In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
As Annette Kuhn points out in Cinema, Censorship and
Sexuality, 1909–1925, debates over film censorship are
dominated by those who see it as a repressive act, an act of
cutting out, of excision, of rejection, of exclusion, of freedom of
expression undermined and subjects forbidden. Within these debates
censorship is conceived as a problem, and questions revolve around
"the extent to which prohibitions on the content of films
constitute a justifiable exercise of power" (Kuhn 2). The problem
with this "prohibition model," Kuhn suggests, is twofold: first, it
implies that censorship is an act carried out by a singular
empowered person or institution; and second, it assumes that the
process of censorship can only be conceived as a "repressive"
power. As such, the censor can never hold anything other than a
negative relation with the rights and freedoms of others.
What Kuhn sets out to demonstrate is that the power to censor
texts does not lie in the hands of a single public body; instead,
the regulation of cinema takes place within the context of a
network of relations between a number of interrelated though
frequently competing institutions, practices, and discourses. Or,
as Foucault might put it, the regulatory apparatus extends beyond
any single institution to a "thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble
consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms,
regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific
statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions"
("Confession" 194). As a result, Kuhn suggests the regulation of
cinema should be understood "not so much as an imposition of rules
upon some preconstituted entity, but as an ongoing and always
provisional process of constituting objects from and for its own
practices" (7). Censorship, then, is always a matter for debate,
and what is considered appropriate or necessary censorship is
always in tension. Perhaps more important, the work of these
regulatory discourses is never simply "prohibitive" or
"repressive." Rather, as Foucault suggests, power is always
productive in its effects.
Indeed, as Lee Grieveson argues in relation to early cinema,
early debates on censorship were not only directed toward the
"cultural control of cinema, on what could be shown" but frequently
engaged with the question of "how cinema should function in the
social body" (23). As a result, these regulatory discourses not
only worked to produce "censorable texts" but, in their treatment
and handling of "controversial" films during this period,
regulatory bodies like the British Board of Film Censors (BBFC) in
Great Britain and the National Board of Censorship (NBC) in the
United States worked to shape cinema in very specific ways.
For example, after a series of highly controversial films were
released in Great Britain in the early 1910s the BBFC chose to
refuse all health education films a certificate not because "such
films might be 'indecorous,' but because the cinema was . . . not a
suitable place to air matters of potential controversy . . .
Cinemas, in other words, were seen as exclusively for
'entertainment' films, and entertainment films were to be neither
educational nor controversial" (Kuhn 66). Similarly, in the United
States the NBC was forced to seriously reconsider its policy of
promoting cinema as a site of public education after the release of
two highly controversial "white slave" films in 1913. It admitted
that the "lack of dialogue and emphasis on the dramatic" made film
a "difficult medium" to achieve educative goals and concluded that
cinemas were "primarily places of amusement and not of serious
discussion and education" (qtd. in Grieveson 184), prompting the
nascent American film industry to move away from the production of
potentially controversial "educational" films and focus instead on
"the self-enclosed space of the fictive and the harmlessly
'entertaining'" (Grieveson 184). As Grieveson suggests, far from
"repressing" the film industry, the regulatory debates that
unfolded in the early years of the twentieth century significantly
contributed to the American film industry's self-definition as a
producer of entertainment and significantly shaped the development
of the fictional, narrative, and ideological norms central to
classical Hollywood cinema. However, while the practices of these
censorship bodies may well have been "productive," they were not
exactly "libertarian." And although institutions like the BBFC, the
NBC, and later the Hays Office were set up in order to guard
against the threat...