Media Effects and the Subjectification of Film Regulation

As Annette Kuhn points out in Cinema, Censorship and Sexuality, 1909–1925, debates over film censorship are dominated by those who see it as a repressive act, an act of cutting out, of excision, of rejection, of exclusion, of freedom of expression undermined and subjects forbidden. Within these debates censorship is conceived as a problem, and questions revolve around "the extent to which prohibitions on the content of films constitute a justifiable exercise of power" (Kuhn 2). The problem with this "prohibition model," Kuhn suggests, is twofold: first, it implies that censorship is an act carried out by a singular empowered person or institution; and second, it assumes that the process of censorship can only be conceived as a "repressive" power. As such, the censor can never hold anything other than a negative relation with the rights and freedoms of others.

What Kuhn sets out to demonstrate is that the power to censor texts does not lie in the hands of a single public body; instead, the regulation of cinema takes place within the context of a network of relations between a number of interrelated though frequently competing institutions, practices, and discourses. Or, as Foucault might put it, the regulatory apparatus extends beyond any single institution to a "thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions" ("Confession" 194). As a result, Kuhn suggests the regulation of cinema should be understood "not so much as an imposition of rules upon some preconstituted entity, but as an ongoing and always provisional process of constituting objects from and for its own practices" (7). Censorship, then, is always a matter for debate, and what is considered appropriate or necessary censorship is always in tension. Perhaps more important, the work of these regulatory discourses is never simply "prohibitive" or "repressive." Rather, as Foucault suggests, power is always productive in its effects.

Indeed, as Lee Grieveson argues in relation to early cinema, early debates on censorship were not only directed toward the "cultural control of cinema, on what could be shown" but frequently engaged with the question of "how cinema should function in the social body" (23). As a result, these regulatory discourses not only worked to produce "censorable texts" but, in their treatment and handling of "controversial" films during this period, regulatory bodies like the British Board of Film Censors (BBFC) in Great Britain and the National Board of Censorship (NBC) in the United States worked to shape cinema in very specific ways.

For example, after a series of highly controversial films were released in Great Britain in the early 1910s the BBFC chose to refuse all health education films a certificate not because "such films might be 'indecorous,' but because the cinema was . . . not a suitable place to air matters of potential controversy . . . Cinemas, in other words, were seen as exclusively for 'entertainment' films, and entertainment films were to be neither educational nor controversial" (Kuhn 66). Similarly, in the United States the NBC was forced to seriously reconsider its policy of promoting cinema as a site of public education after the release of two highly controversial "white slave" films in 1913. It admitted that the "lack of dialogue and emphasis on the dramatic" made film a "difficult medium" to achieve educative goals and concluded that cinemas were "primarily places of amusement and not of serious discussion and education" (qtd. in Grieveson 184), prompting the nascent American film industry to move away from the production of potentially controversial "educational" films and focus instead on "the self-enclosed space of the fictive and the harmlessly 'entertaining'" (Grieveson 184). As Grieveson suggests, far from "repressing" the film industry, the regulatory debates that unfolded in the early years of the twentieth century significantly contributed to the American film industry's self-definition as a producer of entertainment and significantly shaped the development of the fictional, narrative, and ideological norms central to classical Hollywood cinema. However, while the practices of these censorship bodies may well have been "productive," they were not exactly "libertarian." And although institutions like the BBFC, the NBC, and later...