A reflection on the historical role of censorship in cinema’s approach to moral and social issues.
Censorship in cinema normally refers to one of two things: either a government-mandated restriction on the political ideas expressed within a film, or the self-regulation of the entertainment industry to “maintain the moral, social and ideological mores of their national culture” (Maltby, 1997). There have been very few occasions in mainstream Hollywood when the former has been required, so it has been primarily through self-regulation that the film industry has flourished. Such is the dominance of Hollywood in the film industry that this practice of self-regulation has dominated throughout cinema history (Maltby,1997). The most famous of these self-regulatory practices was the Hays Code, which was in place until the late 1960s and laid out a specific list of “don’t”s and “be careful”s, covering the portrayal of not only sex and relationships but also crime and morality. Films released during this period had to work carefully within these guidelines to ensure they would be able to be distributed to mainstream cinemas and consequently to their target audience (Mondello, 2008). This essay examines three films released during this period, Brief Encounter (David Lean 1945), Breakfast at Tiffany’s (Blake Edwards 1960) and Breathless (Jean-Luc Godard 1961), and reflects on how this self-regulation affected their portrayal of the attitudes of the day.
Brief Encounter, a quintessentially British film released immediately after the Second World War, is a film about the “repression of excessive romantic emotion”; however, “it uses cinematic techniques in its lighting, camerawork and lighting which can only be described as excessive” to provide the viewer with an “equivocally subjective viewpoint” (Nelmes, 2011). In this way, the film clearly builds empathy for the protagonists, who are involved in an extra-marital affair, thereby giving credit to the theory that there is a hidden underlying message in the film—homosexuality.
While extra-marital affairs were scandalous post-war, homosexuality was at the time illegal in the United Kingdom and strictly a taboo subject in society. The film’s screenwriter Noël Coward was private about his homosexuality throughout his life; David Lean, on the other hand, was more avant-garde with his relationships, having been married six times (Thomson, 2010). With this in mind, Coward could be seen to be reflecting on his sexuality and writing a parable about the difficulties facing gay couples in post-war Britain, a time when such relationships would have had devastating consequences for all concerned if made public. Brief Encounter could be a metaphor for how gay men had to live—not openly expressing their feelings, only having “close friendships”, and maybe even (although not in Coward’s case) entering into a marriage of convenience (Thomson, 2009). This use of metaphor is common in cinema. Two more recent examples are Soldier Blue (Ralph Nelson 1970) and Little Big Man (Arthur Penn 1970), which used the treatment of Native Americans as a metaphor for the Vietnam war and race relations (Doughty and Etherington-Wright, 2011).
Breakfast at Tiffany’s (Blake Edwards 1960) is based on a novella by Truman Capote which tells the story of a prostitute. While morality had evolved by 1960 for the baby boomer generation, the same could not be said for their parents. Under the Hays Code, the themes addressed by the novella could not be openly shown in the cinema. Therefore, in contrast to the source material, the film does not overtly mention that Holly is a prostitute, removes all trace of the pregnancy with Jose’s child and concludes with a romantic happy ending that brings Holly and Paul together.
On the face of it, Holly and Paul are living the American dream, with money, nice apartments in the heart of New York City and little need to work. The opening shot of the film demonstrates this by showing a taxi driving along 5th Avenue, the immaculate Holly Golightly stepping out of it. However, Breakfast at Tiffany’s is also a film about loneliness and unfulfilled dreams, and showing Holly as a solitary figure dwarfed by the buildings of New York in this same opening helps to reinforce this impression to the audience. Holly is a complex character who fails to realise that she is the architect of all her own problems; her desire is to have a stable life, but she is fixated on the idea that this can only come through money.
There are many reasons as to how and why anaudience interacts with a movie, and a major factor is escapism (Doughty and Etherington-Wright, 2011). Therefore the self-imposed censorship of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, where vague dialogue explaining how Holly earns money (“I always get fifty dollars for the powder room”; Edwards, 1961) clearly alludes to her being a prostitute but does not mention it explicitly. The casting of Audrey Hepburn in the role of Holly also affects the way the audience views the character. An audience in 1961 would not immediately believe Hepburn to be a prostitute, as she was not perceived to be sexual or common enough; perhaps if one of her more sexual contemporaries, Kim Novak or Janet Leigh for example, had been cast, the veil over Holly’s employment status would have been thinner (Thomson, 2015).
These traits in the film allow it to maintain the escapism while permitting the darker themes of loneliness and prostitution to come through, especially when combined with the overall mise-en-scène, including costumes which were stylish and elegant; the use of lighting and colour in the cinematography depicts New York as glamorous without being over the top. Even now, over 50 years later, the film’s style remains attractive to the viewer. The self-regulation at the heart of Hollywood stopped Edwards from dealing with the underlying theme of a potentially unachievable American dream head on, which would have been more relevant to teenagers of the day but would have made the film unpalatable to the average audience.
Finally, Breathless (Jean-Luc Godard 1961) was a contemporary of Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Being made outside of the Hollywood studio system, however, the film deals with love, lust, and relationships much more directly, with an overall mise-en-scène far different to that of Brief Encounter and Breakfast at Tiffany’s. The use of handheld camera techniques and on location shooting (including the interior shots) gives the film the casual, more documentary look which made the French New Wave revolutionary (Thompson and Bordwell, 2016).
Working outside of a studio system, Godard takes the conventions of film noir and gives them a contemporary setting, creating an homage to that golden age and sowing the seed for movies where the main protagonists are outlaw lovers, such as Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn 1967), Badlands (Terrence Malick 1973) and True Romance (Tony Scott 1993) (Thompson and Bordwell, 2016). The Hays code of conduct specifically identified that film makers should be careful of “excessive or lustful kissing, particularly when one character or the other is a ‘heavy’”. As Jill Nelmes suggests, Godard did not have to invite us to like his characters and thus could produce a film which provided no excuses for the protagonists’ objectionable behaviour (Nelmes, 2012). In contrast, Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Brief Encounter go out of their way to have the audience empathise with their protagonists.
Breathless shows that in the late 50’s and early 60’s, young people of the day were starting to live outside of the traditional family unit. Patricia is living an amoral lifestyle as a young American in Paris. Paul is self-centred and fixed on sexual conquest. Patricia also appears committed to the promiscuous lifestyle, even when she finds out she is pregnant. They are a particularly amoral couple, happy to live their lives as they see fit without regard for convention.
In summary, while the absence of the restrictions imposed by the Hays Code allowed Godard to produce a film with more realism than Edwards and Lean, censorship did not stop Edwards and Lean from attempting to tackle issues of the day. While they are more shrouded in metaphor and mystery, their films do allow contemporary audiences to take watch the wanted from the movie – peer behind the veil if they wanted, whereas Godard’s film can be viewed as a more accurate record of its time that Hollywood audiences of the era may have found difficult to accept.
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