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Author: Gregory D. Black
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521629058
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 332
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Book Description
For more than three decades the Catholic church, through its Legion of Decency, had the power to control the content of Hollywood films. From the mid-1930s to the late 1960s the Catholic Legion served as a moral guardian for the American public. Hollywood studios submitted their films to the Legion for a rating, which varied from general approval to condemnation. This book details how a religious organisation got control of Hollywood, and how films like A Streetcar Named Desire, Lolita, and Tea and Sympathy were altered by the Legion to make them morally acceptable. Documenting the inner workings of the Legion, The Catholic Crusade against the Movies also examines how the changes in the movie industry, and American society at large in the post-World War II era, eventually conspired against the Legion's power and so lead to its demise.
Author: Gregory D. Black
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521629058
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 332
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Book Description
For more than three decades the Catholic church, through its Legion of Decency, had the power to control the content of Hollywood films. From the mid-1930s to the late 1960s the Catholic Legion served as a moral guardian for the American public. Hollywood studios submitted their films to the Legion for a rating, which varied from general approval to condemnation. This book details how a religious organisation got control of Hollywood, and how films like A Streetcar Named Desire, Lolita, and Tea and Sympathy were altered by the Legion to make them morally acceptable. Documenting the inner workings of the Legion, The Catholic Crusade against the Movies also examines how the changes in the movie industry, and American society at large in the post-World War II era, eventually conspired against the Legion's power and so lead to its demise.
Author: Colleen McDannell
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195306562
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 377
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Book Description
Catholicism was all over movie screens in 2004. Mel Gibsons The Passion of the Christ was at the center of a media firestorm for months. A priest was a crucial character in the Academy Award-winning Million Dollar Baby. Everyone, it seemed, was talking about how religious stories should be represented, marketed, and received. Catholic characters, spaces, and rituals have been stock features in popular films since the silent era. An intensely visual religion with a well-defined ritual and authority system, Catholicism lends itself to the drama and pageantry of film. Moviegoers watch as Catholic visionaries interact with the supernatural, priests counsel their flocks, reformers fight for social justice, and bishops wield authoritarian power. Rather than being marginal to American popular culture, Catholic people, places, and rituals are all central to the world of the movie. Catholics in the Movies begins with an introductory essay that orients readers to the ways that films appear in culture and describes the broad trends that can be seen in the movies hundred-year history of representing Catholics. Each chapter is written by a noted scholar of American religion who concentrates on one movie that engages important historical, artistic, and religious issues and then places the film within American cultural and social history, discusses the film as an expression of Catholic concerns of the period, and relates the film to others of its genre. Tracing the story of American Catholic history through popular films, Catholics in the Movies should be a valuable resource for anyone interested in American Catholicism and religion and film.
Author: William Bruce Johnson
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442691824
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 541
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Book Description
Miracles and Sacrilege is the story of the epochal conflict between censorship and freedom in film, recounted through an in-depth analysis of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision striking down a government ban on Roberto Rossellini’s film The Miracle (1950). In this extraordinary case, the Court ultimately chose to abandon its own longstanding determination that film comprised a mere ‘business’ unworthy of free-speech rights, declaring for the first time that the First Amendment barred government from banning any film as ‘sacreligious.’ Using legal briefs, affidavits, and other court records, as well as letters, memoranda, and other archival materials to elucidate what was at issue in the case, William Bruce Johnson also analyzes the social, cultural, and religious elements that form the background of this complex and hard-fought controversy, focusing particularly on the fundamental role played by the Catholic Church in the history of film censorship. Tracing the development of the Church in the United States, Johnson discusses the reasons it found The Miracle sacrilegious and how it attained the power to persuade civil authorities to ban it. The Court’s decision was not only a milestone in the law of church-state relations, but it paved the way for a succession of later decisions which gradually established a firm legal basis for freedom of expression in the arts.
Author: Robert Pondillo
Publisher: SIU Press
ISBN: 0809385740
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 271
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Book Description
America’s First Network TV Censor: The Work of NBC’s Stockton Helffrichis a unique examination of early television censorship, centered around the papers of Stockton Helffrich, the first manager of the censorship department at NBC. Set against the backdrop of postwar America and contextualized by myriad primary sources including original interviews and unpublished material, Helffrich’s reports illustrate how early censorship of advertising, language, and depictions of sex, violence, and race shaped the new medium. While other books have cited Helffrich’s reports, none have considered them as a body of work, complemented by the details of Helffrich’s life and the era in which he lived. America’s First Network TV Censor explores the ways in which Helffrich’s personal history and social class influenced his perception of his role as NBC-TV censor and his tendency to ignore certain political and cultural taboos while embracing others. Author Robert Pondillo considers Helffrich’s life in broadcasting before and after the Second World War, and his censorial work in the context of 1950s American culture and emerging network television. Pondillo discusses the ways that cultural phenomena, including the arrival of the mid-twentieth-century religious boom, McCarthyism, the dawn of the Civil Rights era, and the social upheaval over sex, music, and youth, contributed to a general sense that the country was morally adrift and ripe for communist takeover. Five often-censored subjects—advertising, language, and depictions of sex, violence, and race—are explored in detail, exposing the surprising complexity and nuance of early media censorship. Questions of whether too many sadistic westerns would coarsen America’s children, how to talk about homosexuality without using the word “homosexuality,” and how best to advertise toilet paper without offending people were on Helffrich’s mind; his answers to these questions helped shape the broadcast media we know today.
Author: Philip Jenkins
Publisher:
ISBN: 0195176049
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 269
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Book Description
And the recent pedophile priest scandal, he shows, has revived many ancient anti-Catholic stereotypes."--BOOK JACKET.
Author: Eric Michael Mazur
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313013985
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 665
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Book Description
Comprising 91 A–Z entries, this encyclopedia provides a broad and comprehensive introduction to the topic of religion within film. Technology has enabled films to reach much wider audiences, enabling today's viewers to access a dizzying number of films that employ diverse symbolism and communicate a vast array of viewpoints. Encyclopedia of Religion and Film will provide such an audience with the tools to begin their own exploration of the deeper meanings of these films and grasp the religious significance within. Organized alphabetically, this encyclopedia provides more than 90 entries on the larger religious traditions, the major film-producing regions of the globe, the films that have stirred controversy, the most significant religious symbols, and the more important filmmakers. The included topics provide substantially more information on the intersection of religion and film than any of the similar volumes currently available. While the emphasis is on the English-speaking world and the films produced therein, there is also substantial representation of non-English, non-Western film and filmmakers, providing significant intercultural coverage to the topic.
Author: Kendall R. Phillips
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1567207243
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 232
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Book Description
At the heart of any history of controversial films is a strange paradox: while films, especially popular and mainstream films, are often portrayed as meaningless products of popular culture, those popular films involved in public controversies become the focal point of enormous cultural energy, political attention, and profoundly conflicting sets of principles. The ongoing culture wars continue to shape the American political landscape, and controversial films continue to be a major point of conflict. Controversial Cinema: The Films that Outraged America traces the history of controversial films and offers insights into why it is that certain films spark controversies, and how Americans typically react to controversial moviemaking. Since the widespread banning of DW Griffith's The Birth of a Nation, the American film industry has found itself embroiled in one political controversy after another. These controversies have centered on everything from the portrayal of the past, as in Griffith's film, to depictions of sex and sexuality, to the use of graphic violence, and issues of race, religion, and politics. In turn, segments of the American public have been driven to boycott, picket, and even censor those films they felt challenged their sense of decency. At the heart of this history of controversial films is a strange paradox: while films, especially popular and mainstream films, are often portrayed as meaningless products of popular culture, popular films involved in public controversies become the focal point of enormous cultural energy and political attention. The ongoing culture wars thus continue to shape the American political landscape, and controversial films continue to be a major point of conflict. In the course of this wide-ranging work, Kendall Phillips offers insights into the kinds of films that spark controversies, and the ways that Americans typically react to them. Organized around broad controversial themes and with particular attention to mainstream films since the dissolution of the Motion Picture Production Code in the mid-1960s, Controversial Cinema explores why films spark broad cultural controversies, how these controversies play out, and the long-term results. The four broad areas of controversy examined in the work are: Sex and Sexuality, Violence, Race, and Religion. Each chapter offers a broad overview of the history of these topics in controversial American films as well as more in-depth examinations of recent examples, including The Silence of the Lambs, Natural Born Killers, Do the Right Thing, and The Passion of the Christ. A final section of the book considers the broader issues of cultural politics in light of the long history of controversial cinema.
Author: A.S.
Publisher: Xlibris Corporation
ISBN: 1483665372
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 822
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Book Description
‘A Corrupt Tree’ is a unique, extensively researched, four volume exposé of the dark side of the Church of Rome. It reveals that for nearly two thousand years the Church’s fundamental characteristic has been its self-serving abuse of religio-corporate power. A large proportion of this first volume provides a detailed catalogue of the multitude of unholy popes. Included, are those who were immature, capricious, corrupt, lascivious, fanatical, senile, truly mad, megalomanic, tyrannical, murderous, and wholesale killers. It confirms that for many, many centuries the popes were corrupt, cruel, inhumane, and despotic. In an age of savagery they were the leaders in barbarity; in the subsequent age of enlightenment they have persistently resisted the march of progress. Additionally, the popes were wholesale killers who ‘made the principle of assassination a law of the Christian Church.’ Accordingly, the Church ‘has shed more innocent blood than any other institution that has ever existed among mankind.’ Here also are presented the cupidity, corruption, and sexual misconducts of lesser ecclesiastics, including cardinals, bishops, priests, monks and nuns. Pope Honorius III, for example, described his priests as ‘worse than beasts wallowing in their dung.’ The Church’s ruthless stranglehold on knowledge and learning is catalogued in detail. Mathematics, philosophy and science were repressed. Selected, applied theology ruled the world. ‘Everything was explained, but nothing was understood.’ The chapters on censorship reveal that even works of considerable literary or philosophical merit did not escape. A large number of writings which eventually became classics of European culture were condemned and prohibited. The Church also exhibited a vitriolic hatred of those who translated the Bible into the vernacular. Many of these men were annihilated. Holy books were burned in large numbers ‒ particularly the Jewish Talmud. It is clearly demonstrated that the Church held back civilisation for over fifteen hundred years. ‘Century after century passed away, and left the peasantry but little better than the cattle in the fields.’ Finally, the unholy behaviours of the numerous popes, cardinals, and lesser ecclesiastics are shown to establish, unequivocally, that the Church of Rome is neither holy nor apostolic. The ultimate message of these volumes is that to become an exemplary institution, and to play a truly humane role in the world’s future, the Catholic Church must change.
Author: James Chapman
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 1861895747
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 488
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Book Description
The cinema has been the pre-eminent popular art form of the 20th century. In Cinemas of the World, James Chapman examines the relationship between film and society in the modern world: film as entertainment medium, film as a reflection of national cultures and preoccupations, film as an instrument of propaganda. He also explores two interrelated issues that have recurred throughout the history of cinema: the economic and cultural hegemony of Hollywood on the one hand, and, on the other, the attempts of film-makers elsewhere to establish indigenous national cinemas drawing on their own cultures and societies. Chapman examines the rise to dominance of Hollywood cinema in the silent and early sound periods. He discusses the characteristic themes of American movies from the Depression to the end of the Cold War especially those found in the western and film noir – genres that are often used as vehicles for exploring issues central to us society and politics. He looks at national cinemas in various European countries in the period between the end of the First World War and the end of the Second, which all exhibit the formal and aesthetic properties of modernism. The emergence of the so-called "new cinemas" of Europe and the wider world since 1960 are also explored. "Chapman is a tough-thinking, original writer . . . an engaging, excellent piece of work."—David Lancaster, Film and History
Author: Jeremy Bonner
Publisher: CUA Press
ISBN: 0813215072
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 442
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Book Description
The Road to Renewal offers an important contribution to the study of Catholicism in the 1960s. Grounded in thorough archival research, the book breaks new ground in its examination of the implementation of Vatican II at the diocesan level.
