Good Censorship Venus

I have been keeping up with Tony Comstock's investigations into the OFLC's decision to blacklist seven films this year at the Melbourne Underground Film Festival. The OFLC as usual were stumped for answers when Tony asked pertinent questions about classification and censorship decisions made by the Office of Film and Literature Classification, no surprises, as they believe their system is imperfect - what we are not asking is for them to perfect their system, we are seeking to have it changed.

These kind of queries behind the OFLC's methods are not particularly recent, going back three years ago, the problems in practice were and perhaps still are that in order to get your film exempt you must request the exemption through the grounds of belonging to a moral or religious organisation - the issue here being is that there is only a limited number of these organisations considered legitimately acceptable. We have a stupid theory that because a religion chooses some enigmatic deity that no-one can question, the content that organisation wants to screen can be passed through, pending numbers and most likely bank balances of the "followers", yet anyone who is part of a community who practices "ritual" in known realities are easily dismissed.

The other issue is that films with adult themes are extremely hard for the OFLC to judge (why? they know it is wrong to shoot someone at any time, but to fuck someone?), so apparently they use community standards as a guideline, but how these standards are determined is not clear - community standards as we all know are densely hypocritical, fluently contradictory, and more then often severely corrupt.

Going on the basis of using an example of road rules, everyone knows that speeding kills, that it is a thoughtless act, and finally an offense, yet one only has to look at the figures for those booked speeding per year to realise that our community standards towards road safety are incredibly low. Using community standards to measure anything is the most shallow and thoughtless method of regulating anything. You might as well feed your pet dog shit out of a can.

Another issue is that the individual or team behind the work has very little redress to reverse the result and it is up to them to bring the matter to court as no-one is policing how the government bodies make their decisions. We have certain individual remedies such as Freedom of Information but not Freedom of Speech. We can request to be told but we can not request to tell. This parenting of the public wreaks of inequality. The same sorry old story of the two brothers, one athletic and a follower of his parent's ideals, the other concerned with interests outside of his family unit and bookish. The favoured son. The favoured mob.

Yet another broader issue relating to regulation is the passive/aggressive nature of classification, outright censorship would probably be a better tool for damning our creative output, because classification has a wider regulatory net and seems to use the classifications then as leverage for censorship where-ever and when-ever the desire arises, rather then a straight out "banning" which would hold better grounds for rebuttal.

Let's face facts though, being banned by the OFLC will one day see you having them buy you a champagne when they finally recognise that the rest of the world views your work respectfully. The funniest thing in my own respect to this matter of having my short work banned is that recently our feature film LOS that I co-wrote & co-directed was selected by Sundance for screening in next years program. Better tell the OFLC to get those flutes chilled.