For or against censorship

"I Don't Mind the Sex It's the Violence": Film Censorship Explored by Enid Wistrich (Marion Boyars £2.25: cased edition £5.95) Censorship as an issue splits opinion down the middle, for or against. Mrs Wistrich claims that in 1973 as a member of the Greater London Council she approached film censorship as an innocent.
A chapter on "The Reluctant Censor" conveys her surprise at discovering the existence of the GLC Films Viewing Board whose chairman she was persuaded to become.
When after two years' energetic chairmanship her proposal that the GLC 'cease to exercise its permissive power to censor films for adults was defeated by 50 votes to 44, she resigned from the board.
The resultant hook fulfils its main title, "Film Censorship Explored", (The over-title is a more or less irrelevant gimmick, though the book of course contains plenty about violence and research into its effects, as well as frequent reference to such notorius films as "A Clockwork Orange", "Last Tango", "Blow-Out" and many worse).
Mrs Wistrich has written a lucid, lively and except for much inevitably distasteful subject-matter readable account of her exploration.
But it is exploration by an anti-censor. Mrs Wistrich's position might be deduced from the contemptuous opening phrase about "the ancient repressive control of prior censorship" (Mrs W's bugbear) or from consistently derogatory references to "Mrs Whitehouse and the antipornography crusaders".
Mrs Wistrich discovers the
Upstream exhibition
The paintings and drawings of Brian Nicol and Les Cunliffe will be on show at the Upstream Gallery, Short Street. London. SEI, from June 5 to July I . The gallery will be open in the evening from 6 p.m. to 7.30 p.m. whenever the Upstream ;Theatre Club puts on a production.
St Luke for children
A new record for children of stories from St Luke's Gospel has just been published by the Scripture Union. The stories are narrated by Roy Castle and the script is by David Lewis. "Luke Street" is available from most Christian record suppliers at £1 .95.
familiar anomalies of the British system: the British Board of Film Censors set up by the industry for self-protection and since endowed with semi-legal status, but still liable to be overridden by local authority.
She rightly consulted John Trevelyan. so long Chief Censor, and pays tribute to his "unrivalled knowledge of the film world", but does not answer the important question whether his vaunted 'liberalisation" followed or led opinion down its path to the permissive society.
My own only first-hand experience of screen censorship was for an independent television company, censoring films to be shown to children, the only uncontroversial field of film censorship. On censorship for adults, as Mrs Wistrich found, opinion is fiercely divided.
Many, perhaps most, critics and others who take films seriously are profoundly opposed to censorship on principle, though the principles sometimes sound like a totalitarian dedication to
political or artistic freedom as priorities before all other values.
Today, looking round at the London scene, makes it difficult not to endorse the statement of the present Censor James Ferman, as quoted by Mrs Wistrich: "I can conceive of no society that would not place some limits on what is permissible on the screen."
Mrs Wistrich has made a stimulating and energetic exposition of the known faults of film censorship. As an anti. censor, she cannot be expected to provide the positive rational system which would solve the anomalies and answer the question: "Who is to do the censoring and lay down the laws?"
Probably the most authoritative text for censors is St Augustine's: "By seeing everything we finally tolerate anything, and tolerating anything fivally leads us to
approve everything" a process well illustrated if not accepted, by this book.
Freda Bruce Lockhart