"RECOMMENDED BY THE CENSOR FOR ADULTS"

New Zealand Listener, Volume 11, Issue 262, 30 June 1944, Page 20

"RECOMMENDED BY THE CENSOR FOR ADULTS"

N almost every week of the year, a New Zealander can open his newspaper and read about some resolution that has been passed by a school committee, an education board, a welfare society, or similar group, deploring the influence of the cinema on children and demanding stricter censorship. There was an example last week when a deputation waited on the Minister of Internal Affairs. Every now and then one also comes across some judge or magistrate who has been speaking in the same vein about the harmful effect on children of certain types of movie. It is a healthy sign that all these people are alive to the potentialities of the cinema to influence the young; but their complaints always appear to me to be rather unhelpfully vague. Exactly what do they object to? Broadly, their answers would probably reduce to "Too much emphasis on sex, encouraging a looseness in morals," and "Too much emphasis on violence and crime." Now it is true that violence and sex are the basic ingredients of nearly all films, either separately or in conjunction, and psychologists explain the popularity of these themes by saying that the movies, like most fiction, are providing us with "compensation’a safety-valve, so to speak-for passions that have to be repressed in civilised society. But the objection of the advo-cates-for-tighter-censorship must surely be confined to sexy and violent situations or single scenes, or perhaps to the precociousness of American youth as a model for our own: they can scarcely object to the general conclusions that ns

are arrived at, or to the morals that are pointed. For, as every filmgoer will confirm from his own experience, vice is practically never allowed to remain triumphant when the curtain goes down. On the contrary, thanks to the film industry’s internal system of censorship, the wicked are punished with far greater vigour and certainty than ever happens in real life. Anyway, so far as children are concerned, all reliable evidence suggests that the average child is bored by the average love story, and would much prefer something else, and that what may appear sexually shocking to a grown-up usually passes completely over his head. But violence? Well, here the position may be slightly different, though the evidence of the cinema’s effect on child delinquency and crime is wholly contradictory. But when our school committees and magistrates express their concern that so much violence is allowed to be shown on the screen to mar impressionable young minds, it would be interesting to know what kind of violence they mean. Would they ban young people from seeing most war films? For nowhere else could you find such a concentration of the more lurid forms of blood-letting, or such incitement to hatred, as in this type of picture, and particularly some recent ones. Ea * * PERSONALLY, I am against our present negative form of film censorship, even for children. I’d let them go to any film if they really wanted tobut I'd try to provide something better and encourage them to go there instead, Yet if you are going to keep children away from anything, surely you should keep them away from realistic scenes of soldiers getting their throats cut and _ their faces smashed in with rifle-butts, not to mention being shot down or blown up in batches. To give our New Zealand censor his due, he does put his "Recommended for Adult Audiences" certificate on this type of movie: but although I may be wrong, I suspect that many of the very people who pass resolutions deploring the present laxity of censorship (and certainly a great body of parents) might be just as likely, for emotional and patriotic reasons, to encourage youngsters to see such pictures as Commandos Strike at Dawn, Went the Day Well? and In Which We Serve. Considered objectively (which is hard these days, I know), there would seem to be little difference, from the (continued ‘on next page)

(continued from previous page) viewpoint of potential harm to tender minds, between a scene of a soldier getting his head smashed open with a chopper or a knife stuck in his back, and one of a Chicago gangster mowing people down with a tommy-gun in order to rob a bank. If you are going to condemn the one, you should logically ‘condemn the other. Or does the act acquire some special virtue which makes it harmless for children to look upon when the head or the back is German? % * % NE form of violence which is particularly lucrative to the movie-makers and particularly provocative to the resolution-passers comes under the category of "horror"-the Calling Dr. Death or Mummy’s Ghost type of picture. Recently, legislation was prepared in New South Wales to ban "horror films" from Saturday matinees for children. Our own legislators haven’t got round to that yet, but if they ever do, they should find plenty to talk about. These so-called horror films are just about the silliest form of entertainment that Hollywood now produces, yet judging by their frequent appearances on _programmes, they still have their audiences; and although our censor almost invariably suggests that they are more suitable for adults than for children, the patronage is often largely juvenile. For here we find demonstrated one of the most absurd anomalies in an otherwise comparatively good system of censorship; there is nothing to prevent a horror film recommended more especially for adults from being co-featured with a film of another sort that is approved for universal exhibition. * * % HILE it is undesirable that such an anomaly should exist, I must confess that it does not perturb me greatly that children should be allowed, if they wish, to see these "horror films." It is doubtful if they take much real harm from them, any more than their parents took much harm from the Penny Dreadfuls which they read with such voracity when young, and which their parents, in turn, viewed with such misgivings. It would be a lot better if people exercised themselves less about what children should not see at the cinema, and more about what they should see. In other words, what is really needed is not censorship, but guidance. Censorship may, indeed, have exactly the opposite effect from what is intended. It is quite likely to emphasise the desirability of the thing that is censored; give it the attraction of forbidden fruit. I can well remember breaking bounds as a college boy in order to see Damaged Goods-and being very bored and bitterly disappointed (as, of course, I richly deserved). Miss C. A. Lejeune, of the London Observer, once had something worth repeating to say on this point: "The main danger of indiscriminate picturegoing for children is not what they may learn but what they may miss, without the pointer of an older experience to guide them. In the bewildering mass of film material issued every week, there are always a few films more valuable than the rest. Not necessarily educational in the strict sense, but richer than the others in the things that children want to learn about. A good story of flying; a good s of pioneering; an exciting bit of history; story of the sea; of fire-fighting; of wireless telephony; of scientific discovery. Or just simply good comedy, or high adventure, done as 1 as such things can be. ... (continued on next page)

| CINEMA CENSORSHIP

(continued from previous page) No child can discover these things for himself, for selection is a quality that comes with years. But the responsible adult can, and should, discover them for him. .... * Xe * HE trouble would seem to be that there are not enough "responsible adults" in Miss Lejeune’s sense in this _ country, judging by the number of children who are given sixpence on Saturday afternoons and allowed to go where they like, usually ending up at the cheapest double-feature show in town, which is, in the nature of things, more often than not the cheapest in quality, too. Where our system of censorship fails particularly, so far as children are concerned, is that its effect is negative rather than positive. Generally speaking, a film either gets a blanket approval from the censor, indicating that it is not considered unsuitable for either children or grown-ups, or else it is "recommended for adults." (Sometimes, as I have said, you find the two gradings on the same programme!). Occasionally the theatre management may back up the censor’s recommendation and indicate that some film is likely to be harmful to children, and that they will not be admitted.

Yet surely what is needed is something in the opposite direction: a positive indication to parents (and children) that certain pictures are definitely suitable for juvenile consumption. Give them if you like, a "recommended as particularly desirable for children" certificate. Such an innovation, which would almost certainly be welcomed by a large body of parents and teachers, might be beyond the Censor’s present function and ability-it is not everyone who knows the kind of films children should see, though there are plenty of people to tell you what kind they should not see. I would seriously suggest, therefore, that it would be worth our Education Department’s while to attach someone with that knowledge to the Censor’s office. His job would be to see all likely films, and publicly recommend those which children, if they are going to the movies, should: be encouraged to see. And let teachers in the schools get busy and back him up. x * Be HE alternatives to this suggestion are to continue the present vague and negative system until the pressure of resolutions from social welfare societies and the weight of magisterial comment force a more repressive form of censorship upon us, or elge to bar children under a certain age from attending the cinema except for occasional selected films. The latter would be ‘too drastic, though it is the course followed on the Continent, where children under 14 or 16 are not admitted to picturetheatres except for specially approved matinees. But in this country, the effect on our young people, reared in the habit of frequent and unrestricted moviegoing, would be simply to make them stay away in scorn from the films thus made available to them (they would resent the suggestion of "education" and "uplift") while encouraging them to seek every opportunity for worming their way into those which were forbidden. Only in one way might such a restrictive policy work satisfactorily: by following the Soviet example and setting up special children’s picture-theatres, plentifully supplied with films specifically made for juvenile patronage, to which children could go by themselves, but from which adults would be excluded unless accompanied by children. This proviso, though it- may seem trivial, is really vital to the Russian system. It gives children a sense of responsibility and of equality with grown-ups: a feeling that they are important people in their own right. They may not be permitted to see many grown-up films, and only then if their parents take them, but that seems fair enough if their parents cannot see the children’s own films unless the children take them. However, this system would demand such a wide measure of public control of theatres, and such a degree of cooperation by the industry to produce a large supply of special children’s films on a basis other than that of pure profitmaking, that we aren’t likely to see it operating here yet. In the meantime, the suggestion that certain of our ordinary films should be recommended as being specially suitable for ey Base well be considered.