Screening the police : film and law enforcement in the United States / Noah Tsika.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Tsika, Noah, 1983- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Police in motion pictures.

Police and motion pictures.

Motion pictures--United States--History.

Motion pictures.

Motion pictures--Production and direction.

United States.

History.

Motion pictures--Production and direction--United States.

Genre:

History.

Physical Description:

xiv, 352 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2021]

Summary:

"American police departments have presided over the business of motion pictures since the end of the nineteenth century. Their influence is evident not only on the screen but also in the ways movies are made, promoted, and viewed in the United States. Screening the Police explores the history of film's entwinement with law enforcement, showing the role that state power has played in the creation and expansion of a popular medium. For the New Jersey State Police in the 1930s, film offered a method of visualizing criminality and of circulating urgent information about escaped convicts. For the New York Police Department, the medium was a means of making the agency world-famous as early as 1896. Beat cops became movie stars. Police chiefs made their own documentaries. And from Maine to California, state and local law enforcement agencies regularly fingerprinted filmgoers for decades, amassing enormous records as they infiltrated theatres both big and small. Understanding the scope of police power in the United States requires attention to an aspect of film history that has long been ignored. Screening the Police reveals the extent to which American cinema has overlapped with the politics and practices of law enforcement. Today, commercial filmmaking is heavily reliant on public policing-and vice versa. How such a working relationship was forged and sustained across the long twentieth century is the subject of this book"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Machine generated contents note: 1. Cinema's Municipalities: Industrial Expansion and the Locations of Policing

2. Cinematic Badges: Conventions, Complications, and "Films For Cops"

3. Veto Power: Film Censorship as Discretionary Policing

4. Ballistics, Bertillonage, and Ballyhoo: Selling the Science of Crime Detection

5. Filmgoers' Fingerprints: Supporting Carceral Expansion Through "Lobby Gags"

6. From Kiddie Cops to the Coal Police: Private Proxies and the Production of Criminological Common Sense

7. Coda: 2020 Vision.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Other Format:

Online version: Tsika, Noah, Screening the police

ISBN:

9780197577721

0197577725

9780197577738

0197577733

OCLC:

1243013235

Publisher Number:

99988585603