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06 Dec 07

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Legion_of_Decency

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The National Legion of Decency, also known as the Catholic Legion
of Decency, was an organization dedicated to identifying and combating
objectionable content in motion pictures. For the first quarter-century
or so of its existence, the legion wielded great power in the American motion
picture industry.

The Legion was founded in 1933 by
Archbishop of Cincinnati John T.
McNicholas as the Catholic Legion of Decency (CLOD)
Though established by Roman Catholic bishops, the Legion originally
included many Protestant and
even some Jewish clerics. It was renamed
in April of 1934, substituting
National for Catholic
3 more annotations...
- for
  
  Motion Pictures.
- The Legion distributed a list of ratings for films in order to provide "a
  moral estimate of current entertainment feature motion pictures". The Legion was
  often more conservative in its views on films than the Motion Picture Association of
  America's Production
  Code. Films were rated according to the following schema:
  
  A: Morally unobjectionable
  B: Morally objectionable in part
  C: Condemned ^#3
  by the
  
  Legion of Decency
  A-I: Suitable for all audiences
  A-II: Suitable for adults -- then, with the introduction of
  A-III -- suitable for adults and adolescents
  A-III: Suitable for adults only
  A-IV: For adults with reservations
  
  In 1978, the B and C
  ratings were combined into a new O rating for "morally offensive"
  films.
- By the 1960s, however, the organization
  had become an exclusively Catholic concern. In 1966 it was renamed the National Catholic Office for
  Motion Pictures

MOTION PICTURES, HISTORY OF,

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education film history motion movies paper pictures

In both the U.S. and Europe, pictures drawn by hand were animated as amusements,
using devices that became popular in the parlors of the middle class.
by 1861 the American inventor Coleman Sellers (1827–1907) had patented the
Kinematoscope, which brought to life a series of posed photographs mounted on a
turning paddlewheel.
18 more annotations...
- In 1877 the English-American photographer Eadweard Muybridge used a battery of 24
  cameras to record the cycle of motion of a running horse.
- Until the 1890s, scientists were interested chiefly in the development of
  photography rather than cinematography. This changed when the American inventor
  Thomas Alva Edison set up the Black Maria, a
  tarpaper shack near his West Orange, N.J., laboratories that became the site of
  Edison's moving picture experiments and the world's first movie studio
- In 1896 the French magician Georges Méliès (1861–1938) proved that film could
  interpret life as well as record it. He made a series of films that explored the
  narrative potential of the new medium, and the one-reeler was born. In a studio
  on the outskirts of Paris, Méliès reconstructed a ten-part version of the Dreyfus trial (1899) and filmed
  Cinderella (1900) in 20 scenes
- Working at the Edison studio, Porter produced the first major American film,
  The Great Train Robbery, in 1903.
- The Great Train Robbery was hugely successful and is credited with
  turning movies into a mass art. Small theaters called nickelodeons sprang up all
  over the U.S., and motion pictures began to emerge as an industry. Most
  one-reelers of the time were short comedies, adventure stories, or filmed
  records of performances by leading actors of the day.
- The most influential filmmaker of the early silent period was the American
  producer and director D. W. Griffith, who developed the aesthetics
  of the motion picture
- Even more impressive is Griffith's later film Intolerance (1916), made in
  part as an answer to critics of The Birth of a Nation and often cited as
  the greatest motion picture ever made.
- Between 1915 and 1920 grandiose movie palaces proliferated throughout the U.S.
  The film industry moved gradually but firmly out of the East to Hollywood
- Chaplin was a comic genius whose work lit up the screen. His presence in a film
  virtually assured its success. Chaplin was the first truly international movie
  star and a legend well within his own lifetime
- After World War I, motion picture production became a major American industry,
  generating millions of dollars in assets for successful producers. American
  films became international in character and dominated the world market.
- The earliest films were documentaries in the sense that they simply recorded
  what was happening. The San Francisco earthquake of 1906, the flight of the Wright brothers in France in 1908, and the
  eruption of Mount Etna in Sicily in 1910 were all recorded by movie cameras and
  incorporated into some of the Pathé newsreels, which continued production
  through the early 1950s
- In 1926 the Warner Brothers studio introduced the first
  practicable sound films, using a process known as Vitaphone, the recording of
  musical and spoken passages on large disks that were then synchronized with the
  action on the screen. In 1927, Warner Brothers released The Jazz Singer,
  their first talking picture, starring the entertainer Al Jolson, and sound films
  were an immediate success with the public.
- The following year, the producer Walt Disney pioneered the use of sound in an
  animated short film, Steamboat Willie, which helped turn a cartoon
  character named Mickey Mouse into a national celebrity.
- Gangster films and musicals dominated the screen in the early 1930s. The highly
  successful Little Caesar (1930) made a star of Edward G. Robinson and spawned a series of
  violent reflections on America during the Great Depression and the era of
  Prohibition. Films such as Public Enemy (1931) and Scarface (1932)
  brought speed, vigor, and realism to the screen, as did the musicals and zany
  comedies that seemed to have a nonconformist attitude toward life.
- From the 1890s onward, directors had been testing the boundaries of sexual
  propriety, and a trade in pornographic movies had developed; in mainstream
  films, however, sexuality was suggested rather than depicted. An exception,
  scandalous for its day, was Ecstasy (1933), a Czech film starring the
  young Viennese actor Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler, later known as Hedy Lamarr
  (1913–2000); for years, customs officials sought to bar the film from entering
  the U.S. Much of the violence and sexual innuendo in Hollywood's early gangster
  and musical-comedy films was toned down by the emergence of the Catholic Legion
  of Decency and the strengthening of U.S. censorship laws in 1934.
- The vogue of making films based on popular novels, never really absent from the
  screen, reached a zenith in the late 1930s with expensively mounted productions
  of A Tale of Two Cities (1935), The Good Earth (1937),
  Wuthering Heights (1939), and one of the most popular films in motion
  picture history, Gone with the Wind (1939).
- After World War II, the popularity of motion pictures began to be challenged by
  the advent of television. As audiences started to dwindle, Hollywood responded
  with size and spectacle
- Hollywood censorship policies were relaxed in the late 1960s in favor of a
  rating system that allowed any type of subject matter to be filmed, but imposed
  age restrictions on the audiences that would be allowed to see it. This change
  permitted the writers and directors of films intended for mature audiences to
  exercise much greater latitude in their choice of language and in their
  depiction of sexuality and graphic violence.

09 Nov 07

Scientists are unnerved by this summer’s massive polar ice
melt, its implications and their ability to predict it.
According to a new report, the Bush administration’s climate policy will result
in emissions growing 11 percent in 2012 from 2002.