The Shape of Water and the Cold War Revisited

The chapter analyzes Guillermo Del Toro’s Oscar-winning film and its relation to Cold War nostalgia. It claims that The Shape of Water reimagines Cold War America while paying homage to classic tropes of the 1950s. To specify, the film reimagines the classic horror/SF film for a twenty-first-century audience. While the same pathos for the creature exists as in the original that inspired it–The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954)–Del Toro adds pointed social commentary that would not have been permitted in Hays Code America. The chapter explores how The Shape of Water pays tribute to The Creature from The Black Lagoon while serving as a statement and an update for twenty-first-century filmgoers.

ANTROPOLOGÍA, VISUALIDAD Y REFRACCIÓN: UNA APROXIMACIÓN A LAS REPRESENTACIONES DE GÉNERO EN HOLLYWOOD BAJO EL CÓDIGO HAYS (1940-1968) / ANTHROPOLOGY, VISUALITY AND REFRACTION: AN APPROACH ON GENDER REPRESENTATIONS IN HOLLYWOOD CINEMA BY THE HAYS CODE

O Motion Picture Production Code, mais conhecido como “Código Hays”, surgiu nos Estados Unidos nos anos de 1930, prolongando-se até finais da década de 1960. Durante esse período, a produção cinematográfica precisou se adaptar a determinadas noções de moralidade que forçaram os profissionais de Hollywood a buscarem estratégias refrativas para mostrar, por meio de distorção, aquilo que não era possível visualizar de outra maneira. Paralelamente, a fixação de certos modelos de gênero na sociedade americana do período se mostra rastreável através de uma forma específica de narrativa cultural, a ficção cinematográfica, que permite identificar tanto os arquétipos que servem de base ideológica às representações de gênero quanto eventuais espaços de dissensão e contramodelos. Isso tudo transforma o cinema de ficção em uma fonte valiosa para a antropologia audiovisual.ABSTRACTMotion Picture Production Code, better known as the “Hays Code” was enhanced in the 1930s United States and lasted until the end of the 1960s. During those years, film production had to observe certain notions about morality that forced Hollywood professionals to use refractive strategies to show – through distortion – situations that could not be otherwise represented. Also, certain gender models among the American society at that time are nowadays traceable through a specific cultural narrative: film fiction. Fiction allows the researcher to identify basic ideological archetypes for gender representations as well as possible spaces for dissention or counter-models. All together turns fiction films into a highly valuable source for audiovisual anthropology.

Hollywood Heroes and Shameful Hookers

This chapter examines the cases in which individuals used a right to privacy to claim ownership over their life stories, when appropriated by film studios for fiction films. It tracks the move of industrial image making from the East Coast to the West coast of the United States in the 1910s and compares the different contexts of New York’s privacy laws with California’s, informed as they were by a utopian “pursuit of happiness” guaranteed by the Californian Constitution. This chapter also examines the right of privacy in relation to the censorship demands of the Hays Code and considers the onscreen celebration of men’s heroic “public” lives compared to the shaming of women’s “private” lives. It discusses the motion pictures CDQ or Saved by Wireless (1911), The Red Kimono (1925), Yankee Doodle Dandy (1944) and The Sands of Iwo Jima (1949). Whereas female plaintiffs took issue with being condemned or marginalized by films because of their sexuality (their status as hookers or divorcees), men protested the implications of being publicly celebrated for their professional deeds or achievements.

The Wider Context

This chapter explores the topics of silent film, censorship, and the development of cinematic technology. The roots of all the major film censorship systems lie in the silent era. As such, it helps one to understand the peculiarities of the British system by explaining how the system emerged, and in particular the odd role of local authorities, which produces idiosyncratic exceptions to this day. Equally, the US Hays Code, while its enforcement really dates from the sound era, was formed and moulded in the silent days. Many of the motifs and generic elements of film music also go back to silent roots. The chapter then examines the widespread variety and diversity of silent world cinema. It also considers the return to classical Hollywood for film plots and narratives in contemporary Hollywood.