Synopses & Reviews
Using original research, this book explores the recurring debates in Britain and America about children and how they use and respond to the media, focusing on a key example: the controversy surrounding children and cinema in the 1930s. It explores the attempts to control children's viewing, the theories that supported these approaches and the extent to which they were successful. The author develops her challenging proposition that children are agents in their cinema viewing, not victims; showing how these angels with dirty faces colonized the cinema. She reveals their distinct cinema culture and the ways in which they subverted or circumvented official censorship including the Hays Code and the British Board of Film Censors, to regulate their own viewing of a variety of films, including
Frankenstein,
King Kong and
The Cat and the Canary.
Synopsis
Children have long been one of cinema's largest audiences yet, from its infancy, cinema has in the minds of moral watchdogs accompanied a succession of pastimes and new technologies as catalysts for juvenile delinquency. From 'penny dreadfuls' and comic books to television, 'video nasties' and computer games, and more recently, gangsta rap, mobile phones and the Internet - all have been seen as threats to children's safety, health, morality and literacy, and cinema is no exception. Writing with energy and wit and mobilising impressive original research, Sarah J. Smith explores recurring debates in Britain and America about children and how they use and respond to the media, focusing on a key example: the controversy and apparent moral panic surrounding children and cinema in its heyday, the 1930s. She shows how children colonised the cinema and established their own distinct cinema culture. And, considering films from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs to Scarface and King Kong, she explores attempts to control children's viewing, the underlying ideas that supported these approaches and the extent to which they were successful.
Revealing the ways in which children subverted or circumvented official censorship - including the Hays Code and the British Board of Film Censors - she develops a challenging new proposition: that children were agents in the regulation of their own viewing, not simply passive consumers.
About the Author
Sarah J. Smith is Lecturer in History and Director of Open Studies at the University of Reading.
Table of Contents
The Doom of a Generation? * How Bridget Served the Salad Undressed: The Regulation of Cinema 1895-1929 * It Ain't No Sin: The Regulation of Cinema 1929-1939 * Moral Panic or Flapdoodle? * Children as Censors * Matinees, Clubs and Children's Cinema Culture * Children and Cinema; Control and Resistance
The Doom of a Generation? * How Bridget Served the Salad Undressed: The Regulation of Cinema 1895-1929 * It Ain't No Sin: The Regulation of Cinema 1929-1939 * Moral Panic or Flapdoodle? * Children as Censors * Matinees, Clubs and Children's Cinema Culture * Children and Cinema; Control and Resistance