Censorship as a Dangerous Form of Constriction

One of the most dangerous aspects of the 20th century was how the National Board of Censorship and the Catholic Legion of Decency got away with heavily censoring films. Both bodies appeared to be trying to help filmgoers in terms of not being corrupted by what they watched. However, it’s this form of “moralism” that allows organizations to have more power than should be allotted them. The real question that has to be asked is what was the real rationale for why these organizations did what they did? What effect did their actions have of the filmmaking industry? What effect their restraint had on the artists in that industry?
One of my main problems with self censorship is the arbitrary decision of who are the “up-standing citizens” who should be censoring films. The leading member of the National Board of Censorship (a body run by film distributors in order to not have the government dictate what state their films should appear in), Dr. Oberholtzer, felt that the people who comprise the Board that had complete control over whether or not a film could be censored, was any person who was not a criminal or illicit person and not a politician (Saylor, 146). That’s a very generalized group of people. Therefore, say someone feels the need to censor a given movie, that arbitrary person gets power over someone who may actually know what they are doing. That person on the board may simply not like a given scene because they don’t politically agree with it, ect. Therefore, they’ll censor that given movie. The fact that the artist who actually created the product had no say in the matter during the National Board of Censorship’s reign, over an arbitrary person who is dictating the outcome of what happens to the film, is completely anti-Democratic and illogical. Self-censorship was a fake form of Democracy, that was simply window dressing over the fact that censorship itself is an anti-Democratic principle that takes all the power away from the artist. For what is an artist but a symbol of freedom of speech?
The criteria that the Board used during its reign made no sense either. Even though the first two edicts were typical censorship ideology, (films should be censored for their, “obscenity, indecency and inhumanity” and for their “sacrilegious character”) the criteria also included, “Their tendency to present crime in an informatory way” and “Their incitement to riot and attacks upon public order” (Saylor, pg. 146.) Now, these last two edicts are silly, and also indicative of how condescending the censorship board was towards the public populace that went to the movies. The censorship board’s main aim, in my opinion, was to simply dumb down the movies. The third criteria basically shows that the censorship board wanted to take out any form of reality out of a given movie because of fear that the young would be highly influenced by viewing illicitness in movies. The censorship board is basically stating here that movies are entertainment and entertainment only; they should never have the power to show the workings of the real world, because audiences wouldn’t be able to handle this. This doesn’t make any sense, considering that the news certainly shows readers and viewers what the real world is really like. As if simply showing crime in a movie would create an illicit reaction out of someone. Modern audiences see crime all the time in a given movie, and they haven’t rioted the streets. The censorship board during their reign basically stated that audiences couldn’t handle the documentary field in anyway. This censored view of life is a fake blasé view, and many older films during the censorship board’s reign can attest to this. What were the censorship board trying to do? Were they trying to police a world’s populace by trying to show them a fake view of the world, in film? What does this say about the censorship board’s view of the intelligence of the standard film audience; that they were dumb and simply deserved sub-standard entertainment that didn’t make them think a little? The ramifications of the censorship board’s actions were extreme because they limited artistic freedom, thus limiting the potentialities of the film medium.
The shocking edict of that time was that movies were simply entertainment and were sub-standard in importance towards theater, painting, novels, music, ect. Really, what the censorship board’s prime aim was to make cinema the sub-standard art form that they initially felt it always was. Mature themes like violence are an important part of an artist’s vision. If Dostoyevsky were censored there would never be masterpieces of literature like Crime and Punishment and Notes from the Underground. They would be highly botched works, and more importantly they wouldn’t make any sense, had they been censored. They might even have been withdrawn had they existed under conditions like the censorship board. Dostoyevsky’s never got to exist during the early half of the 20th century in film because of self censorship. Yes, there are filmmakers out there who use violence tastelessly and ill morally in their films. However, should their bad judgment be used against filmmakers of exquisite taste? Well, that’s what happened under the censorship board’s reign. They basically used film as instructive moral doctrine for audiences, which is in itself a form of usury. Is it any wonder that the Catholic Church had leeway over filmmaker’s rights?
When the pact between both the National Board of Censorship and the Catholic Legion of Decency occurred, ironies ensued because of the vast differences between both organizations. When Elia Kazan reached a disagreement with the the National Board of Censorship on the rape scene at the end of A Streetcar Named Desire, his reasoning was that, “The rape of Blanche is a pivotal, integral truth in the play, without which the play loses its meaning, which is the ravishment of the tender, the sensitive, the delicate, by the savage and brutal forces of modern society. It is a poetic plea for comprehension” (Brook, 348.) By this time, in my opinion the times were changing and the Board realized that they had to move with the mandate of the times. It’s with A Streetcar Named Desire that the Board finally realized the transgression of their ways, and permitted the rape to be subtly hinted at, for the sake of the initial message that the filmmakers were trying to come through with. They finally realized that moments such as the one with Blanche shouldn’t be censored or else the meaning of the film would be lost; the filmmakers were not trying to sneak pornographic material in the film just for the thrill of it; the illicit material had meaning behind it. Unfortunately, almost as a haunting reminder of the stupid decisions that the Board had pulled in the past for the sake of “morality”, the Catholic Legion of Decency, with the clout that the Board gave them in the past, had final cut over A Streetcar Named Desire. (Brook, 349.)
Naturally, Kazan was outraged. The fact that a filmmaker even has to deal with a Religious body is ludicrous; Tennessee Williams and Catholicism should not be uttered in the same sentence (Brook, 349.) Just as there should be a separation of church and state, there should be a separation of church and art. As mentioned before, what appears illicit may not be merely illicit, if handled by an artist. Well, a body primarily concentrating on simply what is or appears moral doesn’t care about those considerations. If anything, it’s more political than that. The person being affected by this the most, of course, speaks the most eloquently about the situation, because they are experiencing the situation firsthand. Here’s Elia Kazan: “They didn’t give a damn about the beauty or artistic value of the picture. To them it was just a piece of entertainment. It was business, not art. They wanted to get the entire family to see the picture. They didn’t want anything that might keep anyone away. At the same time they wanted it to be dirty enough to pull people in. The whole business was rather an outrage” (Brook, 349). If one didn’t know better they may think that Kazan was describing the National Board of Censorship.
Even though the National Board of Censorship’s intentions were sound, the idea being that self-censorship is the best alternative opposed to government censorship for the sake of the integrity of the artist, they missed the fact the censorship simply shouldn’t exist. The idea that they or the Catholic Legion of Decency had the right to take over an artist’s vision by censoring it is far more immoral than any illicit behavior depicted in the films being censored, as the National Board of Censorship found out, only to late. They were being made irrelevant by an organization that they themselves gave power to. This is the inherent problem when organizations go mad with the idea that they and they alone can enforce morality; they begin to dupe themselves.