| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Policing Cinema: Movies and Censorship in Early-Twentieth-Century America. By Lee Grieveson. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. xiv, 348 pp. Cloth, $60.00, ISBN 0-520-23965-2. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 0-520-23966-0.)

Lee Grieveson's Policing Cinema will appeal most to readers who are interested in the relationship between governance and culture in the early twentieth century. It is an ambitious study of how censorship and its threat helped define the social function of cinema in its formative period, namely, the years from 1907 to 1915. At this time, cinema blossomed from one-reel films shown in nickelodeons to multireel feature films that defined classical Hollywood cinema. Grieveson argues that the struggle between "the regulatory authorities" (p. 4) and the film industry had a formative impact on the social and aesthetic identity of cinema. Following this line of reasoning, he maintains that elites exerted control through policies that included the efforts of the New York-based National Board of Censorship and of municipal, state, and federal legislatures. In this way, he concludes, the discussion over how to censor the cinema became a place where the elite successfully protected the dominant hierarchy of class, race, and gender, which was reproduced in classical Hollywood film.

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