Dirty Words and Filthy Pictures: Film and the First Amendment

by Jeremy Geltzer

From the earliest days of cinema, scandalous films such as The Kiss (1896) attracted audiences eager to see provocative images on screen. With controversial content, motion pictures challenged social norms and prevailing laws at the intersection of art and entertainment. Today, the First Amendment protects a wide range of free speech, but this wasn’t always the case. For the first fifty years, movies could be censored and banned by city and state officials charged with protecting the moral fabric of their communities. Once film was embraced under the First Amendment by the Supreme Court’s Miracle decision in 1952, new problems pushed notions of acceptable content even further.

Dirty Words & Filthy Pictures explores movies that changed the law and resulted in greater creative freedom for all. Relying on primary sources that include court decisions, contemporary periodicals, state censorship ordinances, and studio production codes, Jeremy Geltzer offers a comprehensive and fascinating history of cinema and free speech, from the earliest films of Thomas Edison to the impact of pornography and the Internet. With incisive case studies of risqué pictures, subversive foreign films, and banned B-movies, he reveals how the legal battles over film content changed long-held interpretations of the Constitution, expanded personal freedoms, and opened a new era of free speech. An important contribution to film studies and media law, Geltzer’s work presents the history of film and the First Amendment with an unprecedented level of detail.

Genres: Film, Nonfiction, History, Media Tie In

354 pages, Paperback

First published January 4, 2016

Reviews

[Gunnar Larson · Rating 3 out of 5]

A pretty facile history of film through the lens of court cases.. spends about 2-3 pages each on court cases / decisions (this is a very generous estimate). Includes choice excerpts from judges’ decisions, which can be interesting, but this could’ve gone much deeper into the legalese of all of this. The structure of the book itself is a bit of an oddity… chronological until ~1960 when it splits to covering obscenity, focusing on language first and “pornography” after. But it’s odd because he covers “nudie” pictures prior to the language section, so when it jumps back to the “pornographic” films of the ‘60s he ends up covering a lot of the same ground again, mentioning the same people.. in all he doesn’t go into enough detail on any case or any individual film, instead focusing on the breadth of history and cases instead of its depth.

I would comment on current issues regarding censorship in the streaming era, but that could be compromising……..

[Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

"It started out as a kiss." Not just the first line of a rock classic by The Killers, but also a reference to one of Thomas Edison's first motion pictures, The Kiss, which in 1896 depicted nothing more than a 47-second long lip-lock, and which started America's centuries-long obsession with film censorship. 

In Dirty Words and Filthy Pictures, fellow attorney Jeremy Geltzer chronicles the various waves of censorship from the local censorship boards prominent throughout much of the early 20th century to the ongoing national efforts to regulate internet pornography. Although at some points Dirty Words is overwritten and repetitive, the entirety of the book is a fascinating examination of the place of film in the battle between art and public morality that has played out in American courts since the advent of the Constitution in 1789. 

Stories of the dangers of censorship abound. One such story, told early in Dirty Words but which will likely linger in my mind for life, is of a Jewish costume designer turned filmmaker whose extreme gory take on the American Revolutionary War eventually led to his deportation to Germany . . . at the outset of the Nazi regime.

The most striking uses of the power of movie censors chronicled in Dirty Words sound in abject racism. Witness the powerful Memphis censor who banned a Little Rascals film because it featured black and white students in the same school room. This was not an isolated incident. Among films banned: movies featuring strong black characters; movies that sullied the south by depicting the horrors of slavery; and movies featuring interracial couples, among others. Note that many of these films received far harsher treatment than the blatantly white nationalist movie The Birth of a Nation.

Furthermore, the underpinnings of censorship laws were almost universally sexist. Witness the oft-repeated maxim that members of the public who needed to be shielded from content deemed to be in any way problematic were "children," "the weak minded," and "women."

Although like Mr. Geltzer, I am an attorney, a Juris Doctorate degree is not a prerequisite for enjoying Dirty Words. Indeed, Mr. Geltzer's book will likely entertain and educate anyone who, like me, is fascinated by film history. 

[Valerie · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5. Not especially well written but there was good information in here.