 when finally overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court. However, Biesen describes the film industry after the Supreme Court's 1952 Burstyn v. Wilson decision as “now empowered by free speech protection,” allowing “floodgates” to open (p. 97). The decision was much more complicated—so unclear, in fact, that it allowed governmental censorship and its reverse burden of proof to continue for another thirteen years. Along with the more familiar story of the Production Code Administration, students of film censorship should learn about this crucial legal component of the regulation of American screens. © The Author 2019. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Organization of American Historians. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Film Censorship: Regulating America's Screen
JF - The Journal of American History
DO - 10.1093/jahist/jaz592
DA - 2019-12-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/film-censorship-regulating-america-s-screen-ezDoJzziSW
SP - 781
VL - 106
IS - 3
DP - DeepDyve
ER -