Film & Video Censorship in Modern Britain by Julian Petley (Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 240 pages. ISBN: 978-0748625383 (hardback), £75; ISBN: 978-0748625390 (paperback), £24.99
About the Author: Dr Kate Egan is a Lecturer in Film Studies at Aberystwyth University, UK. She is the author of Trash or Treasure?: Censorship and the Changing Meanings of the Video Nasties (2007) and The Evil Dead (Cultographies series, 2011), and co-editor (with Sarah Thomas) of Cult Film Stardom: Offbeat Attractions and Processes of Cultification (2012).
E-mail: kte@aber.ac.uk
Film and Video Censorship in Modern Britain explores the development of film and video censorship since the beginnings of the domestic video industry in 1979. The book’s chapters and sections focus, in turn, on a series of cases and debates that have made, as Petley notes, Britain one of the most censorious nations in contemporary Europe - from the ‘video nasties’ debate and the subsequent establishment of the 1984 Video Recordings Act (VRA); to the 1994 amendment of the VRA in light of the media panic over the murder of James Bulger; to the 1996 controversy over David Cronenberg’s CRASH; to the illuminating battle between the Home Office, British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) and Video Appeals Committee over the R-18 certificate and its guidelines in 1999/2000.
This book, in many respects, will serve as a useful resource for both media studies students and teachers
While, as the author acknowledges, a number of chapters included in the book are reproductions (or amended and expanded versions) of articles written by Petley at the time that these cases and events were unfolding, their inclusion alongside each other in this book has a number of benefits for those interested in studying the operations and implications of British film and video censorship. Firstly, Petley makes reference, in the book’s introduction, to Annette Kuhn’s ground breaking approach (Cinema, Censorship and Sexuality 1909-1925, Routledge, 1988) of seeing film censorship as an ‘apparatus’ – a view which allows for a conception of film censorship as not just a practice carried out by official censorship bodies (such as the BBFC) but as a process informed by the social, cultural and political ‘forces and institutions’ (2011: 4) that impact on these bodies’ policies and decisions. Kuhn’s conception of censorship as ‘apparatus’ provides Petley with an illuminating framework in which to highlight, in successive chapters, the ways in which the strategies and policies of the organisation at the heart of the book, the BBFC, have been informed by the agendas of a host of relevant ‘forces and institutions’ (from the policies of successive British governments, to the changing interests of the film and video industry, to the agendas that have informed the activities and campaigns of the national press). Secondly, and importantly, Petley places his previously published work in context in another way, throughout the book. In introductions to each of the book’s sections, he highlights and charts the centrality of the (always opaquely-defined) concept of ‘harm’ throughout successive moral panics and censorship debates, and the consequent contribution of these conceptions and processes to the increased legal and political intervention into moral issues and private, domestic activities within contemporary Britain.
This book, in many respects, will serve as a useful resource for both media studies students and teachers. The chapters in the book that focus on the analysis of some of the BBFC’s annual reports, or which reproduce Petley’s interviews with the BBFC directors James Ferman and Robin Duval, ably illustrate the range of documents that can be accessed and analysed when studying British film censorship processes. Petley is also an engaging writer, and his analyses of the conflicting contexts, agendas and misconceptions about the media that have informed successive moral panics, legal cases and changes in the law are always clearly and carefully outlined, allowing this book to serve as both a historical analysis of these debates and a detailed overview of the range of objections that Petley has made, and continues to make, to these panics and processes. In some respects, this second aim does slightly overwhelm the former in the book’s conclusion. Here, Petley valuably outlines a series of suggestions for a programme of film censorship reform in Britain, but this means that less space is given over here to a final overview of the book’s main arguments and a consideration of the degree to which Kuhn’s notion of censorship as ‘apparatus’ serves as a valuable means to assess and illuminate the practices of film censorship in modern Britain. In addition, while Petley’s contribution to the field has always centrally focused on the regulatory debates around adult or controversial film and video titles, a discussion of BBFC policy in relation to genres that are less frequently associated with explicit or adult content (for instance, in relation to the establishment of the 12A category) could have been a valuable and illuminating addition to the book’s arguments and insights. Despite this, however, this book remains an engaging and indispensable overview of both the key issues and events in the field and the experiences, research and arguments of a scholar who has remained at the forefront of film censorship debates in Britain for over thirty years.
Dr Kate Egan
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