Silencing Cinema

Film Censorship around the World

D. Biltereyst, R. Vande Winkel, D. Biltereyst, R. Vande Winkel, Kenneth A. Loparo

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137061980
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

Oppression by censorship affects the film industry far more frequently than any other mass media. Including essays by leading film historians, the book offers groundbreaking historical research on film censorship in major film production countries and explore such innovative themes as film censorship and authorship, religion, and colonialism.

Part I

Censorship, Regulation, and Hegemony

1

All the Power of the Law: Governmental Film Censorship in the United States

Laura Wittern-Keller

As this book makes clear, cinema has been stifled in many ways—some subtle, some blatant. But there can be little doubt that the most obvious and intrusive interference with what filmmakers could produce—and what audiences could see—has come from governmental film censorship agencies. As we will see in this chapter, in their ability to keep things from the screen, American governmental censors not only carried the force of law and the power of the state, but also influenced motion picture production companies to censor themselves. Without the state and local censor boards that sprang up during the Progressive Era, the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association (MPPDA, later known as the MPAA) would not likely have tried to police its own member studios. As state censorship continued through the 1930s and as other voices joined the states’ demand for cleaner movies, Hollywood’s censorship regime grew ever more entrenched.

Hollywood first tried to clean up its image and its content with “Thirteen Points” in 1921, then with “Don’ts and Be Carefuls” five years later, and finally with the Production Code in 1930 and the Production Code Administration (PCA) in 1934. This is the American movie censorship that most people know about.¹ What is not so well known is that the real reason for these regulations was not just to mollify critics but also to conciliate state and local censors and to stave off any possibility of federal film censorship. Hollywood’s censors kept track of the type of content that irritated state censors so they could warn their producers about potentially problematic content.² The sanitized American motion pictures from the mid-1930s through the demise of the Production Code in the 1960s, then, is actually the product of a symbiotic relationship between governmental censors and Hollywood’s internal censors at the PCA. Put to a chicken-and-egg question, there is no doubt the governmental censors came first. But once the movie industry began policing movie morals in 1934, the PCA took over, leaving the governmental censors with little to do until the end of World War II, when cultural changes shifted the action back toward the state censors—this time, though, with most of the action coming in American courts.³

Origins of American Governmental Censorship

When movies burst onto the cultural scene at the turn of the twentieth century, they became immensely popular amazingly quickly. Such popularity, though, unnerved society’s moral guardians—those concerned about public propriety and moral order. They were concerned—and not without justification—at the immense social implications of what they perceived as commercialized voyeurism. Previously, communal filters of clergy, teachers, and family determined what people could see, read, or hear. But with movies, those filters disappeared—bypassed in favor of profit-driven moviemakers far away from and unaccountable to the community.⁴

The turn of the twentieth century was also a time of societal turmoil, moving away from cultural commandments that strictly separated private from public.⁵ Movies were seen by the guardians of the old order as accelerating that trend, not just because of questionable content, but because the new movie theaters indiscriminately mixed male and female, immigrant and native, degenerate and innocent—all in close proximity and in the dark. These rapid changes led to what sociologists call a “moral panic,” a time when fear causes a disproportionate reaction.⁶ So much was changing that defied regulation; movies, however, were a hittable target. Fearing that movies were a bad influence on the nation’s youth and immigrants, moral guardians wanted some sort of filter that could weed out the bad in movies and then attach a label of purity to what remained.

The drive for some sort of control was so strong that it overcame Americans’ long distaste for any law placing a prior restraint on publication. The First Amendment to the US Constitution protects Americans from violation of their right to freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, and the right to gather peaceably and to petition the government. While all of these rights seem straightforward enough, their legal definitions have been much argued over, evolving greatly over the second half of the twentieth century. For example, before World War II, freedom of speech was generally taken to mean the right to express only those opinions that most people found non-threatening. Few would have argued that advocacy of troublesome ideas like anarchism was protected speech. In such a legal culture, movie censorship was welcomed as protection from potentially vile expression that might harm the most vulnerable members of society.

Only later in the twentieth century, after many legal challenges, did the First Amendment come to protect the nearly absolute freedom of expression that Americans have today. Moreover, since the language of the First Amendment restricts only Congress’s ability to limit freedoms of speech, press, and religion, it was long assumed that state and local governments were not similarly restrained. So, even if New York State passed a law that expressly violated free speech rights, the First Amendment could offer no protection.

Since the US Congress never passed a federal censorship law, the First Amendment could not have been used to stop early censorship. Moreover, because movies were not seen as legitimate vehicles of expression during the Progressive Era, most people did not see that free speech guarantees in state constitutions applied to movie control. Nor were most Progressives interested in individual rights. Assertion of an individual right to exhibit movies would fail to garner much support since most Progressives blamed society’s ills—low workers’ wages, unsafe workplaces, poor housing conditions, for example—on the assertion of individual rights in business and financial affairs.⁷ Individualism was the problem, they believed; communitarian values were the answer. In such an atmosphere, many Progressives favored censorship as a way to maintain societal harmony and moral order.

Chicago became the first to legally censor movies when in 1907 it empowered its police chief to decide what could be seen on the city’s screens. The movie industry grew worried not just about Chicago’s censorship, but that this type of governmental interference would spread. They were not alone: a group of social activists who agreed that movies should be controlled for the greater good was nevertheless concerned that more governmental censorship would harm the new art form. So, they decided to take preemptive action, creating the National Board of Censorship (later called the National Board of Review). Preferring that any movie control come from them rather than from a governmental agency, their volunteer reviewers began making recommendations and encouraging elimination of questionable content in 1909. While this board sounds like something moviemakers would hate, they actually favored it. Both the National Board of Censorship and the moviemakers wanted to show that government intervention—particularly federal intervention—would not be necessary, that the industry and the board could manage to keep movie content wholesome. Although much heralded at the beginning, the board quickly disappointed many moral guardians, though, when it approved films they did not like.⁸

It was becoming clear that there was little agreement about movie content. Even those who favored controlling movies disagreed on how to do it. Some, like the National Board, favored the enlightened censoring of a sophisticated elite; others, fearful that the elite were allowing too much dangerous content, favored the creation of professional censor boards working under state and local governments. As the voices of this second group became more insistent, and as moviemakers continued to create films that shocked moral guardians,⁹ state legislatures and city councils began to take action. Then, when that first censorship ordinance in Chicago successfully withstood legal attack in 1909, it seemed inevitable that more would follow.¹⁰ And follow they did: Pennsylvania became the first state to adopt a censorship statute in 1911 (its board began work in 1914), soon followed by Ohio (1913), Kansas (1913), and Maryland (1916). In the meantime, dozens of cities and towns had set up their own boards. The movie industry was becoming increasingly worried about possible federal censorship or, even worse, a more likely and necessarily chaotic city-by-city crazy quilt of control.

Worried about New York and its enormous New York City market in 1916, the movie men formed a trade group called the National Association of the Motion Picture Industry (NAMPI), vowing to police themselves by adopting a list of proscriptions called the Thirteen Points. Actually a laundry list of what had bothered the censors, this list pledged to keep from the screen subjects like white slavery, bloodshed, violence, illicit love, and disrespect for the law. But neither New York’s legislature nor its governor believed NAMPI’s promises, and New York State went under a censorship regime in 1922, followed by Virginia the same year.¹¹

The language of each state’s censorship statute was remarkably similar: all (with the exception of Ohio) used negative language—films would be approved if they did not contain anything “indecent,” “immoral,” “inhuman,” “obscene,” “sacrilegious,” or would be likely to “incite to crime.”¹² Ohio’s law called for all movies to be approved provided they were “of a moral, educational, or amusing and harmless character.”¹³

Whatever the language, what the states were looking to prohibit was the same; how they went about it was remarkably different. Because the censors had no guidelines to explain what the statutory language meant in the early years, they were free to interpret it in highly personal ways. Terminology that today seems hopelessly vague and imprecise was accepted by judges as perfectly clear. This was an age that venerated the governmental expert, and so courts were willing to accept the idea that a censor could be asked to apply a word like “immoral” without a statutory definition or regulatory clarification. In fact, in that first court challenge of censorship in Chicago in 1909, the judge dismissed the idea that vagueness could be an issue in censoring, noting that “the average person of healthy and wholesome mind knows well enough what the words ‘immoral’ and ‘obscene’ mean and can intelligently apply the test to any picture presented to him.”¹⁴ This legal philosophy, that definition was not necessary, leaving censors nearly free rein, prevailed in American courts for 44 years. But censors differed from state to state, and even from administration to administration. The state and municipal censors were usually political appointees—political party bigwigs (or their wives) who got their jobs not because they had any specialized knowledge of movies or of public morals, but because they had supported the right candidate for governor or mayor. In Pennsylvania, for example, the lead censor during that board’s formative years was Ellis Oberholtzer, a neighbor of the governor. When asked about his qualifications to censor movies, Oberholtzer openly admitted that he “knew little indeed about the motion picture.”¹⁵ Only the state censors of New York and Ohio were civil servants with some minimal credentials for their work.¹⁶

Image 1.1 Irwin Esmond, chief censor for the State of New York from 1932 to 1945, surrounded by his staff and a visitor (Canadian actor Walter Pidgeon, second from the right)

Source and permission: John Crysler and the Esmond family.

Censors had three options when reviewing a film: they could approve it, require certain cuts to be made before approval (the cuts were called “eliminations”), or ban the film entirely (“banned in toto”). Censors did not make such decisions at taxpayer expense. In fact, fees for review (paid by the distributor) ranged from $1 to $3 per original reel. This was generous enough that all state boards returned handsome profits to their states’ coffers. New York’s profit in 1939, for example, was $200,000. If a board banned a film, the distributor could bring suit. However, since the censorship was a prior restraint—a restriction on communication before anyone other than the censors had seen it—the burden of proof fell on the challenger. Thus it was the distributor who had to prove that his movie was not harmful rather than, as is customary in the American legal tradition, the government proving its case against the distributor. This made governmental censorship different...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Silencing Cinema: An Introduction
• Part I: Censorship, Regulation, and Hegemony
• Part II: Control, Continuity, and Change
• Part III: Colonialism, Legacy, and Policies
• Part IV: Censorship Multiplicity, Moral Regulation, and Experiences
• Notes on Contributors
• Index