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SILENCING CINEMA: CENSORSHIP AROUND THE WORLD, Palgrave Macmillan
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Winner of the 2008 Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) Student Writing Prize First Place.
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The draft Cinematograph Bill, 2010 does not question the simplistic understanding of the media regarding censorship, nor is there any recognition of the fact that the modes of production and consumption of the media are no longer easily amenable to centralised control. This notion of censorship is inherently elitist, premised on the superior wisdom of the privileged few, including the members of the Central Board of Film Certification. There is no clear procedure or set of norms laid down for the selection of these guardians of decency and morality, either in the Cinematograph Act of 1952 or in the draft bill.
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Music Sound and Moving Image
Locating my study around a recent set of issues in India’s mediascape, this article tracks the emergence of ‘sonic publics’ that are conditioned by the figure of the listener, her imaged aurality, and the aural tactics that are developed in response to censorship and a culture of redaction. In exploring the affective and embodied relationships forged through ‘sonic publics’, I trace the emergence of ‘pornosonic’ media that are held in a supplementary relationship with the pornographic, and their efficacy as a transactional medium where the work of sound is affective (working at the level of the body), social (working to create arrangements of public order around sonic artifacts) and cultural (filtered through cultural norms). Using the Hindi film Lipstick Under My Burkha (Dir. Alankita Srivastava, 2017), a phone-sex scandal in the Southern Indian state of Kerala, and the use of voiceover dubbing in the soft-porn industry as case studies, I argue that while these objects arguably exist as different ‘genres’ and operate at varying levels of ‘offensiveness’, they offer us ways of locating how sound becomes a site and object of contestation in the public sphere. This article is the winner of the 2018 Claudia Gorbman Writing prize awarded jointly by the SCMS Sound Studies SIG and the Music, Sound, and the Moving Image.
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This paper is invested in exploring the sensory affect that is created through censorship. It is invested in unravelling the complex interaction between the films of Anurag Kashyap and the institution of censorship, the sensibilities of which are capitalized and appropriated into the aesthetic effect of the film. It also looks at how such a deployment constructs the cult of a transgressive auteur. I argue that the deafening ‘beep’ that screams of the otherwise silencing practices of censorship is what guides the way to unraveling the subversion of censorship in the filmic text. Taking cue from Žižek’s Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (2006) which looks at cinema as the ultimate pervert art, telling us how to desire, this paper asserts that censorship doesn’t erase the profane, instead it points to its very utterance. I argue how Kashyap’s films’ profilmic text becomes the site of censorship standing out as material evidence to its very censoring. The ‘beeped’ or censored word becomes a provocation focusing attention onto itself by mobilizing its unspeakability through marketing the product as “controversial”. I posit that Anurag Kashyap capitalizes on this recognition. I look at the force of publicity that is created by censorship in Kashyap’s public discourse on censorship, in his negotiations with the CBFC (Central Board of Film Certification) from before the planned commercial release of his first directorial venture Paanch to his ongoing battle with the CBFC over refusing to use the court mandated no smoking warning in ‘Ugly’ (2014).
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Acts of Media: Law and Media in Contemporary India
Acts of Media seeks to consolidate a field of multidisciplinary work around media technologies that intersects with legal scholarship. This volume brings together contributions from leading academics, lawyers, researchers and policy experts about contemporary India and Sri Lanka. The approaches to law and media taken in this volume challenge us to think outside of traditional disciplinary descriptions. Rather than approaching the law as being outside of, and constantly catching up with the media, the contributors of this book view law and media as being deeply intertwined. The chapters in this volume address the relationship between law and media through different entry points—disputes over media and information systems shaping law, theories of law that incorporate media forms, and law and media co-producing trials. The multidisciplinary nature of this book has facilitated a rich and productive conversation among legal scholars, researchers and lawyers from disciplines such as constitutional law, law and technology, media and cinema studies, legal anthropology and political science.
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Censorship and the Staging of the Obscene Body-in-the-Text "The relation between Reality and Relativity must haunt the court's evaluation of obscenity, expressed in society's pervasive humanity, not law's penal prescriptions." "Social scientists and spiritual scientists will broadly agree that man lives not alone by mystic squints, ascetic chants and austere abnegation but by luscious love of Beauty, sensuous joy of companionship and moderate non-denial of normal demands of the flesh. Extreme and excesses boomerang although some crazy artists and film directors do practice Oscar Wilde's observation: "Moderation is a fatal thing."" "Surely, the satwa of society must rise progressively if mankind is to move towards its timeless destiny and this can be guaranteed only if the ultimate value-vision is rooted in the unchanging basics, Truth
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