Censorship is no easy matter

By GRAHAM REID

Any second now - if you dare to keep reading - the notorious c-word will come up. So brace yourself, because even in a world of laissez-faire morality the c-word still quickens pulses.

As with the f-word, regularly used in close proximity, the c-word alienates.

Lines about it are drawn in perpetually shifting sand as liberals and puritans square off and shout across the great divide.

Yes, the c-word - "censorship", should you still be in any doubt, regularly used in close proximity to the f-word, "freedom" - can still break up an otherwise civilised dinner table conversation.

As mainstream television drops in that other c-word and the infinitely adaptable f-word to mid-evening viewing on programmes such as Sex and the City and The Sopranos, the question today, however, is not just what you get, but how you got it.

Increasingly, the delivery systems of potentially offensive material are so diverse that few would envy the moral gatekeepers, official or self-appointed.

There's the familiar stuff like books, CDs, videos and unforgivable Kevin Costner movies.

Then there are also DVDs and sell-through videos with extra footage, niche-market film festivals, video and PC games, PlayStation, internet chat rooms and hardcore sites, Eminem albums and thug-life gangsta rap ...

Different laws apply to different products. If it's in print or on a music CD, it need not pass through the Office of Film and Literature Classification (chief censor, Bill Hastings), although if you are offended by the content you can complain.

If it's on television, the channels themselves act as gatekeepers and offer on-screen warnings about content. If you find something objectionable then you complain to the Broadcasting Standards Authority.

So far, so simple. But it gets complicated.

Videos and films - whether for general release or festivals - generally go to the censor's office for review if they carry an age restriction from overseas or are unrated.

If they have a non-restricted rating from Australia or Britain, they are steered to the Film and Video Labelling Body in Auckland, along with most DVDs, but may end up at the Classification Office. Those increasingly complex computer games usually go to the Labelling Body.

If you import your own DVD or videos they need to be classified, only if they are to be used for public showing.

To the year ended June 30, the Classification Office received 1678 films, videos, DVDs and computer games from the Labelling Body, an increase of 10 per cent on the previous year.

The internet is the domain of Internal Affairs, which can shut down New Zealand sites displaying or selling offensive content, or put the frighteners on locals accessing offensive overseas sites. However, the hardcopy can be submitted to Hastings' office in Wellington.

So what do Hastings and his team look for? The Films, Videos and Publications Classification Act which took effect in October 1994 defines as an offensive publication one that "describes, depicts, expresses or otherwise deals with matters such as sex, horror, crime, cruelty or violence in such a manner that the availability of the publication is likely to be injurious to the public good".

It seems a catch-all, but some - Hastings included - say the law isn't specific enough in some areas, or at least allows for varying interpretation. And it's up for debate in court.

Hastings cites the case of two videos characterised as anti-homosexual that were initially given R18 certificates by his office and then subsequently banned by the Board of Review.

The ban was upheld by the High Court, but that decision was quashed in the Court of Appeal which, says Hastings, "put in doubt the office's ability to classify as restricted or objectionable publications which treat a group of the public as inherently inferior by reason of a prohibited ground of discrimination" - a reference to another section of the law pertaining to censorship.

The Court of Appeal looked to the letter of the act ("deals with matters such as sex ... ") and determined that discussion of homosexuality and the transmission of HIV through sex was not within those constraints.

"Matters such as" was interpreted to mean "activity" rather than "expression of opinion or attitude".

The videos were sent back to the Board of Review and are now classified as unrestricted.

That decision raises questions about whether, for example, a surreptitiously filmed video of young boys changing outside a swimming pool deemed objectionable by his office would now be permissible because it contained no sexual activity.

The debate continues, and gets more complex.

Censorship debates are obliged to hinge on what is considered injurious to the public good.

Public tolerance - "bugger" being a mild example - certainly changes over time. The once controversial Last Tango in Paris, which was banned from 1973 to 1975, rated R20 in 1977 and R18 in 1988, recently screened on Sky.

Hastings acknowledges his office is partly responsible for the changing climate as it walks the line between freedom of expression and social responsibility.

"It's a circle, and quite where we fit in along the perimeter I'm not sure. Attitudes partly change because of what we do here, and that raises a philosophical question about the role of censorship - should it be one step behind public opinion, or ahead, or trying to match it?

"It's also a result of split jurisdictions. Whenever we get people in to help us with a film or as part of research projects they inevitably say they've seen worse on television.

"So television is the wallpaper to our lives, forever determining the boundaries of what people accept, or maybe accept with a shrug of resignation, the 'What can you do?' kind of thing.

"That inevitably affects their advice to us on a film, which inevitably affects what we do on future films."

The act does not require proof that something be injurious to the public good, says Hastings - the phrase is "likely to be".

Increasingly, research is telling us how likely it might be.

"There are now journals and so on which pretty well define that for anyone with a propensity to sexual violence, that [propensity] will be heightened by exposure to sexually violent images.

"Other studies show that negative attitudes towards women can be maintained by exposure to demeaning images. On hip-hop [music] less research is available."

Neither anti-social behaviour nor language alone lead to restrictions, but they will be bannered in a descriptive note "because quite regularly we get feedback, particularly from older people, who want such warnings".

But there is little to warn grandma about the mainstreet shop in Auckland called Rip, Shit and Bust. She probably walks past it unblinkingly because most people have the capacity to normalise social change.

But in Hastings' office they have to run twice as fast to keep up with new technologies.

Computer games with intricate and almost inaccessible levels of content were a knotty issue remedied by hiring a part-time games player. With government consent, games are now examined substantially rather than entirely. The industry also helps with cheat sheets to quickly access various levels of the games and videos of the worst bits.

Films, videos and DVDs still represent the most contentious area.

Bill Hood, executive director of the Film and Video Labelling Body: "We can rate non-restricted content whether it be video, DVD, VCD [video compact disc] or 35mm film, assuming it's of a non-restricted nature and has been classified so by the Australian classification board or the British equivalent.

"What we do then is a checking procedure with a lot of paperwork, but that doesn't necessarily mean the product in question has to be fully viewed by the censorship office in Wellington."

The biggest recent problem has been DVDs that often come with additional footage, such as trailers and interviews. Video is reasonably simple - trailers for films above the rating of the main feature can be simply taken off. But that cannot be done with footage burned on to DVD.

"Classification has to be for the whole unit," says Hood, "so we spend half our lives fiddling with interactive systems on DVDs to make sure the terms of the regulations and act are being applied."

And that is where the censor's office is in the firing line today. It's less to do with censorship than that other c-word: cost. Hood says a straightforward rating for a DVD is $50 a title. The second time through from a different applicant it's only $40 because much of the work has been done so it's a paper-checking procedure. A VHS or VCD is $40.

The cost at the Classification Office, where movies, videos and DVDs may have to be viewed in their entirety and reports written, is $1000 for a VHS, $1100 for a DVD or a film.

Bruce Craig of Viewmaster, a specialist DVD and video shop in Grey Lynn, says he spent around $15,000 last year at the Film and Video Labelling Body. "My problem is in the smaller movies that can't carry the [classification] expense. If I get an old movie that was classified back in the 80s and it's got some additional footage, I might sell only four or five copies because there's a limited market. And for that I have to pay about $700."

Craig has not had a single complaint about extra footage on a DVD, which might suggest the system is working.

For the small distributor of arthouse films or the organisers of a film festival, classification costs can be prohibitive.

The office has been sympathetic, however, and at Hastings' discretion up to 75 per cent of the fee can be waived for non-profit organisations such as film festivals. There can be waivers for DVDs where only the additional content is viewed.

Even so, some argue that material already classified in Australia or Britain should simply be cross-rated to New Zealand, thus saving bureaucracy, paperwork and expense.

Andrew Cornwell, general manager of Columbia Tri-Star and a member of the Film and Video Labelling Body committee, agrees the system can be costly, often unnecessarily so. He argues for cross-rating from Australia or Britain (the US is slightly different and not particularly cross-creditable).

"In the [Australian] R18 category, every single title the Labelling Body sent [to the Classification Board] came back at R18. Maybe one in seven years hasn't, and that's a lot of money to pay to get the obvious rating."

Hastings' rejoinder is that New Zealand has ceded enough sovereignty over ratings and that our legislation is different.

We look to material being injurious to the public good. In Australia they are obliged to take into account "standards of morality, decency and propriety generally accepted by reasonable adults".

That is a difficult and, some say, more dangerous path, but the distinction doesn't wash with Cornwell.

"The censor always has the right to review so it's really a matter of managing the exceptions," he says. "Under the current act he can ask to look at anything, so we wouldn't be giving up any sovereignty but only exercising it where it's logical.

"At the moment we've got a system which creates costs and delays when 98 per cent of the product could go through the cross-rating way and he could deal with the other 2 per cent."

The big film festivals, despite fee waivers, also have their gripes.

"Last year it cost us something in the neighbourhood of $30,000," says Bill Gosden, director of the long-running International Film Festival. "If they hit us up for the whole lot we'd be out of business.

"The whole concept of who pays for censorship is interesting. If it's conceived as a user-pays charge then who is the user of censorship? It's not the film festival or distributor, it's this concept of the social good.

"Obviously it behoves festivals and distributors to be cooperative and to work in the interests of the public good, but to actually have to foot the bill for it ...

"The whole censorship operation is incredibly expensive and a lot of it is devoted to going through CD-ROMs looking for child pornography. I don't know that film distributors should be paying for that."

Many of these issues have gone before the Government Administration Committee chaired by Dianne Yates, which has finished its hearings and expects to make recommendations to Internal Affairs Minister George Hawkins "optimistically before Christmas, or early in the New Year".

One of the submissions comes from Gosden, seeking an extension of the category of exemption from censorship to include certain films for exhibition at approved film festivals.

"We recognise the censor needs to be able to retain the ability to ask to see films, which is how it works for festivals in Canada, Australia and the UK," Gosden says. "We're not looking for a total exemption from censorship and are nervous that's how we are being represented."

Gosden says there are huge costs in classifying an inoffensive film which will be seen only by 200 people and for which the festival could do its own classification.

And he notes, as do many others in the debate, that films that they have jumped through classification hoops to screen - he cites Funny Games - now appear on pay television channels such as Sundance and MGM.

"We have the impression the censor's office would prefer to hang on to film festival responsibilities because it's one of the few opportunities to see any decent films,"says Gosden.

You could hardly blame them. Some of the material is offensive and some of it is problematic - and sometimes decisions are redundant at birth.

For example, Hastings says the office will soon be asked to consider a recent Sex and the City episode which will be presented for classification as a sell-through video.

It deals with urination during sex, "which, because of its content, we would have to ban or request a cut to".

But it's already been shown on television, the wallpaper of our lives.