Provisional title: Censorship and Film Form. The Impact of the Hays Code on the Aesthetic Principles of American Classical Cinema

Acceptance of proposals for the Notebook section: from November 1st to 26th, 2018.

 

Without intending to justify the good old days of censorship, quite a few scholars have pointed out the coincidence between the so-called “golden age” of classical cinema and the period in which the Hays Code was applied with particular firmness. The repressive apparatus and the splendour of American cinema are inevitably bound together, which would seem paradoxical if we did not know that all eroticism requires taboo, and that the ridiculous prohibitions of classical Hollywood may not have reduced the potential pleasure of its cinema, but rather they constituted the foundation of a whole narrative and mise en scène model based on the interruption and postponement of the spectator’s voyeur desire as a source of pleasure.

The truth is that the Production Code, popularly known for trivialities, reveals itself as a basic pillar of the Hollywood building if we consider that it aspired to regulate aspects of the classical film project that were not at all anecdotal: for more than thirty years, it governed over the representation of issues as central to any story as desire, the forbidden, transgression or evil, as well as over sex and violence, the most primary visual attractions of cinema as spectacle. A regulation that was so ambitious affected, in the first place, the content and discourse of the filmic texts. But, at the same time, by establishing the legitimate forms of representation of the bodies and articulating solutions that would allow addressing the sin in its stories, the Code had to necessarily generate a more than considerable impact also on the visual and narrative style that dominated for decades American cinema.

Strictly speaking, it should be recognized that self-regulation did not appear with Joseph I. Breen and the PCA in 1934, nor did it disappear altogether three decades later with the replacement of the Code by a system of qualifications. Since the beginning of the century, filmmakers had lived with moralistic regulations similar to those that will prevail from the mid-thirties on. Apart from that, according to certain authors who have questioned the supposed freedom during the Pre-Code era, the famous code of self-censorship was the consequence or the symptom, rather than the cause, of a certain agreement around what constituted an acceptable form of entertainment for the cultural and social elites of the United States: even if the text written by Daniel Lord and Martin Quigley had not been imposed with such severity, classical cinema would not have failed to reflect this consensus, at least to a large extent and up to a certain point.

However, the period that goes from 1934 to the end of the sixties is still exceptional in a particular sense: the application of censorship rules in an extremely universal, centralized, standardized way. A single code, a single administration to interpret it, patterns and routines offering typical solutions to typical problems. In short, the censorship being part, as one more code, of the same production process, rules in coexistence - sometimes peaceful, other times frankly conflicting - with all the other regulations, conventions and systems that operated simultaneously in that hyper-regulated factory (of dreams) that was American cinema.

In the line of some investigations that conceive censorship as an institution with a productive dimension, this monograph aims to trace the footprint of the Motion Picture Production Code and its precedents not on the content or the themes addressed, but on the narrative style and the mode of representation of classical Hollywood. Without wishing to exhaust the possible ways of approaching the issue, we offer below some of the main questions that intend to be addressed:

• Censorship and the consolidation of a narrative cinema. The Code regulated what could be said in a film but also, and especially, what could be shown, and for how long: more than themes, sex and violence constituted attractions that aroused the senses and offered a pure scopic pleasure, not dependent on its narrative connection. By condemning the unjustified gloating, trying to reduce to a minimum the visual spectacle that was irrelevant for the progress of the story - see the speed and cleanliness of violence, or the figure of the osculum interruptus -, we can think of censorship as a mechanism that contributed to reinforce the narrative character of classic film, the abstract stringing of causes and effects. But, to what extent was the scopic pleasure in classical cinema actually limited? What kind of voyeuristic attractions, conveniently standardized, managed to survive censorship? With what resources and mechanisms did Hollywood try to activate the spectatorial imagination as a substitute for the effective showing of the flesh? In short, and even before the establishment of the Hays Code, what role did self-censorship play in the step from a cinema of attractions to one of a narrative nature, ergo in the consolidation of the Institutional Mode of Representation?
• Censorship and narrative principles. Without going so far as to consent to the famous five reels of transgression followed by a final one of redemption or punishment, the Code was relatively permissive with the representation of evil as long as it did not come off well. The aim was to reduce moral ambiguity by establishing the basic principle of compensatory values and deterministic narrative patterns that will inevitably contribute, due to their reiteration as a formula, to a certain predictability, characteristic of narrative classicism. This tendency of the censorial administration to resolve the conflicting elements of the text by modifying the outcome, however, will entail quite a few problems in the construction of the plots, due to the imposition of abruptly leading to an often implausible resolution, putting at risk classical values as essential as transparency. At the same time, the censorship led to the abuse of the ellipsis to avoid the explicitness of the most recurrent situations, hardly suggesting everything that could not be expressed. Ambiguity and opacity thus filled the filmic text with holes and threatened even to crack the causal chain of the story, the result of a code of conventions developed with total cynicism to allow an innocent and sophisticated interpretation of the same filmic text. How was this secret language, full of misunderstandings, visual symbols and synecdoches set up? What role did the filmmakers, the industry, the censorial administration and film critics play in its consolidation and dissemination among the public? To what extent did censorship contribute to reinforce classical values of the Hollywood narrative style – such as clarity, predictability, closure - or, on the contrary, encouraged the introduction of problematic elements that led it towards its mannerist crisis?
• Censorship and production process. The Breen office participated as a creative collaborator in each project from its very start, trying to avoid intervention in the final stages of production, but preserving its right to cuts on the final editing. To what extent did the needs of censorship affect the dominant planning style, which tried to provide the editor with many short shots that were more or less interchangeable, easy to replace or eliminate? With what strategies did certain filmmakers try to protect themselves against censorship, choosing to plan in a way that would make it difficult to edit their work, developing a visual language that would allow transgressions to go unnoticed, etc.?
• Censorship in conflict with other systems. Given the importance of infidelity in comedy, transgression in melodrama, violence in gangster films and westerns, the repressed in terror, etc., it is evident that a good part of the conventions of the film genres were in conflict with the principles of the Hays Code. In fact, the definitive form adopted by certain genres – film noir being an emblematic case - can only be understood as a solution to the tensions between the foundations of a generic tradition and the demands of the Breen administration. In a way, the same conflict arises between censorship and the star system, given that the essential values that define cinematographic stardom were hardly compatible with puritan values. How were the mismatches between a problematic star – according to censorship – and the narrative archetypes available in Hollywood – after the filter of the Hays Code had been applied - solved in the classical films themselves? What strategies allowed to resolve, within the genres, the incompatibility of certain classical conventions with the censorship code?

 

References

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Couvares, Francis G. (ed.) (1996). Movie Censorship and American Culture. Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.

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Grieveson, L. (2004). Policing Cinema. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Jacobs, L. (1988). The Censorship of Blonde Venus: Textual Analysis and Historical Method. Cinema Journal, 27(3), 21-31. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1225289

— (1997). The Wages of Sin: Censorship and the Fallen Woman Film, 1928-1942. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

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Staiger, J. (1991). Self Regulation and the Classical Hollywood Cinema. Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, VI(1). https://journals.ku.edu/jdtc/article/view/1830/1793)

Vasey, R. (1997). The World According to Hollywood, 1918–1939. Exeter: University of Exeter Press.

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Williams, L. (2008). Screening Sex. Durham y Londres: Duke University Press.

 

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