By Tami Johnson
As new forms of media and the way we consume it gain popularity there is one that remains timeless and continues to shape society: film.
Film as an art form is meant to push, influence and inspire. Roman Polanski, a Polish-French filmmaker and actor once said that “Cinema should make you forget you are sitting in a theatre”.
The first film ever created was made by Edward Muybridge, in 1872. He made it by rigging 12 cameras on a racetrack to capture shots quickly as the horse galloped in front of the cameras, creating the illusion of movement.
In 1889, Thomas Edison put together a team, led by William Laurie Dickinson to build the very first motion picture camera. Although Edison’s inventions jump started film production, his propensity to sue for even the most minor infringements of his patents was a driving factor of the mass exodus of film makers, from New York to California.
By 1919, Hollywood had become the face and home of American cinema and all the glamour it would come to embody.
After a decade of resisting films with sound, due to fears of it being a fad the Warner Brothers finally released the ‘The Jazz Singer’ which launched ‘talkies’ and made them quintessential in the film industry. In reaction to this development, the industry exploded.
Due to the versatility and convenience that sound provided, new genres like action, musicals and westerns gained popularity and more actors were launched into fame like Audrey Hepburn, Fred Astaire and Shirley Temple.
Although the 20s and 30s marked the beginning of the Golden Age, under the glitz and glamour were layers of controversy and what was viewed as moral degeneration as a series of scandals led to public opinion of Hollywood and its stars becoming increasingly negative.
From 1917 to 1922 Massachusetts, New York, Virginia, Maryland, Kansas, Pennsylvania and Ohio created their own film censorship boards as more people were calling for regulation of the film industry which would result in the curtailment of the power studio executives were able to exert.
The leaders of the industry created the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA), now Motion Picture Association of America, to oppose threats of government intervention and paint Hollywood in a positive light. William Hays, former Chairman of the Republican National Convention was offered the position of President of the organization.
The first attempts of regulation included a document, published in 1927, called “Dont’s and Be Carefuls”. Until 1934 most of these attempts were disregarded because there were no laws in place to enforce them. This time was known as ‘Pre-Code Hollywood’. After a lot of pressure from trade publisher and extremely pious Roman Catholic Martin J. Quigley and a Jesuit priest and writer Daniel A. Lord, amendments were made and included in the original document. The new document became known as the Hays Code (The Code).
The Code included some laughable restrictions like no raspberry sounds, and no toilets but also some that really capped creative potential. For example, no evil characters could ever appear sympathetic, and under no circumstances should crime pay. It also included rules that banned homosexuality from being depicted because it constituted sexual indecency. There were also stringent regulations regarding the portrayal of marriage, sexuality and interracial relationships.
The Code was also used to reinforce negative stereotypes regarding people of colour by restricting the types of roles they were permitted to play.
The Code collapsed and was replaced by the Motion Picture Association for America’s age ratings system, in the 1960s. Once the Code became more stringent, directors had to find creative ways to get around the restrictions. During the Code, audiences were becoming bored with the way characters were being depicted. They were curious and hungry for darker themes, which reflected the overall mood of social upheaval in the 60s. This is why there was such a shift in the cinematic field with films like ‘Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner’, which explored interracial relationships and ‘Rosemary’s Baby’, a psychological horror.
One of the ways that censorship affected film was in relation to film being used as a tool for propaganda. For example the 1940s German film ‘Der Ewige Jude’, promoted antisemitism. The ‘Why We Fight’ film series, produced in the late 1940s by America was propaganda to explain why they had entered the war.
Censorship determines what is included and what is not included. This shapes the public narrative and people’s views. Seemingly innocuous vessels can hide entrenched discriminatory and biased views.
On the other hand, censorship can be helpful in protecting society from harmful content. Research done in 2017 by Anderson and Masicampo, that looked at the relationship between moral values protecting children, showed that when people held a value of sanctity, they were more willing to censor what content was shown to young children.
If censorship can negatively influence and distort and at the same time protect, what is its role in society?
There have been times where I have watched a film and seen something truly horrifying and thought “Can they show that”? Critic David Erlich described the boundary pushing film, ‘The Substance’ as an epic, audacious, and insanely gross, body horror masterpiece.
The famous director Stanislavski believed that theatre should educate and “infect the audience with its noble ecstasy”. Arguably, film, media and entertainment as a whole is meant to entertain but it often serves multiple purposes like education and to get us thinking. How can it be a tool for education if anything uncomfortable is cached? How can we learn to deal with uncomfortable and distressing emotions?
But, where do we draw the line? What happens when a film becomes a vignette of someone’s real pain like in ‘real life’ stories that are tweaked to ramp up the drama? Should it be our choice about how we navigate the media to avoid certain things, or censorship from a governing body which is not neutral?
In my view there is no clear cut answer to that question. Censorship has advantages and disadvantages but perhaps the thing that should concern us most is the fact that those in charge of censorship have their own biases and prejudices and that will undoubtedly affect how they perform their role. And that will shape the public narrative for better or for worse.