Download or read book Film and Video Censorship in Modern Britain written by Julian Petley and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2011-05-17 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Film and Video Censorship in Contemporary Britain written by Julian Petley and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Interviews with central figures.
Download or read book The British Board of Film Censors written by James C. Robertson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-02-29 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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."
Download or read book A Matter of Obscenity written by Christopher Hilliard and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2023-09-26 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Trash or Treasure written by Kate Egan and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2012-06-15 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Censored written by Tom Dewe Mathews and published by Random House (UK). This book was released on 1994 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Transnationalism and Genre Hybridity in New British Horror Cinema written by Lindsey Decker and published by University of Wales Press. This book was released on 2021-03 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Hidden Cinema written by Dr James C Robertson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2005-08-02 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Silencing Cinema written by D. Biltereyst and published by Springer. This book was released on 2013-03-26 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Censorship and the Permissive Society written by Anthony Aldgate and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1995 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Obscenity and Film Censorship written by Bernard Williams and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1981-10-29 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Williams Report on Obscenity and Film Censorship provoked predictably strong reactions in Britain when it first appeared (in 1979), both from those who had read it and from those who had not. It is reissued here, in an abridged form, in the belief that it ought to be more widely read and more fully discussed. The practical issues and political principles examined in the Report are certainly of very general and continuing interest, and the report will remain a crucial point of reference for all future public discussion of the subject, whether in Britain or elsewhere. This edition presents all the main findings and arguments of the full report, omitting only the length appendices. There is a preface which explains the background and briefly comments on the reception of the report.
Download or read book The Video Nasties written by Martin Barker and published by London : Pluto Press. This book was released on 1984 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book What the Censor Saw written by John Trevelyan and published by Michael Joseph. This book was released on 1973 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Censored Screams written by Tom Johnson and published by McFarland. This book was released on 1997-01-01 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As Dracula (1931) and Frankenstein (1931) ushered in the golden age of horror films in the United States, studios and distributors were faced with a major problem in their number one overseas market: the British Board of Film Censors (BBFC) were demanding extensive cuts, enforcing age restrictions, and banning outright many of Hollywoods horror movies. The issue most often used to limit the showing of horror films was their "unsuitability" to children. With that in mind, the BBFC developed specific film codes--the "A" (for adults) and the "H" (for horrific), both of which restricted viewing to those 16 or older--and then applied them liberally. This work examines how and why horror films were censored or banned in the United Kingdom, and the part these actions played in ending Hollywoods golden age of horror.
Download or read book The Routledge Companion to British Cinema History written by I.Q. Hunter and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2017-01-12 with total page 473 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over 39 chapters The Routledge Companion to British Cinema History offers a comprehensive and revisionist overview of British cinema as, on the one hand, a commercial entertainment industry and, on the other, a series of institutions centred on economics, funding and relations to government. Whereas most histories of British cinema focus on directors, stars, genres and themes, this Companion explores the forces enabling and constraining the films’ production, distribution, exhibition, and reception contexts from the late nineteenth century to the present day. The contributors provide a wealth of empirical and archive-based scholarship that draws on insider perspectives of key film institutions and illuminates aspects of British film culture that have been neglected or marginalized, such as the watch committee system, the Eady Levy, the rise of the multiplex and film festivals. It also places emphasis on areas where scholarship has either been especially productive and influential, such as in early and silent cinema, or promoted new approaches, such as audience and memory studies.
Download or read book Behind the Scenes at the BBFC written by Edward Lamberti and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2019-07-25 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This official history of the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) draws on unprecedented access to the BBFC's archives to trace 100 years of film classification, with contributions from leading film critics and historians and case studies of controversial films such as Battleship Potemkin and A Clockwork Orange.
Download or read book Censoring the 1970s written by Sian Barber and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2011-09-22 with total page 165 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the work of the British Board of Film Censors in the 1970s. Throughout the decade this unelected organisation set standards of acceptability and determined what could and what could not be shown on British cinema screens. Controversial texts like A Clockwork Orange (1971), Straw Dogs (1971), The Devils (1971) and Life of Brian (1979) have been used to draw attention to the way in which the BBFC operated in the 1970s. While it is true to say that these films encountered major classification problems, what of the hundreds of other films being classified at the same time? Did all films struggle with the British censors in this period, and can these famous examples be fitted into broader patterns of censorship policy and practice? In studying over 250 film files from the BBFC archive, this work reveals how 1970s films such as Vampire Circus (1971), Confessions of a Window Cleaner (1974) and Carry on Emmannuelle (1978) also ran into trouble with the film censor. This work explores the complex process of negotiation and compromise which affected all film submissions in the 1970s and the way in which the BBFC actively, and often sympathetically, negotiated with film directors, producers and distributors to assign the correct category to each film. The lack of any defined formal censorship policy in this period allowed the BBFC to work alongside the film industry and push cultural, social and artistic boundaries; however it also left the Board open to accusations of favouritism, subjectivity and personal bias. This work is not simply a study of controversial films and contentious issues, but rather engages with wider issues of changing permission, legal struggles, the influence of the media and the legislative and governmental controls which both helped and hindered the BBFC in this important post-war decade. The focus on historical and archival research offers a great deal to scholars from associated disciplines including history, social policy, media and communictaions and politics.
