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This article examines the relationship between policing, film censorship, and right-wing extremist politics through a case study of the Detroit Police Department Censor Bureau’s censorship of leftist cinema during the 1930s. This period saw the police Censor Bureau repeatedly target films suspected of harboring sympathy for communist ideology as well as films openly critical of Hitler and fascism. I place this history within the context of the rise of nativist and fascist movements in southeast Michigan as a whole, and within the Detroit Police Department in particular, during the years leading up to the Second World War. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article traces the introduction of cinema to the Gulf through the archives of the India Office Records (IOR). The records of the political agent in Bahrain illustrate clearly the extent to which cinema was closely monitored and regulated by the British colonial network of administrative functions in the Persian Gulf, India, and England. Following the discovery of oil in 1932, hydrocarbon modernity gave rise to new spaces of urban culture, most prominently cinema. But in the oil cities of the Gulf, film spectatorship in its early years was refracted through three spheres of moving-image culture: private, corporate-sponsored, and commercial public cinemas. What was common to these three spheres was a certain logic of exclusion and restricted access norms. Administrators in the Gulf looked to how cinema was handled in India for models and ideas to create actual policies on the ground. The bureaucratic traffic over the case of early public cinema petitions in Bahrain shows how regulatory practices and norms of governance over cinematic spheres circulated from one colonial context (South Asia) to another (the Gulf). The core political issue of the emergence of a cinema culture in the Gulf was the restriction of cinematic medium and space to certain populations. As such, regulating cinema was linked to the question of managing the social forces of hydrocarbon modernity that the discovery of oil unleashed. The arrival of cinema in the Gulf took place in an exclusionary and uneven world, entangled with circulations of colonial practices, regimes of segregation, expansionist oil capital, international labor, and film cans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article situates a lost film titled Mill or Mazdoor (1934/1939) and its history of proscription at the intersection of three arguments: (1) that the loss of the film artifact should not preclude attempts for historiographic engagement and interpretation; (2) that site-specific histories of film censorship tell a significant story about the meanings and emotions generated by a film; and (3) that the repeated return of the censored, proscribed, or lost film complicates approaches to origins, authorship, and provenance. Through archival research, analysis of publicity materials, and engagement with scholarship on film censorship, urban and industrial history, and geography, I embed the story of Mill within a dense history of local industrial unrest, transnational fears of filmic communism, and wranglings with a colonial censor regime. The singular travails of a proscribed film thus embody the stories of a specific place whose specificity is wrought out of its links with other places in the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article studies the 1983 ban on video technology in Iran in order to place amateur filmmaking within the larger historiography of Iranian cinema. I examine debates that emerged in the country’s newspapers both at the time of the ban in 1983 and again when it was lifted in 1994. I read these editorials alongside the laws and policies that took shape in response to video technology in order to understand both the government’s anxieties about amateur filmmaking and the informal practices that formed around those anxieties. The history of analog video in Iran presented in this article expands video studies to include nonwestern cinemas and to address the political as well as the economic concerns of amateur filmmaking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In bringing to the screen the life of murderer Robert Stroud in Birdman of Alcatraz(1962), filmmakers encountered official obstruction from the director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, James V. Bennett. Campaigning for the release of Stroud, Burt Lancaster retaliated by exposing Bennett's efforts to censor the film as evidence of a personal vendetta against the prisoner. However, new archival research demonstrates how the bureau had collaborated with Hollywood's own censorship body, the Production Code Administration, for many years-and that Birdmanwas in fact the culmination of a decades-long struggle to control all films about Alcatraz. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A Woman of Affairs(1928), produced by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer as a Greta Garbo vehicle, was based on Michael Arlen's succès de scandale novel The Green Hat(1924), one of the books banned by the Hays Office, which imposed a great number of changes on the screenplay and forced the studio to conceive a new plot. This article studies, from a historical as well as an aesthetic point of view, the constraints placed by the MPPDA on the production and on director Clarence Brown's use of visual images to convey the full content of the novel. As a result, A Woman of Affairspresents two separate and contradictory story lines: the narrative revealed by the images and the official speech supervised by the censors and featured in the intertitles of the film. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Media crusades leveled at moving-picture exhibition in penny arcades and nickel shows are surprisingly consistent in their tropes and rhetorical strategies from the inaugural campaign in the San Francisco Call in 1899 to the famous one in the Chicago Tribune in 1907. This essay situates this emerging discourse on visual "corruption" alongside many other "evils" in the larger context of media activism. The critical tenet is the historiographie usefulness of mobilizing journalism as a day-to-day negotiation of media culture's functions in modernity's cityscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During a time when the word nigger was casually used behind the scenes in Hollywood, the industry was deciding whether or not the term could be used onscreen. The MPPDA's shifting policy on antiblack epithets was driven less by respectful consideration of Black spectators than by concern about state censors and the specter of Black revolt. It tells us much about how industry self-censors sought to mask American race relations through encoded textual signification. Thus, the industry's limited conception of Black humanity can be seen not only in its onscreen stereotypes but also in its inconsistent attempts to acknowledge Black spectators' offense as it did with other groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Considered in the context of revisionist film history, this essay draws on Production Code Administration (PCA) documents and studio story files to look at how Dr. Ehrlich's Magic Bullet, a 1940 Warner Bros. biopic about Paul Ehrlich-German Jewish medical scientist and pioneer in treating sexually transmitted diseases-secured the approval of the PCA in the face of a prohibition on VD propaganda films. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The battle over motion picture reformduring the early years of film exhibition in Milwaukee took place during a transitional period in the city's politics, as socialists and non-partisan progressives chased scandal-tainted machine politicians from office. Their varied approaches led to reforms of both the content of films and the physical environments in which they were seen. The drive for reform culminated in the creation of the Milwaukee Motion Picture Commission, which survived as a film censorship body until 1971. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the First World War, the town of Düsseldorf, with its rapidly expanding local cinema industry, became the headquarters of military film censorship in the west of Germany. Unique documents held by the municipal archive show the practical side of this laborious work as well as the close collaboration between army and film industry. Before 1914, the German military were hardly interested in cinema. This changed radically during wartime, which (among other reasons) may be a consequence of some high-ranking generals' personal experience of what a serious lack of motion picture prints meant for the morale of the population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how movie censorship developed in Portland, Oregon, and why theater managers and the city struggled so intensely over local censorship of motion pictures. It does so through an analysis of the history of Portland's motion picture censor board in its various iterations in the early 1910s. Primary evidence is derived from a selection of archival documents from the mayoral papers of H.R. Albee, who served the city of Portland from 1913 to 1917, and other documents from the City of Portland archives, including City Council documents and monthly reports. The paper also consults various local newspapers from the same era, as well as compilations of theater, vice, and social hygiene reports from prominent civic and government groups at the time. This examination will serve to illustrate factors that affected the legitimacy and effectiveness of Portland's censor board, which in turn will contribute to a broader understanding of the birth of motion picture censorship within the unique social and political conditions of the 1910s. In addition, a case study of Portland's censor board provides much-needed analysis of censorship processes in area of the country that was, during this period, shedding its identity as a frontier setting and beginning to define itself as an urban center. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anti-radicalism in the United States has a long history. During World War I, it was transformed into anti-communism and became embedded in the political culture of the United States for the next seventy-plus years. The author states that there were many varieties of anti-communism, but it can be divided into two main categories: official or governmental, and unofficial or nongovernmental. This article traces the development of those varieties that most impacted the motion picture industry, led to the blacklisting of hundreds of employees, and cast a pall of censorship over movie making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At a time of transition for the Production Code Administration, Hollywood's self-regulatory censor body, a number of films pushed permissible boundaries regarding profanity and violence. Drawing on material from Production Code files, this paper discusses problems involved in the production and release of two films notorious for their depiction of violence and delinquency, "The Wild One" (1953) and "The Blackboard Jungle" (1955). The making of both films are detailed. The article also discusses the reception of the two films. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the spring of 1923 the Ku Klux Klan launched a series of protests against actor and director Charlie Chaplin's motion picture "The Pilgrim" and actress Pola Negri's motion picture, "Bella Donna." This article considers how and why the Klan opposed these films. Drawing on extensive research in Klan newspapers, the article suggests that the Klan sought to promote and define itself through its discourses with the film industry and repositions the Klan as a hugely influential and overlooked social reform group, pressuring the industry during the 1920s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Except for one brief period, D.W. Griffith's motion picture "The Birth of a Nation" was banned in the state of Ohio from the time of its original release until the collapse of motion picture censorship in that state in 1954. Drawing on records in the collection of the Ohio State Archives, this paper examines several of the unsuccessful legal appeals undertaken by Griffith and his distributor, the Epoch Producing Corporation. A lengthy historical bibliography justifying the film's version of reconstruction, prepared by Griffith's attorneys, is analyzed in detail. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Alfred Hitchcock's I Confess was based on Paul Anthelme's 1902 play Nos Deux Consciences. Hitchcock began working on the film in 1947 but had great difficulty in fashioning a script which met both his requirements and those of various other interested parties, including the Production Code Administration and the Roman Catholic Church. The paper traces the compromised development of the project through to its location filming in Quebec in 1952, and suggests that problems with the film cited by Robin Wood and others can be traced to this troubled development process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on Joe Breen who won the fourth honorary Oscar Award at the twenty-sixth Academy Awards ceremony held on March 25,1954. He was awarded for his conscientious, open-minded, and dignified management of the Motion Picture Production Code. Breen had served almost twenty-one years as the head of the Production Code Administration (PCA), the body that censored all films shown in the theatres of the U.S. Breen had cultivated a reputation that bore little resemblance to open-minded and dignified. As a chief enforcer and interpreter of the Production Code, Breen was capable of being high handed and capricious. Breen was totally dedicated to enforcing both the spirit and the letter of the code and was also capable of quoting passages in the Code that did not exist. For many film historians, the image of Joe Breen is that of a belligerent, profane and sanctimonious bigot. Although he presented himself to Hollywood as a self-confident and indefatigable defender of the Code, private correspondence of Breen reveals a very different picture.

The article presents an essay that discusses local regulation and censorship of film in Norway before a central Norwegian Board of Film Censors was established in October 1913. On 11 November 1911, the police superintendent in the city of Trondhjem, a small town on the west coast of Norway, wrote a telegram to his colleague the police superintendent in Kristiania, Norway's capital about approved bordello scene cut and the dance of Per Krohg which was dropped. This telegram is one of the very few proofs of actual film censorship in Norway before the central Board of Film Censors was established. The cutting of these two scenes and especially the dance of Per Krohg, probably disappointed the cinema-owner Martin Carstens who in his advertisement for the film drew attention to the dance and the dancers as well as the audience that came to see this erotic dance inspired by Afgrunden and other popular Danish erotic sensational melodramas. Ironically, the only two surviving scenes of "Dæmonen" are the scenes cut by the police superintendent in Trondhjem because the rest of the film has been lost.

This article focuses on censorship of motion pictures in Luxembourg. During the first third of the twentieth century, there was not a single major polemic surrounding a film in Luxembourg, let alone a case of film censorship. On the contrary, several films banned for political reasons in one or the other neighboring country, such as "Battleship Potemkin," "All Quiet on the Western Front," or "KuhleWampe," were freely shown in Luxembourg without causing any controversy. The first major polemic in Luxembourg, which led to the ban of a film for purely political reasons, only dates back to 1934 and the German film "Morgenrot." "Morgenrot," a German war film that does not merely eulogise the bravery but also the heroic death of a German soldier, was produced and shot before the Nazis' ascendance to power. The second major case of censorship for political reasons broke only four years later, with the ban of the American film "The Road Back." In May 1938, the socialist Luxembourg Minister of Justice, Rene Blum, himself a confirmed adversary of censorship, explained before Parliament what had made him decide to have this pacifist work banned.

Pennsylvania was one of the leading proponents of state-controlled censorship. As such, the Pennsylvania State Board of Censors provides an interesting case study of government-legislated film censorship boards. This article is about the latter era of the Pennsylvania State Board of Censors and Ellis Paxton Oberholtzer's tenure as Board Secretary, which appeared in the Summer 1999 issue of the Pennsylvania Heritage. Oberholtzer's tenure coincided with an era of great societal reform in the U.S. Oberholtzer believed that the majority of Americans were depraved and needed someone to supervise what was being produced by the movie industry for their viewing. As a member of the Board of Censors, Oberholtzer felt that he was caught in the middle between an uneducated populace and greedy film makers who were devoid of conscience.

Focuses on the formation of a film censorship board in Mobile, Alabama. Negotiations between city officials, residents and theater operators over the establishment of a movie censorship board; Promotion of film censorship ordinance; Arguments for film censorship; Attempts of local women to establish a censorship board.

This article examines the significance of cinema programmes in Danish cinema during the silent film era. One function of the programmes was providing useful background information that would have been awkward if inserted in intertitles, particularly since the long-form narrative feature was just beginning to emerge at this time. The author also speculates that the programmes helped films escape rigorous examination by censors. The programmes would deemphasize any controversial elements and the resulting products helped create Denmark's reputation as the home of the erotic melodrama.

The article focuses on censorship, protest and the moviegoing experience from 1912 to 1922. Failure to meet the demands of the audience led to declining box office returns and a scarred reputation in the community, and the exhibitors were held fully accountable by their audience for the quality of the moviegoing experience. It mentions that theatre owners realised that their livelihood and reputation depended on pleasing an opinionated audience and moviegoers knew that their privilege to see what they wanted rested on their ability to communicate, negotiate and compromise with their local exhibitors.

The article discusses an American film "To Be or Not to Be," by Ernst Lubitsch, having Jewish face and the ability of Lubitcsh's work that fared him better than his colleagues. Topics addressed include the appearance of Jews as characters in Lubitsch's films, the situation of censorship set forth in the story, and the role played by Greenberg in epitomizing both plight of Poland and grim fate in stored for Poland Jews.

The article focuses on re-editing and the Soviet film culture in the 1920s. It states that the term "re-editing" means the reworking of a film to suit it to a country other than that of its origin, and is associated with censorship and is regarded as part of the political history of film. A discussion on the re-editing for export and the re-editing of foreign films is presented. It is inferred that efforts to bring Soviet films closer to what was called the psychology of the Western viewer is a debate between producers and exporters. Some of the implications of re-editing for Soviet film culture is also discussed.

The article focuses on drive-in theaters and the changing audience practices in the U.S. during the postwar era. The author discusses the theater ordinance outlined by Reverend J. Virgil, limiting the operation of drive-in theatres in Montgomery, Alabama which imposed a $1,000.00 license fee and set an 11:00 p.m. curfew on the theater built by Sidney Lust. Virgil's claim that drive-ins are places with demoralizing influence echoed in many popular magazines and trade journals, sealing its reputation as passion pits to this day. However, the drive-in theaters have always occupied a narrow position relative to other more legitimate places of motion picture exhibition, and is examined with suspicion by the film industry and critics alike.

The article examines the film archival experiences in the early German television and discusses three types of structuring limitations in film archiving. These structuring limitations include overt policies that restrict access to otherwise available material, overt policies which define and restrict the collection of material and general historical filtration processes which shape the archival record. Early German television is shaped by the ideological context of the German Reich, post-ware division of the nation and cold war. It has been claimed that barriers to archive users are prompted by restrictions and censorship. It is concluded that films lost that do not conform to aesthetic criteria will constitute an absence for the future.

The article explores the cinema reform movement in Germany and its attempts to shape the sensibilities of cinema audiences through educating children and adults. It discusses the protection of child audiences from the hazards of cinema, through censorship, taxes and child protection laws in attempts to create an alternative motion picture system by controlling means of production, distribution, and exhibition. It also highlights the reformers efforts to persuade production companies and theater owners to support reform films and exhibition values, which led to the creation of reform theaters and community cinemas.

The article examines the institutional and ideological connections between the production of exploitation films in the 1930s and the manner in which the Hays Office or the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA) tried to position itself as a regulatory organization. The author intends to show the significant role of exploitation films in the formulation and maintenance of self-regulatory policy. The silent exploitation film "Is Your Daughter Safe," which was produced and directed by S. S. Millard is also emphasized.

The article discusses the influence of activist Catholic clergy and laity on the creation and implementation of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America's production code. The operation of the Production Code Administration in its first decade is examined with specific reference to the problems surrounding BELLE OF THE NINETIES (Paramount, 1934), THE MERRY WIDOW (MGM, 1934), THE PRESIDENT VANISHES (Paramount, 1934), and BLACK FURY (Warner Bros., 1935). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From 1894 to 1915, a popular yet controversial cycle of some 100 boxing films occupied the screens of early cinema. Although these prize fight films constituted an important part of the inchoate movie industry's product, they remained under continual attack from Progressive Era reformers. A study of the reception and eventual suppression of boxing films in the United States reveals both the contradictions between social reform and social control inherent in American progressivism and the historical conjunction between humanitarian and racist motivations for motion picture censorship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The establishment of the Board of Censors of Motion Picture Shows (later known as the National Board of Review) in New York in 1909 is discussed. The paper deals with the Board's relationship to the motion picture industry and its efforts to avoid a formal structure of centralized film censorship. The establishment of official censorship boards in several states and the industry's formation of the MPPDA in 1922 ultimately undercut the National Board's authority by 1922. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction to the journal is presented in which the editor reflects on various articles published within the issue including one about American newsreels during World War I, one regarding the film "The Battle of the Somme," and one on film censorship in Düsseldorf, Germany.

An introduction to the journal is presented in which the editor discusses various articles published within the issue on topics including the evolution of Slovenian cinema, a case study on motion picture censorship, and the women filmmakers Alice Guy Blaché and Lois Weber.

Introduces articles published in the Volume 16 2004 issue of "Film History." Description of how D. W. Griffith constructed a revolutionary distribution strategy for his film "The Birth of a Nation"; Clarification of Robert Paul's "The Magic Sword" through cinematic archeology; Establishment of a commission for motion picture censorship by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

The article discusses a cartoon, originally printed in the August 7, 1909, issue of the journal "Moving Picture News," that criticizes film business monopolies and motion picture censorship in the early-20th century.