US politicians and the world of movies
Origins of a complex and ambivalent relationship
Abstract
The article analyzes the way in which US politicians dealt with the problems related to the appearance of cinema and the affirmation of films as a social phenomenon in the interwar period. In particular, both the executive apparatus and the Congress of Washington D.C. were concerned with the great capacity that directors and producers had in spreading new ideas and values among the masses. In those years, important questions (still relevant in our present time) arose. Where to set the limits of freedom of expression? To what extent is the State entitled to regulate the mass media sector and censor certain content? Can a democratic government produce artistic works in order to modify attitudes and opinions of its own citizens?
Downloads
References
Abel, Richard. “Labor movement: USA”. En Encyclopedia of early cinema, editado por Richard Abel, 178-182. London: Routledge, 2005.
Adams, Dale. “Saludos amigos: Hollywood and FDR’s Good neighbor policy”. Quarterly review of film and video 24, 3 (2007): 289-295. doi.org/10.1080/10509200500486395.
Auerbach, Jonathan. “McKinley at home: how early American cinema made news”. American quarterly 51, 4 (1999): 797–832. https://www.jstor.org/stable/30041673 .
Benjamin, Louise M. “Defining the public interest and protecting the public welfare in the 1920s: parallels between radio and movie regulation”. Historical journal of film, radio and television 12, 1 (1992): 87-101. doi.org/10.1080/01439689200260041.
Bennett, Todd. “The celluloid war: state and studio in Anglo-American propaganda film-making, 1939–1941”. The international history review 24, 1 (2002), 64-102. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40110034 .
Bogle, Donald. “Black beginnings: from Uncle Tom’s cabin to The birth of a nation”. En Representing blackness: issues in film and video, editado por Valerie Smith, 13-24. London: Athlone Press, 1997.
Brown, Karl. Adventures with D. W. Griffith. New York: Da Capo Press, 1976.
Butsch, Richard. “American movie audiences of the 1930s”. International labor and working–class history, 59, (2001): 106–120. https://www.jstor.org/stable/27672712.
Crafton, Donald. The talkies: American cinema’s transition to sound, 1926–1931. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.
Decordova, Richard. “The emergence of the star system in America”. En Stardom: industry of desire, editado por Christine Gledhill, 17‐29. London: Routledge, 1991.
Digital History. https://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/topic_display.cfm?tcid=124 .
Gilbert, Nora. Better left unsaid: Victorian novels, Hays code films, and the benefits of censorship. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013.
Gomery, Douglas. “Economic struggle and Hollywood imperialism: Europe converts to sound”. Yale French studies 60 (1980): 80‐93. doi.org/10.2307/2930006.
Grieveson, Lee. Policing cinema: movies and censorship in early–twentieth–century America. Berkeley, University of California Press, 2004.
Grieveson, Lee. “Regulation/censorship”. En Encyclopedia of early cinema, editado por Richard Abel, 960-963. London: Routledge, 2005.
Gunning, Tom. “Cinema of attractions”. En Encyclopedia of early cinema, editado por Richard Abel, 178-182. London: Routledge, 2005.
Gunning, Tom. D. W. Griffith and the origins of American narrative film: the early years at biograph. Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1991.
Hernández Rubio, José. “La crisis de la Gran Depresión en Estados Unidos: su reflejo en la industria del cine y en películas representativas”. Tesis doctoral, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, 2014.
Lindsay, Vachel. The art of the moving picture. New York, Macmillan, 1915.
Mainer, Carmen. “El cine norteamericano durante la gran depresión (1929–1939)”. Fotocinema. Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía, 6, (2013): 171-200. doi.org/10.24310/Fotocinema.2013.v0i6.5914 .
Mclane, Betsy A. A new history of documentary film. New York: Continuum, 2005.
Migliucci, Dario. “Intolerable, peligrosa, imprescindible: intelectuales y políticos estadounidenses ante la problemática de la propaganda en el periodo de entreguerras (1919-1939)”. Rubrica Contemporánea 5, 10 (2016): 45-64. https://revistes.uab.cat/rubrica/article/view/v5-n10_migliucci .
Migliucci, Dario. “La lucha institucional contra la propaganda de las grandes empresas estadounidenses durante la Gran Depresión.” Historia Contemporánea, 68 (2022): 171-202. https://doi.org/10.1387/hc.21442
Migliucci, Dario. “La propaganda como desafío para la democracia: la clase política estadounidense y la manipulación de la opinión pública (1919-1941)”. Tesis doctoral, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, 2019. https://eprints.ucm.es/id/eprint/58458/
Migliucci, Dario. “Opinión pública y propaganda: su definición, interpretación y significado en los Estados Unidos de la primera postguerra (1918-1922)”. Historia y Política, 40 (2018): 213-238. https://doi.org/10.18042/hp.40.08 .
Mould, David H. “Historical trends in the criticism of the newsreel and television news, 1930-1955”. Journal of popular film and television 12, 3 (1984): 118–126. https://doi.org/10.1080/01956051.1984.10661979 .
Munsterberg, Hugo, The photoplay: a psychological Study. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1916.
Musser, Charles. “At the beginning: motion picture production, representation and ideology at the Edison and Lumière companies”. En The silent cinema reader, editado por Lee Grieveson y Peter Kramer, 15‐30. London and New York: Routledge, 2004.
Musser, Charles. “Documentary”. En The Oxford history of world cinema, editado por Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, 86-94, New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey, The History of Cinema: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.
Rosenbloom, Nancy J. “From regulation to censorship: film and political culture in New York in the early twentieth century”. The journal of the Gilded age and Progressive era 3, 4 (2004): 369–406. https://www.jstor.org/stable/25132414 .
Shull, Michael Slade. Radicalism in American silent films, 1909–1929: a filmography and history. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, 2000.
Simmon, Scott. The films of D. W. Griffith. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Strauven, Wanda (ed.). The cinema of attractions reloaded. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006.
Thompson, Kristin y Bordwell, David. “The invention and the early years of the cinema 1890s‐1904”. En Film history: an introduction, editado por Kristin Thompson y David Bordwell, 14‐21. Boston: McGraw‐Hill, 2009.
Thompson, Kristin y Bordwell, David. “The late silent era in Hollywood, 1920-1928”. En Film history: an introduction, editado por Kristin Thompson y David Bordwell, 144–147. Boston: McGraw‐Hill, 2009.
Vaidhyanathan, Siva. Antisocial media: how Facebook disconnects us and undermines democracy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.
Vasey, Ruth. “The world-wide spread of cinema”. En The Oxford history of world cinema, editado por Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, 53-62. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
Vezzani, Roberto. “Fascist indirect propaganda in 1930s America: the distribution and exhibition of Italian fiction films”. The Italianist 38, 2 (2018): 156-173.
Waldman, Harry. Nazi films in America, 1933–1942. Jeerson, NC: McFarland, 2008.
Wallace, Michele. “The good lynching and ‘The birth of a nation’: discourses and aesthetics of Jim Crow”. Cinema journal 43, 1 (2003): 85-104. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1225932 .
Wittern–Keller, Laura. Freedom of the screen: legal challenges to State film censorship, 1915–1981. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2008.
HISPANIA NOVA is a journal duly registered, with ISSN 1138-7319 and legal deposit M 9472-1998.
The texts published in this journal - unless specifically stated- are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No derivative Works 3.0 Spain license. They can be copied, distributed and publicly communicated as long as the author, journal and institutions publishing the works are quoted, not use the material for commercial purposes and no derivative work is made. The complete license agreement can be found in https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/es/deed.en
Funding data
-
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
Grant numbers 2020-I
