This thesis deals with film censorship as a strategy of regulation; with the discourses, practices and powers involved in the censorship of films; with relations between these; and with what is produced in these relations. It is also a social history of film censorship. The inquiry's starting point is the birth of film censorship in Britain, and it focusses on the years between 1909 and 1925.. This was a period of uncertainty, Indeed of struggle, over what the new medium of cinema was to become: how it would be understood, defined, constituted, regulated, as a public sphere. In looking at the instrumentality of film censorship in the emergence of a public sphere of cinema during the earlier part of this century, this inquiry also draws in institutions, practices and discourses which at first sight might appear to have little or nothing to do with the censorship of films. Important among these are 'new' forms of knowledge about sexuality and society,and organisations devoted to the promotion of 'social purity'. At the centre of this study are three case histories involving specific films or groups of films-- commercial fiction features, both British and American--which were caught LIP fl various ways in processes of censorship during the 1909-1925 period. When each case is investigated with a view to revealing the power relations involved, prevailing understandings of censorship are opened up to critical scrutiny and reformulation. More than merely a series of fixed institutional practices of prohibition, film censorship emerges here as a set of processes, as in a play of shifting and contradictory forces. It also emerges as 2roductiv, in that, at a particular historical moment, processes of censorship were actively involved in the constitution of a public sphere of cinema, of cinema as an object of regulation.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:311897 |
| Date | January 1987 |
| Creators | Kuhn, Annette Frieda |
| Publisher | University College London (University of London) |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/10006539/ |
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