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The Censorship in American Film

In: Film and Music

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Kent Tsao
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The censorship in American Film

The earliest motion picture was initially exposed by a Californian Eadweard Muybridge around the year of 1875 with the bet of whether or not all four hooves of a horse are off the ground during racing, which the idea was further developed by a well known inventor Thomas Alva Edison and one of his employees William Kennedy Laurie Dickson, who was an electrical engineer and photographer. After a series of experiments on the mechanics and the film medium itself, Edison’s company, not only invented the devices that fundamentally change the world like telephone and electric and etc., but also introduced the first ever motion picture apparatus, Kinetograph, therefore “movies in America were born.” (Jon Lewis, American Film 10) The year was 1891, only 16 years apart from Eadweard Muybridge’s unintended discovery. Since then, the wind of motion pictures had been blew to European countries like Great Britain and France. 1895, two French people, Auguste and Louis Lumiere, as known as the Lumiere brothers first showcased the motion pictures using Cinematographe to general public thus declared the era of silent movies. Soon a year later, in 1896, Thomas Edison also showcased the motion pictures to the general public with Vitascope, the first time in America cinema history. After the success of nickelodeon parlors and other film houses, the early movies play a significant role of “emerging consumer culture, in which one paid one’s money and got in return some sort of amusement, some sort of escape from the daily grind.” (Jon Lweis, American Film 16)
When one discusses the so called break through of censorship film like Public Enemy in 1931, one ought to look at the root of the censorship all the way back to where it had started. The earliest censorship in America Film can be dated from the beginning of the cinema, as

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