Presenter(s): Arantxa Calles—Cinema Studies
Faculty Mentor(s): Priscilla Ovalle
Session: Prerecorded Poster Presentation
The Hollywood Blacklist was an effort by major film studios to ban filmmakers with leftist politics who were negatively implicated in relation to the trials conducted by the House of Un-American Activities Committee during the 1950s . The “Independent Productions Corporation” was formed around the basis of organizing that blacklisted talent to tell stories of other oppressed peoples through filmmaking . Although there were plans for many such projects, due to the brutal, often violent, repression of their inaugural project, Salt of the Earth (1954), only the one was able to be made . Even after its unlikely completion, the film was prohibited from being shown in cinemas, instead finding a life in underground circuits . Some academic study has been done on the Hollywood Blacklist but much more needs to be dedicated to the ways filmmakers organized against this censorship in order to fill that gap in the fields of filmmaking and labor history . The use of first hand accounts of the production and other published writing that aimed to detail this process were the main sources used . This research revealed how this production model served as a strong challenge to the censorship of diverse political ideas of the time and as an alternative for individuals who wanted to make independent films far before the popular Independent film movement of the US was even established . Only by shining a light on the censure, repression, and scapegoating of the past can we avoid similar conditions in the American media production of the future .