The first movie genre banned in the United States wasn’t even real cinema
For a country that prides itself on the foundational principles of liberty and freedom, the USA certainly does like banning stuff. Over the decades it has said ‘absolutely not’ to all kinds of things including art, books, school teachings, photographs, and of course certain movies, although strangely enough the first example of that wasn’t really a movie at all.
It was in fact the showing of boxing that caused the ire of the censors at the end of the 19th century; almost as soon as people had the means to record anything then, humans being humans, they decided to fight in front of it. This month sees streaming giant Netflix throwing tens of millions of dollars at screening boxing for the first time, but 120 years ago it was a far more rustic affair.
It wasn’t long after Thomas Edison managed to make moving pictures available to the wider public that the showing of boxing to audiences began, sometimes they were real fights, sometimes they were staged, but what came out of his New Jersey production studio was undeniably popular with a fight-hungry public. He had a very quick change of heart however, and decided to veto the use of his equipment in recording prizefighting in 1894.
As noted in Barak Y. Obach’s Prizefighting and the birth of movie censorship paper from the University of Arizona, it was March 1897 when censors first enacted laws against the showing of boxing films, and it would actually be another ten years before the first piece of proper legislation against the showing of ‘immoral or obscene’ films in public, or any film for that matter without the permission of the local Chief of Police.
A decade earlier, prizefighting was illegal in every state of the US other than in Nevada, but the pugilists themselves were seen as celebrities, and worthy members of society, and so the people watching them in films felt like no real crimes were being committed, making banning the boxing movies difficult. The first example ever filmed was the ‘Leonard-Cushing fight’ at Edison’s Black Maria Studios, and it was first shown in Manhattan in 1894. The fight was a six round bout that ended with Mike Leonard knocking Jack Cushing out after a flurry of punches to the stomach.
When the film was shown, admittance was charged for by the round, 5 cents per round in fact, and it was so popular that people queued for two days to get a glimpse and the police had to restore order. By April of 1895, it was being shown on Oxford Street in London and even five years later, each round of the fight was being sold for $22.50, about $900 in today’s money.
Meanwhile back in the USA, other pieces of film were also being banned, including a woman dancing called Carmencita. Over the next couple of decades, all manner of movies fell foul of the censors, some quite rightly, like 1915’s racist Klan diatribe The Birth of a Nation, others not so much, like the documentary about family planning, Birth Control, two years later.
The US also began to ban the showing of foreign movies, like 1922’s Häxan, a Danish silent horror tracking witchcraft through the ages. In 1933 US customs banned a movie from even entering the country, an erotic drama from Czechoslovakia called Ecstasy, burning the original print.
