Film Regulation and the Varieties of Public Opinion: Law as Communication History

• In Event: Historicizing Feeling: Affect, Emotion, and the Making of Communication

Abstract

The paper showcases the importance of the law to communication and emotions history. First, it demonstrates how the history of ideas about communication are archived in the law, and thus attain an instrumental influence. Second, it shows how the history of thought about public opinion traced in film regulation was also a history of emotional norms, showing how the very objects and outcomes of communication study were related to changes in the normative conceptions of emotion and rationality. Two important legal decisions governing film regulation—in 1915, that film was not governed by free speech law and in 1952 that film— are analyzed. The decisions reveal much more than whether the Court thought that film was a form of political communication. They show how conceptions of public opinion shifted over this brief span and how these conceptions reflected different normative visions of communication and emotion.

Author

• Jennifer Petersen, U of Virginia