Film and Video Censorship in Modern Britain

Film and Video Censorship in Modern Britain PDF Author: Julian Petley
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 0748630937
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
How does film and video censorship operate in Britain? Why does it exist? And is it too strict? Starting in 1979, the birth of the domestic video industry - and the first year of the Thatcher government - this critical study explains how the censorship of films both in cinemas and on video and DVD has developed in Britain. As well as presenting a detailed analysis of the workings of the British Board of Film Classification, Petley casts his gaze well beyond the BBFC to analyse the forces which the Board has to take into account when classifying and censoring. These range from laws such as the Video Recordings Act and Obscene Publications Act, and how these are enforced by the police and Crown Prosecution Service and interpreted by the courts, to government policy on matters such as pornography. In discussing a climate heavily coloured by 30 years of lurid 'video nasty' stories propagated by a press which is at once censorious and sensationalist and which has played a key role in bringing about and legitimating one of the strictest systems of film and video/DVD censorship in Europe, this book is notable for the breadth of its contextual analysis, its critical stance and its suggestions for reform of the present system.

Film and Video Censorship in Modern Britain

Film and Video Censorship in Modern Britain PDF Author: Julian Petley
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 0748630937
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 240

Get Book

Book Description
How does film and video censorship operate in Britain? Why does it exist? And is it too strict? Starting in 1979, the birth of the domestic video industry - and the first year of the Thatcher government - this critical study explains how the censorship of films both in cinemas and on video and DVD has developed in Britain. As well as presenting a detailed analysis of the workings of the British Board of Film Classification, Petley casts his gaze well beyond the BBFC to analyse the forces which the Board has to take into account when classifying and censoring. These range from laws such as the Video Recordings Act and Obscene Publications Act, and how these are enforced by the police and Crown Prosecution Service and interpreted by the courts, to government policy on matters such as pornography. In discussing a climate heavily coloured by 30 years of lurid 'video nasty' stories propagated by a press which is at once censorious and sensationalist and which has played a key role in bringing about and legitimating one of the strictest systems of film and video/DVD censorship in Europe, this book is notable for the breadth of its contextual analysis, its critical stance and its suggestions for reform of the present system.

Film and Video Censorship in Contemporary Britain

Film and Video Censorship in Contemporary Britain PDF Author: Julian Petley
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780748625383
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
Interviews with central figures.

A Matter of Obscenity

A Matter of Obscenity PDF Author: Christopher Hilliard
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691226105
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
A comprehensive history of censorship in modern Britain For Victorian lawmakers and judges, the question of whether a book should be allowed to circulate freely depended on whether it was sold to readers whose mental and moral capacities were in doubt, by which they meant the increasingly literate and enfranchised working classes. The law stayed this way even as society evolved. In 1960, in the obscenity trial over D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, the prosecutor asked the jury, "Is it a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?" Christopher Hilliard traces the history of British censorship from the Victorians to Margaret Thatcher, exposing the tensions between obscenity law and a changing British society. Hilliard goes behind the scenes of major obscenity trials and uncovers the routines of everyday censorship, shedding new light on the British reception of literary modernism and popular entertainments such as the cinema and American-style pulp fiction and comic books. He reveals the thinking of lawyers and the police, authors and publishers, and politicians and ordinary citizens as they wrestled with questions of freedom and morality. He describes how supporters and opponents of censorship alike tried to remake the law as they reckoned with changes in sexuality and culture that began in the 1960s. Based on extensive archival research, this incisive and multifaceted book reveals how the issue of censorship challenged British society to confront issues ranging from mass literacy and democratization to feminism, gay rights, and multiculturalism.

The British Board of Film Censors

The British Board of Film Censors PDF Author: James C. Robertson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 9781138997707
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
The secrecy in which the British Board of Film Censors enveloped itself until 1948 resulted in a glaring vacuum in British cinematic history. Originally published in 1985, this book filled this important gap, drawing on the detailed registers of films passed, cut and banned since 1913. The book opens by tracing the events which led up to the creation of the BBFC and goes on to cover the Board s theoretical censorship principles concerning such matters as crime, religion and sex and to discuss how these principles were applied in practice to silent films. The advent of the talkies in the late 1920s caused a minor revolution in the Board s work during the 1930s and 1940s, when the cinema rose to the peak of its popularity. This era of the Board s history is examined in detail, with extensive use of the Board s surviving records and a whole chapter devoted to the special circumstances of the Second World War. The final chapter delves into the Board s work up to 1950, and investigates the connection between film censorship in Britain and the USA. Also discussing the political and social background, this is an essential history of film censorship in Britain in general and the BBFC in particular."

Trash or Treasure

Trash or Treasure PDF Author: Kate Egan
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 9780719072338
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
Trash or Treasure is a wide-ranging historical study of the British circulation of the video nasties - a term that was originally coined to ban a group of horror videos in Britain in the 1980s but which continues to have cultural resonance in Britain up to the present day. The book is divided into three sections, which represent the key periods of existence of the nasties category: The formation of the term in the 1980s; the fan culture that formed around the nasties subsequent to their banning under the video recordings act; and the DVD and theatrical re-release of some of the nasty titles from 1990 onwards. Through an exploration of a range of relevant historical materials (from film reviews to fan websites, to video advertising materials), the book examines how this unusual, historically-specific genre category was formulated in a particular context, and then used (for different reasons) by moral campaigners, distributors, critics, and fans. By examining the discourses that inform the circulation of a group of banned films (including the growth of DVD, the Internet, and the academic rehabilitation of horror films), the book argues that censorship is not just about rules and regulations, but also about the material, cultural, and commercial consequences of a censorship act of law. It will be of great interest to lecturers and students of film, popular culture, and the media, as well as enthusiasts of horror films and those interested in film censorship debates.

Transnationalism and Genre Hybridity in New British Horror Cinema

Transnationalism and Genre Hybridity in New British Horror Cinema PDF Author: Lindsey Decker
Publisher: University of Wales Press
ISBN: 1786836998
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
This book takes British horror films of the 2000s as a case study to theorise transnational genre hybridity, which combines genres from different national cinemas.

Censored

Censored PDF Author: Tom Dewe Mathews
Publisher: Random House (UK)
ISBN:
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
If one drew up a list of the best films ever made, then it turns out that nearly all of them have been heavily censored or banned. Lang's METROPOLIS, Chaplin's CITY STREETS, Eisenstein's BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN, Brando's THE WILD ONE and Kubrick's THE CLOCKWORK ORANGE, for instance, have all suffered from the effects of censorship. This pioneering book explores the absurdities (and occasional virtues) of censorship over the whole history of film in Britain, and places them in the context of their age. From the banning of anti-Nazi films (that continued up to 1939), to the sexual dilemmas of the 50s and 60s as the censors dealt with homosexuality, nudity, violence, drugs, rape and other subjects that came out of the closet, right up to the ludicrous limits still imposed on film-makers by the BBFC, this book is a brilliantly entertaining - but also hard-hitting - account of a control that is often political in its effect, and always contradictory.

The Hidden Cinema

The Hidden Cinema PDF Author: Dr James C Robertson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134876726
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
How does film censorship work in Britain? Robertson examines the history of the British Board of Film Censors and shows that censorship has had a greater influence on film history than is often assumed.

Censorship and the Permissive Society

Censorship and the Permissive Society PDF Author: Anthony Aldgate
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN:
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
Stage or film presentations of Look Back in Anger, A Taste of Honey, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Alfie, and Darling were much changed, even transformed, by censorship between 1955-1965. Censorship and the Permissive Society explores the predicament writers and directors faced, and highlights the debate over the liberalizing or progressive aspects of the sea changes affecting British society at the time. A key decade in the postwar social and cultural history of Britain, the period saw the country emerge from the 'doldrums era' of the fifties, to the permissive society of the 'swinging sixties'. A noticeable move towards 'decensorship' increasingly loosened the traditional constraints imposed on literature, stage, and films. Anthony Aldgate shows, however, that censorship altered the progression of the artistic and creative renaissance of this period, and how the process brought changes in the works of writers such as John Osborne, Shelagh Delaney, Alan Sillitoe, John Braine, Frederic Raphael, and Keith Waterhouse, and directors such as Tony Richardson, Lindsay Anderson, John Schlesinger, and Lewis Gilbert. Drawing upon a mass of recently released or hitherto unseen documentation - including records, files, and photographs from the British Board of Film Censors and the Lord Chamberlain's Office - Anthony Aldgate charts the impact of the censorship process between 1955 and 1965 upon playwrights and directors, many of whom endured the rigorous, sometimes rancorous, though often also fruitful, scrutiny of the film and theatre censors.

Silencing Cinema

Silencing Cinema PDF Author: D. Biltereyst
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137061987
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
Oppression by censorship affects the film industry far more frequently than any other mass media. Including essays by leading film historians, the book offers groundbreaking historical research on film censorship in major film production countries and explore such innovative themes as film censorship and authorship, religion, and colonialism.