| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Lee Grieveson. Policing Cinema: Movies and Censorship in Early-Twentieth-Century America. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 2004. Pp. xiii, 348. $24.95.
Delivering both more and less than its title promises, this fascinating and well-researched study investigates how early regulatory strategies and film industry decisions combined to produce what would become "classical" Hollywood cinema. Lee Grieveson's geographic and chronological frames are relatively narrow—he focuses on New York City and Chicago between 1907 and 1915—but his analytic reach extends to the intersections of gender and class, modernity and masculinity, cinematic practice and social governance. In dialogue with both film studies scholars and historians, he argues that an emerging consensus about the "social function" of film as "harmless entertainment" was as important as narrative structure and film technique to the development of classical cinema.	1
Grieveson's conception of "policing" owes a great deal to Michel Foucault, and he situates film censorship within the broader regulatory space created as elites responded to the anxieties of modernity. While he follows earlier scholars who analyze the regulation of movies as a means of controlling working-class and immigrant Americans, he is concerned as much with middle-class self-definition as with top-down social control, and with the role of gender and race in constructing class sensibilities, regulatory mechanisms, and classical cinema itself. These themes are explored through four case studies that permit a nuanced and contextualized elaboration of the many interdependencies between regulatory discourses and filmic representation.	. . .

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