Sex Scene On Film History

This paper was prepared for Introduction to Film History, Module 1 Homework Assignment, taught by Professor Stephanie Sandifer.

The article describes the relationship between censorship and screwball comedies as a causal one. Pre-code films would brazenly use female sexuality to make more money through straightforward sex appeal, using

This source focuses on the rise of changing sexual morals and women being a symbol of sexual activity in the new workplace, on screens (in films). One of the biggest areas of change and controversy was sexual morals. Sex outside of marriage became more common, and contraceptive advice was openly available for the first time. A big gap was developing between the attitudes of young people and their people or traditional women and flappers. The much freer sex of the 1920s horrified many older Americans. They blamed cinema for its blatant use of sex symbols such as Clara Bow.

The censorship conflicts in the 1900s were extremely intriguing and intense. Around the end of the 1920s, individuals possessed immense moral shifts powered by religious groups during the Great Depression, which resulted in decisions that created a new revolution that dealt particularly with the regulation of content of films. Consequently, in 1934, at the same time that the “Golden Age of Hollywood” began, the Hollywood Production code was formally implemented. The film

Early cinema is often referred to as a progression to narrative cinema, Tom Gunning would argue that it was not a progression but had its own purpose and coined the term The Cinema of Attractions in his essay ‘Now you see it, Now you don’t’. This is the concept that a large quantity of the first film makers produced films that were more about the spectacle, most of the films leading up to 1900 reflected the fascination with technology and how things happened rather than why. Gunning noted that there were three assumptions of film; the general ideas that people had about the timeline of film and where it would end up. There is the cinematic assumption, the idea that film was ‘restricted to the technological reproduction of theatre’ (Gunning T.1993) early cinema was primitive and only a practice for what was to come. The narrative assumption is that film is ‘only important as it is a predecessor to a more engaging and effective form of film,’ (Gunning T. 1993) this suggests that narrative cinema is the natural form of film. The final assumption is the idea that ‘cinema only truly appeared when it discovered its mission of telling stories.’ (Metz C. 1974) These assumptions all encompass the idea that narrative is the end form of film. In this essay I am going to discuss Tom Gunning’s theory of The Cinema of Attractions and the differences between them and narratively driven films.

Ever since Thomas Edison invented the Kinetiscope in 1894, films have been reaching its way to the heart of American culture. Since the roaring twenties, where the United States began to see the first movie theaters to the 1960’s, where films are officially a source of leisure and escape from reality. Films influenced American culture between the 1920’s through 1960’s by becoming an increasingly popular form of leisure for years to come while causing scandals, riots, and movements about films or about the idea of films in general by displaying issues in society such as racism, forming a need for censorship laws. Films have also provided a fantasy world for their audiences by showing a film about someone in their perfect life using ethical

During the early years of Hollywood, films had very few regulations on how they can be made. From 1922 till 1930, people were outraged at Hollywood that they have no rules on how they should make films. In response, religious groups were editing movies for their local communities to make them save for their standards. Eventually the government started to talk about enforcing rules that would censor Hollywood movies for the public. To stop that from happening, Hollywood enforced their own rules called the Motion Picture Production Code or the Hays Code.

The documentary This Film is Not Yet Rated, provides an account about the MPAA and their rating system. The film contends three main arguments against the MPAA rating's prejudice between; sex and violent content, homosexual sex and heterosexual sex, and bloody and non-bloody violence, by their use of side-by-side comparisons. A main argument in the film is how the MPAA differs in its treatment of sexual content versus violent content. The documentary contends that main difference between NC-17 and R is that R would only show missionary position sex; while other type of sexual behaviors is NC-17. Side-by-side examinations of The Cooler and Scary Movie, is used as evidence for this argument.

So, now the question of how they could entertain without offending anyone come into play. Films from this period have been named the "Cinema of attractions" by film scholar Tom Gunning, in part, because they treat show over narrative. The popularity of film in its first decade was for some, a cause for concern. It faced challenges to produce longer pictures, which not only would advance their profitability, but also needed to be narrative, which in turn allowed films to carry ethical and good messages.

There has to be a reason as to why some films can have controversial language, physically inappropriate gestures, sexist comments are exceptional. In a recent research it gave a simple explanations towards why this is. Modern sexism is a multidimensional construct comprising covert attitudes supporting the unequal treatment of men and women(65) Most of what humans are taught in their morals is during childhood. In this chapter 3 called Gender roles, describes that humans are taught to stereotype gender since birth. an educational film about parenthood describes how to handle an infant differently because of the sex. A female infant is picked up automatically once she begins to cry compared to a male infant.

With reference to relevant cultural theories analyse the representation of sexuality in a film/television text of your choice.

The modern film industry was born around the beginning of the twentieth century. On April 23rd 1896 Thomas Edition showed the first publicly-projected motion picture at Koster and Bial's Music Hall in New York City. From there the film industry had an explosive growth rate. In fact,

(No Intro Yet) Due to the Great Depression that started in 1929, the film going audience had considerably diminished. In order to attract individuals back into movie theatres, studios produced films with themes and subjects that had great shock-value such as; violence, prostitution, and especially homosexuality. These subjects clashed with the preaching’s of the Production Code, as well as various local and national censor boards, and are known today as “pre-code” films. Although homosexuality was still a very taboo subject for society at the time, many studios were able to get past the laissez-faire individuals in the Hays Office, and display LGBT content and characters through onscreen insinuation or suggestion (Source). One of the first and central “pre-code” movies during Hollywood’s Golden Age to feature homosexuality is Josef von Sternberg’s hit film Morocco (1930), which stars Marlene Dietrich as a sexually independent woman. Dietrich created a sensation in the film during a scene where she’s clad in a suit and kisses a woman on the lips after a nightclub performance (Source). The juxtaposition of Dietrich’s femininity and the masculine imagery typically associated with a men’s suit can be seen to sexually magnetize both genders watching the scene. John Francis Dillon’s Call Her Savage (1932) is another “pre-code” film that implicitly displays homosexuality. In the film, two characters go to a nightclub where a duo of flamboyant waiters skip around the establishment

The art of film made it’s way into the penetration stage around the turn of the century and remained there until

It was not until the mid-1910’s did the film industry shift “towards a model that prized business legitimacy. This shift ultimately marginalized the woman filmmaker” (Mahar 133).