« The motion picture is potentially one of the greatest weapons for the safeguarding of democracy » : activisme et censure dans le monde hollywoodien des années 1930

Résumé 0

This paper addresses the issue of political commitment within the Hollywood community during the most partisan decade in the history of the film industry, when social-minded artists and anti-fascist émigrés came together in the cultural front. With its growing body of liberal and radical intellectuals, Hollywood had become a potentially rich source of anti-fascism ; while in the early and middle 1930s the activism of film industry employees had focused on domestic issues, in the latter part of the decade the defense of the Spanish Loyalists galvanized them as had no other single cause. Off-screen activities (consciousness-raising, fund-raising, petitions and telegrams sent to President Roosevelt) were effectively organized but the politically-aware film artists wondered whether they could also hope to affect the form or content of studio productions. Their desire to attune story material to contemporary concerns was however thwarted by the political limitations imposed on them by their employers, pressure from both within (self-regulation) and without (local and state censorship boards as well as national interest groups) and by America’s traditional isolationism.