Monitoring the Movies: The Fight over Film Censorship in Early Twentieth-Century Urban America
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.67 (948 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 1477313931 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 272 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2015-05-10 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
Fronc provides a rich and diverse portrait of the social matrix that informed the shape, success, and limits of the National Board of Review’s efforts to encourage better films and defeat censorship laws." (Matthew H. "This is an extremely important book, a major, highly readable, well-researched contribution to the scholarship on the history of movie censorship and regulation in the Progressive era. By mining primary sources from institutional records, Jennifer Fronc is able to provide the first account that really gets inside the workings of the National Board of Review." (Kathryn Fuller-Seeley, University of Texas at Austin, author of At the Picture Show
Jennifer Fronc traces the NB's Progressive-era founding in New York; its evolving set of "standards" for directors, producers, municipal officers, and citizens; its "city plan," which called on citizens to report screenings of condemned movies to local officials; and the spread of the NB's influence into the urban South. The National Board of Review of Motion Pictures (NB), a civic group founded in New York City in 1909, emerged as a national cultural chaperon well suited to protect this emerging form of expression from state incursions.Using the National Board's extensive files, Monitoring the Movies offers the first full-length study of the NB and its campaign against motion-picture censorship. Many who opposed the governmental regulation of film conceded that some entity—boards populated by trusted civic leaders, for example—needed to safeguard
Jennifer Fronc is an associate professor of history at the University of Massachusetts–Amherst. She is the author of New York Undercover: Private Surveillance in the Progressive Era.