Abstract
Analysis of the environment in which films were viewed is essential in order to gain a fuller understanding of the British cinema experience during the Great War. The exhibition context is of particular importance during the war years, as cinema going throughout this period was far from idyllic; in fact, British cinemas were subject to police scrutiny and were a hub of sexual activity that the government strove to suppress. Many critics have located the reports of these activities as part of a wider ‘moral panic’ regarding the cinema and the films exhibited within it, predominantly orchestrated by religious pressure groups and self-styled ‘moral crusaders’.1 Lise Shapiro Sanders likens this movement to similar campaigns in the nineteenth century, arguing that, like music halls previously, cinemas were subjected to ‘censorship and ideological control in an endeavour to distribute middleclass codes of social practice to the “lower” classes’.2 Yet this approach has often been based on the findings of a report by the National Council for Public Morals,3 with little investigation of the actual data supplied to the committee. Even accounts that have used some of this evidence position it as a minor component, exaggerated out of all proportion in order to satisfy the personal objectives of the moral purity campaigners.4
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Notes
See Audrey Field, Picture Palace: A Social History of the Cinema (London: Gentry Books, 1974).
Lise Shapiro Sanders, ‘“Indecent Incentives to Vice”: Regulating Films and Audience Behaviour From the 1890s to the 1910s’, in Andrew Higson (ed.), Young and Innocent?: The Cinema in Britain, 1895–1930 (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2002), p. 98.
National Council of Public Morals: Cinema Commission of Inquiry, The Cinema: Its Present Position and Future Possibilities (London: Williams and Norgate, 1917).
‘The heightened wartime fears of those social purists who were involved in the anti-film crusade turned it into a moral panic that lasted from 1915 to the autumn of 1917’: Dean Rapp, ‘Sex in the Cinema: War, Moral Panic, and the British Film Industry, 1906–1918’, Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies, 34:3 (2002), 425.
Lois Rutherford, ‘“Managers in a Small Way”: The Professionalisation of Variety Artistes, 1860–1914’, in Peter Bailey (ed.), Music Hall: Business and Pleasure (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1986), p. 101.
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© 2011 Paul Moody
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Moody, P. (2011). ‘Improper Practices’ in Great War British Cinemas. In: Hammond, M., Williams, M. (eds) British Silent Cinema and the Great War. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230321663_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230321663_4
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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