Censors for Free Speech

"Censors for Free Speech" is a superb article in Reason on the history of film content controls.  Jesse Walker does several excellent things for historical and present awareness of the topic, starting with reminding us that movies were not initially protected by the First Amendment in the United States.  That interpretation lasted until 1952, which explains a great deal about the first two generations of American film.

Walker then shows how film censorship, like copyright policy, cut across party lines, being driven by people on both the left and right.  The Legion of Decency worked with liberal groups, Progressives helped close some New York City movie theaters, and the supposedly liberal Wilson administration's justice department imprisoned a filmmaker.

The title's paradox offers a great way to see the history of cinematic content control, as many censors positioned themselves as defenders against even stricter controls. That's a powerful political move, and one to anticipate today.

That censoring ju-jitsu move should remind some of us of the Comics Code, where the industry regulated itself rather than suffer federal controls.  There's another comics-movies parallel in the 1930s National Recovery Administration's content censorship - check out the list of prohibitions (it's even called the Production Code).  And the deployment of psychology to support censorship by the Motion Picture Research Council is of a piece with Fred Wertham.

The article concludes by mentioning censors' habits of moving on to other media, once they've accomplished some expenditure of effort in one medium.  The example of television isn't the best one, however, as digital gaming has rapidly become a large target, as we've been noting here.

Bonus reading: Walker links to "The Unluckiest Man in Film History" (2000), an account of a filmmaker jailed for his movie during WWI.  It's deeply sad, and sometimes hilarious.