How censorship can influence the history of cinema
Have you ever heard about the Hays code or the motion picture production code ? At the end of the 20's, the church asked hollywood to censor its films, so a priest and a catholic editor wrote the text setting out the censorship rules. But, at the time, there was only mute cinema, so, even when the first speaking movie appeared in 1927 (« The jazz singer »), the rules only applied for the pictures. The rules were useless because « obsene » images were replaced by « obsene » dialogues. That's why a second version of the Hays code was made in 1934, including censorship applicable to dialogue. But that's not the important point here, we have to understand that realisators used the censorship and its limits to propose some movies and sequences which are today famous because they circomvented the rules in funny ways. For example, the text said that a kiss could not last more than three seconds, and, during this period, Hitchcock propose the longest kiss of cinema