Motion Picture Commission : hearings before the Committee on Education, House of Representatives, Sixty-third Congress, second session, on bills to establish a Federal Motion Picture Commission (1978)

MOTION PICTURE COMMISSION. 217 four films." out of many thousands. The statement is most absurcUy inaccurate. It has been pointed out repeatedly that 15 per cent of the films that reach Chicago are condemned, and we have adopted that bit of statistics, and have cited as examples of what is con- demned by censors and the public not four films but several more than that.'and have referred to a big collection of the rejected films in the Literary Digest of March 28, 1904, reprinted from the North- western Christian Advocate and the Continent. The issue is not Avhether Congress shall undertake Federal censor- ship. Federal censorship of all imported films, through the Secre- tary of the Treasury has been authorized by the present Congress in Ihe'^new tariff bill, but is 3^et inoperative through lack of the experts and machinery which the'Smith-Hughes bill would provide. Surely it is illogical" for Congress to provide for censorship of imported films and leave those made in our own country imrestricted; indeed the last Congress began domestic restriction by forbidding effectively the interstate transportation of prize-fight pictures, so preventing the country from being flooded with pictures of the Santa Fe champion- ship fight. The unofficial " national board of censorship " w^ere un- able to^afford a like protection in the case of the previous black and white Carson fight. That same Congress passed an act providing for censorship of films in the National Capital, where Senators and Congressmen and their families had seen the need of it. The bill was indeed vetoed by President Taft. but it was at the request of the District Commissioners on whom the unwelcome burden of censor- ship was placed with no board of experts oi- machinery such as this bill provides to do the work properly. The veto v.hich has been quoted on the other side therefore is far less significant than the fact that both houses of Congress so recently declared its conviction that censorship is needed. President Taft advised specific law's forbid- ding films of a harmfu.l character; but to forbid ''obscene" films, for example, would be only transferiug censorship to a thousand juries far less capable than a couunission of experts of deciding the subtle difference between a photoplay that will prompt passion and another that will promote purity. Indeed it would l»e a tragedy for exhibi- tors, and especially for film makers, to make it necessary to seize a film and hold it during the sIoav stages of court procedure wherever legal complaint was made, instead of having tlie film examined be- fore it started on its journey by a body whose verdict would be likely to be accepted almost if not quite universally. In this last case a condemned film may sometimes be amended and used. Another instructive precedent for this bill is the fact that the Copyright Division of the Library of Congress exercises what is closely akin to censorship in refusing copyright to anything known to have been adjudged ohscene by the courts. Federal censorship has been well begun at four corners, and the Smith-ITughes bill is but a provision to carry it to consistent com- pletion. Like the pure-food movement this reform in the very nature of the case calls for national regulation. I am well aware that forbidding the issue of a copyright to what a court has adjudged obscene, and forbidding interstate transportation of prize-fight films is not censorship in the strict sense of the term, for censorship implies that something is left to the judgment of the censors; but the tariff provision as to foreign films is straight Federal