Over the last two centuries, a succession of childhood pursuits has been blamed for deterioration in children's health, morality, education and literacy, as well as increases in juvenile delinquency, yet there has also been a constant voice in opposition to these charges. In Britain this debate reached something of a climax in the 1930s, due to the massive growth of cinema and its huge popularity with young people. This thesis aims to explore all aspects of the controversy surrounding children's cinemagoing in the thirties, with a particular focus on the mechanisms used to try and control or contain children's viewing, together with an assessment of the extent to which these mechanisms were successful. Its main arguments are that while concerns about child viewers motivated the development of film censorship practices in Britain and elsewhere, the debate is too complex and varied to be seen as a straightforward moral panic. In addition, it argues that, despite the attempts of the BBFC and others, children were essentially the regulators of their own viewing, as they frequently subverted or circumvented the largely ineffectual mechanisms of official cinema regulation. Moreover it suggests that, in a period when school, home and even leisure tended to be strong on discipline, the cinema was colonised by children as an alternative site of recreation. Matinees in particular were the birthplace of a new and somewhat subversive children's culture, which only started to be `tamed' with the introduction of more formal children's cinema clubs towards the end of the decade. Finally, the productive nature of the debate surrounding children, cinema and censorship is explored in a cases tudy of the 1930s MGM Tarzan films, which assesses the extent to which issues relating to the child audience may have helped to shape a genre.

The United States film industry is controlled by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and its six signatories--the major productions studios (Sony, Warner Brothers, Universal, Walt Disney, 20th Century Fox, Time Warner), and through this joint-partnership they have monopolized prime production, distribution, exhibition and classification of the U.S film market. The objective of this project is to shed light on biases present in the MPAA rating system's treatment of sex and violence under the X/NC-17 rating in order to demonstrate the lack of viability of the system in today's world.

This project explores how film censorship shapes film production and circulation at film festivals, public screenings, and theatrical releases since the early 2000s in Turkey. It argues that, over time, mechanisms of censorship under Erdoğan’s authoritarian regime became less centralized; practices of censorship became more dispersed and less and less “official;” and the various imposing actors and agencies have differed from those in previous decades. Though still consistent with longstanding state ideologies, reasons for censorship practices, now more than ever, must be complexly navigated and negotiated by producers and distributors of film, including festival organizers, art institutions, and filmmakers themselves, through self-censorship.Drawing on a number of in-depth case studies of films banned after 2000, this project analyzes these works within the political and social contexts surrounding their releases, as well as ethnographic data based on dozens of extensive semi-structured interviews with cultural producers over five years of fieldwork. The corresponding ethnographic fieldwork research reveals how the political climate in Turkey has affected (and worked to suppress) cultural production, freedom of speech, activism, and political resistance to the Erdoğan regime. It asks how political activism, speech, and events are converted into the visibility of image, sound, and text (as film) ultimately meets up with structures of the states that seek to obstruct or eliminate this mode of political engagement, not just through banning of artistic expression, but also through processes of delegitimization, investigatory targeting, threats, hate speech, and violence. / Anthropology

Anotation The main gaol of this study is to systematically map the manifestation of God in film with the focus on Hollywood production because it influences the whole western cinematography from its beginning to the present day. It systematically reveals various approaches to adaptation of the topic with regard to the time, cultural and social kontext. It expounds the development of the main aspects and ground of film censorship, which is considerably influenced by religion in secularized societies. It describes the techniques and approaches of individual directors to the topic.

In the autumn of 1921, silent film comedian Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle was arrested for the rape and murder of a model and actress named Virginia Rappé. The ensuing scandal created a firestorm of controversy not just around Arbuckle but the entire motion picture industry. Religious and moral reformers seized upon the scandal to decry the decline of “traditional” moral values taking place throughout American society in the aftermath of World War I. The scandal created a common objective for an anti-film coalition representing diverse social and religious groups, all dedicated to bringing about change in the motion picture industry through public pressure, boycotts, and censorship legislation. In the face of this threat, the film industry created the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association, with Republican strategist Will Hays as its president. Hays worked to incorporate moral reformers into his new organization, giving them an outlet for their complaints while simultaneously co-opting and defusing their reform agenda. Hays’ use of public relations as the means to institute self-regulation within the motion picture industry enabled Hollywood to survive the Arbuckle scandal and continue to thrive. It also set up the mechanism by which the industry has effectively negotiated public discontent ever since.

During the beginning of the cinema media era around the turn of 20th century, a debate prevailed in Sweden about the film’s harmful and negative moral impact on children and young people. This study aims to investigate the debaters’ knowledge claims regarding a preview of a publicly shown film and if it is related to their morality. The following questions were asked: 1. What knowledge claims are made in connection with the need for prior control over the film that is shown in public? 2. What is presented as the basis for the legitimacy of these knowledge claims? 3. How do these knowledge claims change during its path to legal text? 4. What was the relationship between the presented knowledge claims and a moral perception prevailing among the debaters? A debate paper, a parliamentary motion from 1909 and the public inquiry before the decision to create the Swedish Agency of Movie Censors were analysed with argumentation analysis and thematic analysis with a perspective of history of knowledge. This study points at various aspects such as medical, psychological, social structure and moral arguments, which were put forward as arguments for a regulation of the new film medium. The knowledge claims were justified by professional expertise, general knowledge, experiences from other countries and the debaters’ prior knowledge of the subject. A strong fear of ruining a good existing moral conception that exists in the growing generation emerges. The analysis describes a change in knowledge claims: the moral arguments diminish along the way towards the legal text. Furthermore, the study points at the necessity for continued research to increase the understanding of how legitimacy of knowledge is created by an influential group and then passed on.

L'objectif de ma thèse était de créer un catalogue de films de fiction relatifs à la Première Guerre mondiale produits en Italie et en France entre 1914 et 2013. Méthodologiquement, j'ai travaillé sur une variété de sources (répertoires cinématographiques, revues spécialisés, visas de censure et vision des films) selon la disponibilité des matériaux qui sont parvenus jusqu'à nous. J'ai essayé de proposer une enquête analytique qui comprend aussi des films qui se rapportent la guerre sans la montrer, pour cette raison mon travail sera sûrement incomplet mais il vise à une exhaustivité la plus grande possible. J'ai consacré une attention particulière à la censure exercée par |'État, en particulier jusqu’au les années `GD, une époque où la censure politique a été particulièrement forte. En plus de la censure définitive, j’ai aussi analysé celle préalable (en Italie de 1945 à 1965, en France de 1945 à 1961.] et en relevant deux attitudes qui sont similaires mais avec différentes méthodes d'intervention. Bien que l’enquête soit centrée sur les deux pays, l’espace donné à l’affaire italienne est supérieure à celui français. Le choix de la comparaison avec la France a été conditionné par plusieurs considérations, notamment la centralité qui, encore aujourd'hui, à la Première Guerre mondiale dans les cinémas et la public history française. L'évolution du récit cinématographique a été mise en relation avec le contexte politique, cinématographique, Législatif et historiographique; j'ai aussi essayé de comprendre la réception critique des films à travers deux facteurs : les résultats du box-office et les opinions exprimées dans les revues. / The aim of my thesis was to create a catalog of fiction films related to the First World War produced in Italy and France between 1914 and 2013. Methodologically, 1 worked on a variety of sources (movie collections, specialized magazines, rating and direct viewing of picture show), depending on the availability of materials which came to us. I have tried to propose an analytical investigation that also includes movies concerning the war without showing it; I am well aware my work will be certainly incomplete but it tries to be the more comprehensive possible. I have devoted a special attention to the censorious intervention exercised by the government, particularly until the early Sixties, indeed those years political censorship was very strong. In addition to the analysis of general censorship, I added that of prior one (in Italy 1945-65, in France 1945-61) and I found two similar attitudes but with different methods of intervention. Although the investigation is centered on the two countries, more importance will be given to the Italian CBSE instead of French one. The choice of comparison with France was influenced by several considerations; not least, the main point of the First World War has in both film and French public history even today. These factors have not been strange to the will to compare with the history of this country, considered as one of the most interesting. The evolution of fiction story has been put in relation with the political, cinematographic, and legislative and historiography background; I also tried to understand the film reception through two factors: the results of the box office and the opinions expressed in specialized magazines

This thesis is a history of the Sydney and Melbourne International Film Festivals, and covers the years from 1945 to 1972. Based primarily on archival material, it is an organisational history dealing with the attempts by the two Film Festivals to negotiate between the demands of �culture� and �industry� throughout this period. The thesis begins with a consideration of the origins of the Festivals in the post-war period �with the attempts by non-Hollywood producers to break into the cinema market, the collapse of the �mass audience�, and the growth of the film society movement in Australia. The thesis then examines the establishment in the early 1950s of the Sydney and Melbourne Festivals as small, amateur events, run by and for film enthusiasts. It then traces the Festivals� historical development until 1972, by which time both Festivals had achieved an important status as social and cultural organisations within Australia. The main themes dealt with throughout this period of development include the Festivals� difficult negotiations with both the international and domestic film trade, their ongoing internal debates over their role and purpose as cultural organisations, their responses to the appearance of other international film festivals in Australia, their relation to the Australian film industry, and their fight to liberalise Australia�s film censorship regulations.

The subject of non-theatrical films is an understudied topic in archival science. This paper shows how the different approaches to censorship measures that were in play during the 1920s have affected the archiving of non-theatrical films. In the advent of technical and artistic advancement of the film medium, non-theatrical film production had become a prolific business in both the USA and Sweden during the 1920s. At this point in time, filmmaking had become sophisticated enough to tackle more ambitious narratives, while non-fiction filmmaking was still in its gestational period before the 1930s when documentary filmmaking started to be regarded as an art form. As two major film nations of the 1920s, American and Swedish lobbying groups had different views on censorship legislation. In 1911, Sweden founded the first federal censorship bureau in the world, Statens biografbyrå. In America on the other hand, the National Board of Review vehemently opposed any federal attempts to legislate the contents of film. Instead, the National Board of Review implemented a different tactic to sanitize film by incentivizing high quality filmmaking through different strategies that were based on film producers’ voluntary cooperation. Through comparative critical discourse analysis of two case studies, this study found that the archival findings from Tullbergs film and Baumer films were symptomatic of being created during the evidence paradigm, as defined by Terry Cook, where the most useful documentation could be found in state institutions exerting control over film.

This dissertation examines selected love lyrics composed during the 1930s by Cole Porter, whose witty and urbane music epitomized the Golden era of American light music. These lyrics present an interesting paradox – a man who longed for his music to be accepted by the American public, yet remained indifferent to the social mores of the time. Porter offered trenchant social commentary aimed at a society restricted by social taboos and cultural conventions. The argument develops systematically through a chronological and contextual study of the influences of people and events on a man and his music. The prosodic intonation and imagistic texture of the lyrics demonstrate an intimate correlation between personality and composition which, in turn, is supported by the biographical content. / English / M.A. (English)