For more than three decades the Catholic church, through its Legion of Decency, had the power to control the content of Hollywood films. From the mid-1930s to the late 1960s the Catholic Legion served as a moral guardian for the American public. Hollywood studios submitted their films to the Legion for a rating, which varied from general approval to condemnation. This book details how a religious organisation got control of Hollywood, and how films like A Streetcar Named Desire, Lolita, and Tea and Sympathy were altered by the Legion to make them morally acceptable. Documenting the inner workings of the Legion, The Catholic Crusade against the Movies also examines how the changes in the movie industry, and American society at large in the post-World War II era, eventually conspired against the Legion's power and so lead to its demise.

Catholicism was all over movie screens in 2004. Mel Gibsons The Passion of the Christ was at the center of a media firestorm for months. A priest was a crucial character in the Academy Award-winning Million Dollar Baby. Everyone, it seemed, was talking about how religious stories should be represented, marketed, and received. Catholic characters, spaces, and rituals have been stock features in popular films since the silent era. An intensely visual religion with a well-defined ritual and authority system, Catholicism lends itself to the drama and pageantry of film. Moviegoers watch as Catholic visionaries interact with the supernatural, priests counsel their flocks, reformers fight for social justice, and bishops wield authoritarian power. Rather than being marginal to American popular culture, Catholic people, places, and rituals are all central to the world of the movie. Catholics in the Movies begins with an introductory essay that orients readers to the ways that films appear in culture and describes the broad trends that can be seen in the movies hundred-year history of representing Catholics. Each chapter is written by a noted scholar of American religion who concentrates on one movie that engages important historical, artistic, and religious issues and then places the film within American cultural and social history, discusses the film as an expression of Catholic concerns of the period, and relates the film to others of its genre. Tracing the story of American Catholic history through popular films, Catholics in the Movies should be a valuable resource for anyone interested in American Catholicism and religion and film.

Kommentierte Bibliografie. Sie gibt Wissenschaftlern, Studierenden und Journalisten zuverlässig Auskunft über rund 6000 internationale Veröffentlichungen zum Thema Film und Medien. Die vorgestellten Rubriken reichen von Nachschlagewerk über Filmgeschichte bis hin zu Fernsehen, Video, Multimedia.

In their study of religion and film, religious film analysts have tended to privilege religion. Uniquely, this study treats the two disciplines as genuine equals, by regarding both liturgy and film as representational media. Steve Nolan argues that, in each case, subjects identify with a represented 'other' which joins them into a narrative where they become participants in an ideological 'reality'. Finding many current approaches to religious film analysis lacking, Film, Lacan and the Subject of Religion explores the film theory other writers ignore, particularly that mix of psychoanalysis, Marxism and semiotics - often termed Screen theory - that attempts to understand how cinematic representation shapes spectator identity. Using translations and commentary on Lacan not originally available to Screen theorists, Nolan returns to Lacan's contribution to psychoanalytic film theory and offers a sustained application to religious practice, examining several 'priest films' and real-life case study to expose the way liturgical representation shapes religious identity. Film, Lacan and the Subject of Religion proposes an interpretive strategy by which religious film analysts can develop the kind of analysis that engages with and critiques both cultural and religious practice.

Site of the world's busiest and most lucrative harbor throughout the first half of the twentieth century, the Port of New York was also the historic preserve of Irish American gangsters, politicians, longshoremen's union leaders, and powerful Roman Catholic pastors. This is the demimonde depicted to stunning effect in Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront (1954) and into which James T. Fisher takes readers in this remarkable and engaging historical account of the classic film's backstory. Fisher introduces readers to the real "Father Pete Barry" featured in On the Waterfront, John M. "Pete" Corridan, a crusading priest committed to winning union democracy and social justice for the port's dockworkers and their families. A Jesuit labor school instructor, not a parish priest, Corridan was on but not of Manhattan's West Side Irish waterfront. His ferocious advocacy was resisted by the very men he sought to rescue from the violence and criminality that rendered the port "a jungle, an outlaw frontier," in the words of investigative reporter Malcolm Johnson. Driven off the waterfront, Corridan forged creative and spiritual alliances with men like Johnson and Budd Schulberg, the screenwriter who worked with Corridan for five years to turn Johnson's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1948 newspaper exposé into a movie. Fisher's detailed account of the waterfront priest's central role in the film's creation challenges standard views of the film as a post facto justification for Kazan and Schulberg's testimony as ex-communists before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. On the Irish Waterfront is also a detailed social history of the New York/New Jersey waterfront, from the rise of Irish American entrepreneurs and political bosses during the World War I era to the mid-1950s, when the emergence of a revolutionary new mode of cargo-shipping signaled a radical reorganization of the port. This book explores the conflicts experienced and accommodations made by an insular Irish-Catholic community forced to adapt its economic, political, and religious lives to powerful forces of change both local and global in scope.

America’s First Network TV Censor: The Work of NBC’s Stockton Helffrichis a unique examination of early television censorship, centered around the papers of Stockton Helffrich, the first manager of the censorship department at NBC. Set against the backdrop of postwar America and contextualized by myriad primary sources including original interviews and unpublished material, Helffrich’s reports illustrate how early censorship of advertising, language, and depictions of sex, violence, and race shaped the new medium. While other books have cited Helffrich’s reports, none have considered them as a body of work, complemented by the details of Helffrich’s life and the era in which he lived. America’s First Network TV Censor explores the ways in which Helffrich’s personal history and social class influenced his perception of his role as NBC-TV censor and his tendency to ignore certain political and cultural taboos while embracing others. Author Robert Pondillo considers Helffrich’s life in broadcasting before and after the Second World War, and his censorial work in the context of 1950s American culture and emerging network television. Pondillo discusses the ways that cultural phenomena, including the arrival of the mid-twentieth-century religious boom, McCarthyism, the dawn of the Civil Rights era, and the social upheaval over sex, music, and youth, contributed to a general sense that the country was morally adrift and ripe for communist takeover. Five often-censored subjects—advertising, language, and depictions of sex, violence, and race—are explored in detail, exposing the surprising complexity and nuance of early media censorship. Questions of whether too many sadistic westerns would coarsen America’s children, how to talk about homosexuality without using the word “homosexuality,” and how best to advertise toilet paper without offending people were on Helffrich’s mind; his answers to these questions helped shape the broadcast media we know today.

From struggles over identity politics in the 1990s to current concerns about a clash of civilizations between Islam and Christianity, culture wars play a prominent role in the twenty-first century. Movies help to define and drive these conflicts by both reflecting and shaping cultural norms, as well as showing what violates those norms. In this pathfinding book, Daniel S. Cutrara employs queer theory, cultural studies, theological studies, and film studies to investigate how cinema represents and often denigrates religion and religious believers—an issue that has received little attention in film studies, despite the fact that faith in its varied manifestations is at the heart of so many cultural conflicts today. Wicked Cinema examines films from the United States, Europe, and the Middle East, including Crimes and Misdemeanors, The Circle, Breaking the Waves, Closed Doors, Agnes of God, Priest, The Last Temptation of Christ, and Dogma. Central to all of the films is their protagonists' struggles with sexual transgression and traditional belief systems within Christianity, Judaism, or Islam—a struggle, Cutrara argues, that positions believers as the Other and magnifies the abuses of religion while ignoring its positive aspects. Uncovering a hazardous web of ideological assumptions informed by patriarchy, the spirit/flesh dichotomy, and heteronormativity, Cutrara demonstrates that ultimately these films emphasize the "Otherness" of the faithful through a variety of strategies commonly used to denigrate the queer, from erasing their existence, to using feminization to make them appear weak, to presenting them as dangerous fanatics.

The Papacy in the Age of Totalitarianism, 1914-1958 examines the most momentous years in papal history. Popes Benedict XV (1914-1922), Pius XI (1922-1939), and Pius XII (1939-1958) faced the challenges of two world wars and the Cold War, and threats posed by totalitarian dictatorships like Italian Fascism, German National Socialism, and Communism in Russia and China. The wars imposed enormous strains upon the unity of Catholics and the hostility of the totalitarian regimes to Catholicism lead to the Church facing persecution and martyrdom on a scale similar to that experienced under the Roman Empire and following the French Revolution. At the same time, these were years of growth, development, and success for the papacy. Benedict healed the wounds left by the 'modernist' witch hunt of his predecessor and re-established the papacy as an influence in international affairs through his peace diplomacy during the First World War. Pius XI resolved the 'Roman Question' with Italy and put papal finances on a sounder footing. He also helped reconcile the Catholic Church and science by establishing the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and took the first steps to move the Church away from entrenched anti-Semitism. Pius XI continued his predecessor's policy of the 'indigenisation' of the missionary churches in preparation for de-colonisation. Pius XII fully embraced the media and other means of publicity, and with his infallible promulgation of the Assumption in 1950, he took papal absolutism and centralism to such heights that he has been called the 'last real pope'. Ironically, he also prepared the way for the Second Vatican Council.

Dance on its Own Terms: Histories and Methodologies anthologizes a wide range of subjects examined from dance-centered methodologies: modes of research that are emergent, based in relevant systems of movement analysis, use primary sources, and rely on critical, informed observation of movement. The anthology fills a gap in current scholarship by emphasizing dance history and core disciplinary knowledge rather than theories imported from disciplines outside dance. Individual chapters serve as case studies that are further organized into three categories of significant dance activity: performance and reconstruction, pedagogy and choreographic process, and notational and other written forms that analyze and document dance. The breadth of the content reflects the richness and vibrancy of the dance field; each deeply informed examination serves as a window opening onto the larger world of dance. Conceptually, each chapter also raises concerns and questions that point to broadly inclusive methodological applications. Engaging and insightful, Dance on its Own Terms represents a major contribution to research on dance.

At the turn of the twentieth century, the proliferation of movies attracted not only the attention of audiences across America but also the apprehensive eyes of government officials and special interest groups concerned about the messages disseminated by the silver screen. Between 1907 and 1926, seven states -- New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Virginia, Kansas, Maryland, and Massachusetts -- and more than one hundred cities authorized censors to suppress all images and messages considered inappropriate for American audiences. Movie studios, hoping to avoid problems with state censors, worrying that censorship might be extended to the federal level, and facing increased pressure from religious groups, also jumped into the censoring business, restraining content through the adoption of the self-censoring Production Code, also known as the Hays code.But some industry outsiders, independent distributors who believed that movies deserved the free speech protections of the First Amendment, brought legal challenges to censorship at the state and local levels. Freedom of the Screen chronicles both the evolution of judicial attitudes toward film restriction and the plight of the individuals who fought for the right to deliver provocative and relevant movies to American audiences. The path to cinematic freedom was marked with both achievements and roadblocks, from the establishment of the Production Code Administration, which effectively eradicated political films after 1934, to the landmark cases over films such as The Miracle (1948), La ronde (1950), and Lady Chatterley's Lover (1955) that paved the way for increased freedom of expression. As the fight against censorship progressed case by case through state courts and the U.S. Supreme Court, legal authorities and the public responded, growing increasingly sympathetic toward artistic freedom. Because a small, unorganized group of independent film distributors and exhibitors in mid-twentieth-century America fought back against what they believed was the unconstitutional prior restraint of motion pictures, film after 1965 was able to follow a new path, maturing into an artistic medium for the communication of ideas, however controversial. Government censors would no longer control the content of America's movie screens. Laura Wittern-Keller's use of previously unexplored archival material and interviews with key figures earned her the researcher of the year award from the New York State Board of Regents and the New York State Archives Partnership Trust. Her exhaustive work is the first to discuss more than five decades of film censorship battles that rose from state and local courtrooms to become issues of national debate and significance. A compendium of judicial action in the film industry, Freedom of the Screen is a tribute to those who fought for the constitutional right of free expression and paved the way for the variety of films that appear in cinemas today.