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. |
From inside the book
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... theatres. Although these censors had approved The Miracle, the Regents, following Cardinal Spellman's accusation, overruled them, thereby forcing the theatre to stop showing the film. Since the early 1930s, the Catholic Church had been ...
... theatre in Toledo , Ohio , watching an episode of Albert Capellani's Les Misérables ( 1913 ) , Lawson noticed two couples , one mid- dle - aged , the other newly wed . The middle - aged man , who before the lights went down had chatted ...
... theatres be licensed and that the plays and other entertainments shown in them be clean and wholesome . Since neither vaudeville nor – for that matter – legitimate theatre had any constitutional immunity from gov- ernment regulation ...
... theatres revealed: A young girl, 16 years of age, frequented a certain very poorly lighted motion picture theater ... A flirtation with a strange man considerably her senior ... sprang up. Soon they were daily ... sitting in the dark ...
... theatre , its owner asserting that if this $ 200 tariff applied to him , he would have to close down . The court , holding that such an ordinance was plainly within the village's constitutional authority , sensed that this new form of ...
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