In 1915 the United States Supreme Court decided that movies did not deserve the free speech protection given to newspapers. Motion pictures, the justices wrote, were "a business, pure and simple," able to excite audiences for evil as well as good. In Mutual Film Corporation v. Industrial Commission of Ohio (1915), the Court held that films were a business that states could censor, and for decades many states and cities ran censorship boards. The reason was the medium's power. Governments, churches and studios all understood that film could move huge audiences, and each tried to steer that power.

Propaganda

Propaganda is persuasion for a cause that leans on emotion rather than open argument. Film suits it well: it reaches crowds, works on feeling and can make an idea look like a fact of nature. The young Soviet state paid for films such as Battleship Potemkin to tell the story of the revolution. Nazi Germany went further. Joseph Goebbels' propaganda ministry took control of the film industry, Jewish filmmakers were driven out, and films such as The Eternal Jew (1940) spread hatred that prepared the ground for murder.

The best known Nazi film is a record of a party meeting. Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will (1935) presented the 1934 Nazi Party rally at Nuremberg as a mythic spectacle. Democracies made propaganda too. During the Second World War, Frank Capra directed the Why We Fight series for the United States Army, explaining the war to soldiers and civilians. Defenders note an important difference: Capra argued for a cause in a society where opponents could still speak and the press could answer. Critics reply that his films also simplified the enemy and that the techniques of persuasion were much the same.

Censorship and the Production Code

To head off government censorship after a run of scandals, the studios formed a trade association in 1922 led by Will Hays, a former Postmaster General. The Production Code, adopted by Hollywood in 1930 and strictly enforced from 1934, set moral rules for what American films could show. Under it, crime must not be shown to pay, so criminals were punished by the final reel; religion could not be mocked; nudity and many words were banned; and romantic relationships between Black and white characters were forbidden outright. Enforcement tightened in 1934 after the Catholic Legion of Decency threatened boycotts, and Joseph Breen's office could deny a film the seal it needed to play in most theaters.

Defenders argued that the Code protected families and spared the industry from dozens of conflicting local censors, and admirers point out that filmmakers learned to suggest what they could not show, often with great wit. Critics answer that the Code enforced one narrow morality, kept racial segregation on the screen, required gay characters to be hidden or punished, and kept American films from dealing honestly with adult life.

The Code weakened as the studio system broke up, foreign films arrived and television competed for viewers. The courts changed too. In Joseph Burstyn, Inc. v. Wilson (1952), known as the "Miracle" case, the Supreme Court gave films First Amendment protection, overturning the 1915 decision. In 1968 the Code was replaced by a rating system that labels films by age suitability instead of banning content.

Political pressure

Censorship can also target people. In 1947 the "Hollywood Ten," writers and directors who refused to answer congressional questions about Communist ties, were blacklisted and, after losing their appeals in 1950, jailed. The screenwriter Dalton Trumbo kept working under false names and won an Academy Award under one of them before receiving open credit for Spartacus (1960). Elsewhere, governments still jail filmmakers. Iran banned the director Jafar Panahi from making films in 2010; he kept making them anyway, and his work has been smuggled abroad for festival screenings.

Worked example: Triumph of the Will

Use the tools from earlier levels. The film opens in the clouds, with Hitler's plane descending over Nuremberg like a god arriving, its shadow passing over marching columns below. Throughout, Hitler is filmed from low angles that make him loom. The crowds appear in extreme long shots, arranged in huge geometric blocks in which individual faces vanish. There is almost no narration; the film argues through images, rhythm and Herbert Windt's music, not through claims a viewer could check.

Riefenstahl later insisted she had simply documented an event. But parts of the rally were planned with her cameras in mind, and the editing selects and shapes every moment. Level 5's question applies: what was arranged, and was the viewer told?

The film is still studied because its craft is undeniable, and that is exactly the danger. It turns living people into ornaments of a leader's glory, using them as means to an end. Learning how it works does not make a viewer admire it. It makes a viewer harder to fool.