1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910456773603321

Autore

Johnson William Bruce

Titolo

Miracles & sacrilege : Roberto Rossellini, the Church and film censorship in Hollywood / / William Bruce Johnson

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Toronto, [Ontario] ; ; Buffalo, [New York] ; ; London, [England] : , : University of Toronto Press, , 2008

©2008

ISBN

1-4426-8863-7

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (537 p.)

Disciplina

791.430973

Soggetti

Motion pictures - Censorship - United States - History

Freedom of speech - United States - History - 20th century

Motion pictures - Religious aspects - Catholic Church

Electronic books.

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Introduction -- 1. 'A Business Pure and Simple' -- 2. The Church, 'Modernism,' and 'Americanism' -- 3. A Church of Immigrants -- 4. A New Catholic-American Culture -- 5. Protestantism Balkanized -- 6. Reining In Hollywood -- 7. The Production Code -- 8. The Legion of Decency -- 9. The Breen Office -- 10. The Paramount Case -- 11. Cocktails and Communism -- 12. New Realities -- 13. Visions of Mary -- 14. Mary or Communism -- 15. The Priest as Public Figure -- 16. 'Woman Further Defamed' -- 17. 'A Sense of Decency and Good Morals' -- 18. 'The Law Knows No Heresy' -- 19. In the Supreme Court -- 20. Candour and Shame -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index

Sommario/riassunto

Miracles and Sacrilege is the story of the epochal conflict between censorship and freedom in film, recounted through an in-depth analysis of the U.S. Supreme Court's decision striking down a government ban on Roberto Rossellini's film The Miracle (1950). In this extraordinary case, the Court ultimately chose to abandon its own longstanding determination that film comprised a mere 'business' unworthy of free-speech rights, declaring for the first time that the



First Amendment barred government from banning any film as 'sacreligious.'Using legal briefs, affidavits, and other court records, as well as letters, memoranda, and other archival materials to elucidate what was at issue in the case, William Bruce Johnson also analyzes the social, cultural, and religious elements that form the background of this complex and hard-fought controversy, focusing particularly on the fundamental role played by the Catholic Church in the history of film censorship. Tracing the development of the Church in the United States, Johnson discusses the reasons it found The Miracle sacrilegious and how it attained the power to persuade civil authorities to ban it. The Court's decision was not only a milestone in the law of church-state relations, but it paved the way for a succession of later decisions which gradually established a firm legal basis for freedom of expression in the arts.