Professor Jennifer Fronc recently published a new book Monitoring the Movies: The Fight over Film Censorship in Early Twentieth-Century Urban America, with the University of Texas Press.
Using the National Board’s extensive files, Monitoring the Movies offers the first full-length study of the National Board of Review and its campaign against motion-picture censorship. Jennifer Fronc traces the NB’s Progressive-era founding in New York; its evolving set of “standards” for directors, producers, municipal officers, and citizens; its “city plan,” which called on citizens to report screenings of condemned movies to local officials; and the spread of the NB’s influence into the urban South.
Ultimately, Monitoring the Movies shows how Americans grappled with the issues that arose alongside the powerful new medium of film: the extent of the right to produce and consume images and the proper scope of government control over what citizens can see and show.
See the full details about the book on the University of Texas Press website.