David Kirby will present a lecture about censorship and cinema. From 1930 to 1968 movie studios sent their screenplays to be approved by censorship groups in the U.S. and U.K. including Hollywood’s official censorship body the “Hays Office”, the Catholic Church’s Legion of Decency and the British Board of Film Censors. This talk uses material from the archives of these organizations to explore how censorship groups modified cinematic narratives in order to tell what they consideredto bemore appropriate stories about science as a social, political and cultural force. Using films including The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse (1938), Possessed (1947), I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957), and Last Man on Earth (1964). Kirby will demonstrate how film censors considered the potential moral consequences of science and scientific ways of thinking including the theological implications of scientific research, the blasphemy of scientism, and the horror of scientific realism.

Co-sponsors of the event: Center for the Study of Women, Science, and Technology; Georgia Tech Writing and Communication Program; the School of History and Sociology; the School of Literature, Media, and Communication, and Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts Graduate Studies.