ONE hundred years ago this year an audience in Paris saw the first film. A few months later, in 1895, a film was first shown in Dublin at Dan Lowry's in what is now the Olympia. As well as heralding that unique 20th century art form, the cinema also brought with it an unprecedented level of censorship. Index on Censorship commemorates the unhappy, but often willing, alliance between the cinema and censorship. As soon as it became clear that film was going to be an entertainment for the lower orders the moralists and improvers set about ensuring that we were protected.
Censorship is integral to the history of cinema. It was the censor who shaped much of the language of film. It allowed conventions to develop to express proscribed acts or subjects; fire works or crashing waves for sex; certain body language to suggest homosexuality. A woman chewing gum, or smoking in the street, was clearly a prostitute.
Film was to blame for society's evils. At the turn of the century an American judge saw cinema as the chief influence on juvenile offenders; 90 years later this view was echoed when an English judge at the James Bolger murder case could say that the young killers had been influenced by a film, Child's Play 3, without any evidence that the children had ever seen it.
The critic Philip French explains why there was so much concern with the effect of film. Here was a form of entertainment enjoyed by hundreds sitting in close proximity to each other, in the dark, watching an image that was large and intimate, transported in time and space. It opened up social perspectives previously unknown or forbidden. "Cinema offered an invitation to fantasise, to dream, to revolt." Is it any wonder the authorities wanted it severely censored?
Index does not deal with Ireland's enthusiastic contribution to the history of film censorship. However, the Irish get some recognition in the shape of T.R O'Connor, British film censor from 1916 to 1929. Mr O'Connor, born in Athlone, had been a Parnellite MP for Galway before he became MP for a Liverpool constituency. He was a journalist and became Father of the House of Commons.
His rules, 43 in all, ensured that the British film industry became an acquiescent creature of the political establishment. As well as banning the "unnecessary exhibition of underclothing," he also had problems with showing "relations of capital and labour,"and films dealing with India, which showed "British officers in odious light". They remained in force for some 40 to 50 years and ensured that gifted film makers left Britain. Hitchcock was one. He had wanted to make a film which would be set during the general strike of 1929, but knew he would never get a certificate. The Eisenstein classic Battleship Potemkin was banned in Britain for 30 years for fear it would ferment mutiny in the Royal Navy.
In the US equally conservative figures were drafted in to police the film industry; by the industry itself. Will Hays, a former Republic Postmaster General, was the first president of the Motion Picture Producers of America Inc. The Hays Office Code ensured that all American films were suitable for all audiences and all age groups.
This issue of Index is a necessary antidote to the celebration of 100 years of cinema, with its endless lists of 100 best films, filmographies, the resurrect ions of silent classics. Producing any art is probably a compromise, but it would seem from this issue that few compromised quite as willingly as those who controlled the film industry.
This issue continues with the unfailing high standard that Index achieves with every publication. Philip French is joined by a star studded cast, including Ken Loach, John Sayles, John Waters, Constantin Costa Gavras, Quentin Tarantino, whose piece is called "It's cool to be banned", Milos Forman, Arthur C. Clarke and Spike Lee.
Issue No 24 of Index dealt with the future of the United Nations and the state of civil liberties in the US. Read this - if only fort Anthony Lewis' brilliant, if depressing, essay "Nanny knows best", about how the American left has joined with the right in attacking free expression. The nanny philosophy, he says, is the view that people's sensitivities must be protected by censorship or suppression of things that might offend them; sensitivities have become more important than freedom of expression.
He warns black and women's groups seeking the protection of censorship from racism and pornography that censorship is "a boomerang, not a sword". It was America's strong tradition of free speech that gave protection to the feminist movement and the civil rights movement. What seems an attractive option today might be used against those same groups tomorrow - once you admit censorship you have no control over what ideas and opinions might be suppressed.
This issue also contains a number of pieces concerning attacks on press freedom and multi party democracy in Cambodia. Given the high level of involvement by Irish people in the first free elections in that country two years ago as UN police, military observers, and election workers, these developments will be viewed with some disappointment here.