[Commlist] QRFV Special Issue: Hollywood Film Style and the Production Code

Tom Brown is announcing the publication of a special journal issue 
entitled “Hollywood Film Style and the Production Code: Criticism and 
History”.

In the /Quarterly Review of Film and Video 
<https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/gqrf20/current>, 11 brand new articles 
by a range of international scholars discuss the stylistic impact or 
traces of the self-regulatory regime that governed much of Classical 
Hollywood production – the regulations administered by the PCA 
(Production Code Administration) sometimes known as the “Hays Code” or 
simply “the Code”. /

Check out the list of articles in the link above. Some will be open 
access on a permanent basis but all articles will be open access at some 
point this year on a rolling basis. Currently, amongst others, you can 
view the broad-ranging critical introduction 
<https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10509208.2024.2427536> to 
the special issue, which includes summaries of all the essays as well as 
a version of “the Code” itself. And, this month, Martha Shearer’s “Some 
Warners Musicals and the Spirit of the Production Code 
<https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10509208.2024.2410519>” is 
available open access. Here is Martha’s abstract:

“Warners backstage musicals of 1933 appear regularly in accounts of 
‘pre-Code Hollywood’ that highlight their apparent violations of the 
Production Code. Those films are often contrasted with the RKO Fred 
Astaire-Ginger Rogers romantic dance musicals, largely produced after 
the Code's supposed ‘enforcement’ from 1934. This article argues, 
however, that the apparently dramatic contrast between the decade's two 
major cycles and their relationship to the Code is better understood as 
a process that Richard Maltby argues was characteristic of early 1930s 
Hollywood: ‘the more gradual, more complex and less melodramatic 
evolution of systems of convention in representation.’ Placing the 
aesthetics of Warners musicals in dialogue with Production Code files 
and internal studio documents, this article contends that the musical's 
shift towards a romantic model was a pragmatic response to the Code, one 
that was already in progress before July 1934. Genre—if understood as an 
historical process rather than one essential definition or a set of 
monolithic subgenres—can make such aesthetic shifts and institutional 
renegotiations visible.”

I am especially delighted that the collection, which, as well as being 
an intervention in debates on the Code seeks to reconsider the place of 
“close textual analysis” within contemporary Film History, found a home 
in the /Quarterly Review of Film and Video /exactly 30 years after the 
journal published a groundbreaking special issue on the Code that was 
edited by Lea Jacobs and Richard Maltby. To mark this anniversary, the 
journal has kindly agreed to make the 1995 special issue open access 
<https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/gqrf20/15/4> throughout most of 2025.

For those based in South East England, please look out for details of a 
BFI Southbank library talk about the special issue that will take place 
on Monday 3^rd February.


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