Miracles and Sacrilege: Robert Rossellini, the Church, and Film Censorship in HollywoodMiracles and Sacrilege is the story of the epochal conflict between censorship and freedom in film, recounted through an in-depth analysis of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision striking down a government ban on Roberto Rossellini’s film The Miracle (1950). In this extraordinary case, the Court ultimately chose to abandon its own longstanding determination that film comprised a mere ‘business’ unworthy of free-speech rights, declaring for the first time that the First Amendment barred government from banning any film as ‘sacreligious.’ Using legal briefs, affidavits, and other court records, as well as letters, memoranda, and other archival materials to elucidate what was at issue in the case, William Bruce Johnson also analyzes the social, cultural, and religious elements that form the background of this complex and hard-fought controversy, focusing particularly on the fundamental role played by the Catholic Church in the history of film censorship. Tracing the development of the Church in the United States, Johnson discusses the reasons it found The Miracle sacrilegious and how it attained the power to persuade civil authorities to ban it. The Court’s decision was not only a milestone in the law of church-state relations, but it paved the way for a succession of later decisions which gradually established a firm legal basis for freedom of expression in the arts. |
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... declaring that the First Amendment barred government from banning any film as ' sacrilegious . ' Using legal briefs , affidavits , and other court records , as well as letters , memoranda , and other archival materials to elucidate what ...
... declared a ' Baby Boom . ' While the defeated peoples of Germany , Italy , and Japan were still suffering , the basic benevolence of the collective American heart had yielded massive economic aid , along with a healthy injection of ...
... declared a Communist state totalling half a billion people. A year ear- lier, an admitted ex-Communist named Whittaker Chambers had ap- peared before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) and accused Alger Hiss, a former ...
... declared film - making to be merely a ' business ' for which free - speech rights were irrelevant . Hollywood , for its part , did not welcome Burstyn's demand for freedom of the screen , seeing it as a threat to the entente cordiale ...
... declare themselves ' final judges ' of the educational and aesthetic value of a work of pictorial art , since ' it ... declared movies to be ' both journalism and drama , already the most popular form of the latter and likely to become ...
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