3/28/2023 0 Comments Egyptian dance chicago 1930![]() ![]() We come back to the fact that exotification was intrinsic to Orientalism and after the novelty wore off, the art was treated with even more unveiled contempt. Reverend Russell was not alone in his desire to pray over the souls of these allegedly wayward women. However, I should note that while the original sources for both Carmen and The Kiss were generally considered to be harmless when the films were released, belly dancing was indeed a source of scandal. As for the embraces of Jose they are simply barred.” Done Jose is not allowed to do any bodily harm to Carmen. The reader backed their claim with the fact that in the Ohio cut, spicy Carmen was “a decorous, peaceable and even demure little maiden, opposed to cigarettes and cultivating the most friendly relations with the other factory girls. In 1915, Moving Picture World sarcastically claimed they were handing an award for “censorial idiocy” to Pennsylvania but an indignant reader wrote to claim the award for Ohio. Hyperbole was a common way to make fun of censorship, bringing the slippery slope argument in. (Russell also led the early battle against motion picture smut, smashing peepshow machines at Coney Island and subsequently jumping bail after being charged with extortion and was never heard from again.) A similar article published in Alabama in 1898 poked fun at the “fact finding” mission of aldermen trying to determine if belly dance was obscene.īowser was onto something in 1969, in my opinion. After careful examination of the belly dancers (nudge nudge, wink wink), Reverend Russell offered to hold a prayer meeting in the dancehall that Sunday. For example, an 1897 item in The Jersey City News discusses a church group visiting Coney Island on a fact-finding mission. In fact, The Kiss was not considered particularly scandalous at the time it was released and many complaints revolved around the film not being considered sexy enough.įourth, censors were regularly held up for ridicule. Bits of this sardonic article were taken out of context by Terry Ramsaye in his 1926 history of cinema and from there, the myth metastasized into historical fact. When I was researching another “scandalous” 1896 release, The May Irwin Kiss, I discovered that most of the books discussing the film’s alleged censorship based their claims on a misreading of a single satirical magazine piece. Third, satire often gets lost in the sands of time. ![]()
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