Censorship Guide (Part 6: Offline)

This part of the Censorship guide provides a perspective on online censorship by looking at practice offline.

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For those interested in censorship of books we recommend Edward de Grazia's engagingly written - and for the moment definitive - Girls Lean Back Everywhere: The Law of Obscenity & the Assault on Genius (New York, Random 92).

Dr Bowdler's Legacy: A History of Expurgated Books in England & America (Boston, Godine 92) is Noel Perrin's account of sanitising literature from Shakespeare and the Bible - all that horrid violence! - through to Dr Doolittle (seething with political incorrectness).

Paul Boyer's study in Purity In Print (New York, Scribners 68) of the crusade against smut in the first half of last century has aged like a fine wine. Peter Coleman's Obscenity, Blasphemy & Sedition: The Rise & Fall of Literary Censorship in Australia (Potts Point, Duffy & Snellgrove 00) is a reprint of the entertaining 1960 study by the conservative politician. For a view to his left we recommend The High Price Of Heaven (St Leonards, Allen & Unwin 99) by noted Australian author David Marr.

Sex, Laws & Cyberspace: Freedom & Censorship on the Frontiers of the Online Revolution (New York, Holt 97) by Jonathan Wallace & Mark Mangan is a readable account of US online smut-busting in the early 1990s.

In Australia you can readily obtain some publications in bookshops and libraries but not on the Web, because the Internet is somehow special and - unlike broadcast tv or print - will fade your children as well as your curtains (as daylight saving was wont to do under former Queensland premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen).

The Australian Broadcasting Authority, now acting as online censors, for example recent issued a 'takedown' order for a site that published the puerile Anarchists Cookbook, readily available in libraries across Australia.

A perspective on such publications is provided by the 1997 report by the US Department of Justice's cybercrime unit on The Availability of Bombmaking Information.

The US Comic Book Legal Defense Fund (CBLDF) has an extensive bibliography of case law, media coverage, academic studies and other writings from the 1930s onwards regarding censorship of political cartoons and popular comics.

film

Frank Walsh's Sin and Censorship (New Haven, Yale Uni Press 96) is an approachable introduction to currents in US film censorship, enlivened by contemporary criticism such as this account of The Kiss (the sensational four minute 1896 film):

the spectacle of the prolonged pasturing on each other's lips was beastly enough in life size on the stage but magnified to gargantuan proportions and repeated three times over it is absolutely disgusting.

After that it was on to Pulp Fiction. Gregory Black's The Catholic Crusade Against The Movies 1940-75 (Cambridge, Cambridge 97) includes the 1961 demand from the Legion of Decency that depictions of sticking a tongue in a lover's ear be deleted, since

this technique cannot be used without arousing erotically the susceptible members of any audience, anywhere, any time.

Gerald Garner's The Censorship Papers (New York, Dodd Mead 87) offers an insider's view of industry self-censorship 1934-68. Francis Couvares' Movie Censorship & American Culture (Washington, Smithsonian 96) provides an overview of the US regimes. Leonard Leff & Jerold Simmons' Dame in the Kimono: Hollywood, Censorship, & the Production Code from the 1920's to the 1960's (New York, Doubleday 91) is lighter.

For the UK Dewe Mathews' Censored: The Story of Film Censorship in Britain (London, Chatto & Windus 94) is a general history. James Robertson's The British Board of Film Censors: Film Censorship in Britain 1896-1950 (London, Croom Helm 85) and The Hidden Cinema: British Film Censorship in Action 1913-1972 (London, Routledge 89) is heavier going but definitive. Film Censorship (London, Gollancz 75) by Guy Phelps and Enid Wistrich's I Don't Mind the Sex It's the Violence: Film Censorship Explored (London, Marion Boyars 78) are more polemical than Bernard Williams' Obscenity and Film Censorship (Cambridge, Cambridge Uni Press 81). John Trevelyan's What the Censor Saw (London, Michael Joseph 73) is a popular account.

Annette Kuhn's Cinema, Censorship and Sexuality 1909-1925 (London, Routledge 88) and Anthony Aldgate's Censorship and the Permissive Society: British Cinema & Theatre 1955-1965 (Oxford, Oxford Uni Press 95) catch the UK censors in action at critical times.

music, performance and visual arts

John Johnston's The Lord Chamberlain's Blue Pencil (London, Hodder & Stoughton 90) is a readable account of UK theatrical censorship: don't mention the war, the royal family, the 'F' word, the divinity or indeed anything likely to frighten the horses up to the 1950s.

Bleep! Censoring Rock & Rap Music (Westport, Greenwood 99) is a collection of essays edited by Betty Winfield on contemporary music censorship. Elizabeth Childs's Suspended License: Censorship & the Visual Arts (Seattle, Uni of Washington Press 98) and Robert Post's Censorship & Silencing: Practices of Cultural Regulation, Public Policy (London: Oxford Uni Press 98) are academic studies of the US 'culture wars'.

radio and television

Jonathan Wallace's Pervasive Problem is an article on recent US Supreme Court decisions about censorship of radio broadcasts (don't use the F word) as a model for online content regulation. As we noted earlier, keeping the airwaves free from nastiness is a task for Australia's ABA. Robert Corn-Revere's Rationales & Rationalizations: Regulating The Electronic Media (Washington, Media Institute 97) offers a US perspective.

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