Ontario ends film censorship
According to The Guardian, the Canadian province of Ontario has put and end to film ratings, after they were deemed to limit freedom of expression.
Movies will not now have to be classified before they are shown in cinemas, after the regional government yesterday passed a bill that stopped the practice. The act comes after Ontario’s supreme court ruled last year that the law was flawed.
The one exception concerns adult films, which the province’s film review board will censor if they are deemed illegal - for instance, if they break Ontario’s obscenity laws.
Tuesday 31 May 2005 | Paul | Canada
Sorry, but I like censorship. A bit of it, anyway. No censorship at all would mean legal child pornography - if we don’t want that, there has to be some censorship.
Almost as soon as the OFRB powers were taken away, video stores filled up with movies like BUMFIGHTS:A CAUSE FOR CONCERN(homeless people getting paid to fight each other and drink piss out of bottles), TRACES OF DEATH(just all accident and surgery footage with a sex change operation thrown in), and BUMFIGHTS PRESENTS:TERRORISTS KILLERS AND MIDDLE EAST WACKOS(just all actual footage of torture of humans and animals). Since the OFRB censorship powers were taken away, theres nothing they can do to pass these films.
Mabye if the OFRB had been doing a lot of censorship before their powers were taken and we got to see a lot of good, but extreme films that were previously banned, I’d be glad for the censorship powers being pulled. But, there was almost no censorship anyway - so all we get now that censorship is gone is snuff films of naked women having their heads sawed off with a punk rock soundtrack and comedy captions and counters that pop up. This stuff is not even hard to find, its in video stores all over the province.
Yeah yeah, I can choose to censor myself and choose not to watch that stuff. And I do choose to stay away from it. But if this stuff had been legal back when I was 12 or so, I would have jumped at the chance to see it. And I would have. Most 14,15 year olds I know watch lots and lots of shockumentaries, and there numb as hell as a result of it. It really isn’t speech and can’t be defended on freedom of speech grounds.
As for it being “only for adults”, video stores don’t give a damn about the rating system. And the OFRB has curiously gotten harder with ratings since their censorship powers have been taken away, so video stores would go out of business if they obeyed the rating system to a T. The clerks who sell these movies to children have no idea what they are selling them. And besides, these movies are not OK even for adults. If child porn were to become legal, would that be OK as long as it was sold only to adults?
Once your watching REAL death and torture in film, its not fun and games anymore. Its not just like sneaking into a horror movie with a bunch of your friends because the board says your too young to see it. Real death and torture is not just trashy, violent entertainment. It can do much worse than give a kid nightmares. Real death stuff should be banned. Since theres no way to get a non-pornographic movie banned by federal obscenity laws, banning of shockumentaries has to be done at the provincial level. Which means we need censroship back. I don’t understand how anyone could argue that censorship should be liberalized further at this point. We’d have to legalize child porn and bestiality, which people have tried to do and made it to the supreme court. They lost, but they might not lose next time.
Sorry for the slow response, Lungs, but you do make a couple of assertions here that are both emotive and inaccurate…
1: “No censorship at all would mean legal child pornography”
No it wouldn’t. You can’t make child pornography without abusing children. Child abuse is illegal for very good reasons that have nothing at all to do with censorship.
2: “so all we get now that censorship is gone is snuff films of naked women having their heads sawed off with a punk rock soundtrack”
No police force anywhere in the world has ever launched an investigation into snuff films. There is no evidence that these things exist they are, in fact, an urban myth.
1)
The banning of films FOR ANY REASON is censorship. By definition. Yes it does harm children to make that stuff. It brutalizes them. Which is why it is illegal - to discourage its production. And discourage people from going out and doing that to kids because of what they have seen.
Censorship is a dirty word nowdays, which I think is why people are so accepting of “documentaries” like bumfights. Making films illegal FOR ANY REASON is by definition censorship, and therefore there is such a thing as justified censorship. Anti-child porn laws are justified censorship. I think justified censorship can extend to the bumfights series. It should be illegal for the same reasons - 1) It harms homeless people, 2) It may make people(including adults) go out and attack homeless people.
2) The movie “Terrorists, killers, and middle east wackos” really does have just all actual war and execution footage with a punk rock soundtrack and occasional “comedy” captions that pop up.
A snuff film, I guess its not. Fine, I exaggerated when calling it snuff. The filmmakers are not murderers, they just got their hands on the sickest footage they could find. But does that mean its ok, even for adult audiences?
You have to understand what this stuff can do. A kid who watches terrorists, killers and middle east wackos through to the end will get used to the torture. After 20 minutes, they will no longer find it shocking, and then they will be to the point where they can watch real footage of naked women having their heads sawed off and not even flinch. They will have changed. And you know what, it effects adults the same way. No more acceptable for an adult to watch that stuff.
Will it end the world? No. But neither would legal child porn or legal crack cocaine. Does that mean it would be ok? Does that mean we’d be better off with it?
On the other end of the scale, imagine everything becoming really, really conservative. Or I guess regressive. Imagine old “hayes production code” type censorship, no nudity, no sex, no swering, only mild violence. Imagine cigarettes and alchohol being illegal. Imagine magazines like maxim being banned as pornography. Would that end the world? No. But who would want to live like that?
It has to be somewhere between those two extremes. Right now I think were too close to the “legal child porn and hard drugs” extreme, and need to go back towards the middle, in some ways anyway.
Film censorship wise, the way I see it - if its an actual movie with a plot, it should be legal, pretty much no matter how bad it is. Pornography should remain legal, I don’t have a problem with it. To much can get really addictive but it does a lot less harm that cigarettes and alcohol. Up to people wether or not they want to watch that stuff.
But if it exploits real human suffering, with no context, with no point, and in the case of bumfights, with the filmmakers commiting actual crimes during the making of the film, then it should be banned.
Some people really did try to get child porn legalized on “Freedom of speech” grounds, and they made it to the supreme court before they were defeated. The fact that the case even made it into court and was fought for a while is frightening.
I guess its kind of like boiling a frog to death. You put a frog in boiling water, and it will jump out. You put a frog in cool water and slowly turn up the heat, and it won’t jump out, it’ll boil to death. The sicker movies get, the more accepting the public becomes of sicker movies - and then they have to go even farther to shock. If bestiality porn were to be legalized, and then, say, porno movies where the participants are at least 14, because the age of consent is only 14, you’d be surprised at how little outcry there would be.
Here’s an example for you - a movie that could be made today. What if a bunch of psychotic 12 year olds were to get together and make a movie called “actual animal killings”, where they just go around and torture animals to death. Boiling frogs to death in water perhaps? Or how about torturing kittens to death, beating dogs to death with baseball bats, gouging hedgehogs eyes out with glass, and so on. Mabye some “duggestions” to the audience about funny ways that they could torture animals to death.
Now, lets say that movie got submitted to the Ontario film review board. They could call the police and try to get the “Filmmakers” charged with animal cruelty. But, they couldn’t ban the film. Since they aren’t allowed to refuse to rate a non-porno movie, they would be forced to rate the film “R”. An “R rating” means nothing to a kid nowdays, and it means nothing to video stores and theatres, and almost nothing to most parents. So the film would be released, and wether or not the filmmakers were caught, people, including children would see the “film”. People more normal that you would think would watch it. They might just rent it because they couldn’t beleive that such a movie could be made.
Yeah, yeah, such a movie has not been made yet. But bumfights has been made, and that involves homeless people being given doughnuts to fight each other, hit their heads off of stuff, pull out their teeth with pliers and drink piss out of bottles.
I sort of went on and on with this. But anyways, when there is “no censorship”, this is what we end up with. There really has to be some censorship.
I reserve the right to watch any film depicting real or imagined bestiality,torture or child pornography without moral or legal censure,and resort to any level of civil disobedience and destruction of property if facing psuedo-crime law for doing so (the same goes for drug laws.)
If a real rather than simulated crime has taken place then the existing criminal law should be used against those involved in the films production,with the film used as evidence. For example adult males involved in penetrative sex with children/adult/child rape or animal torture would be adequately covered by the existing law. With regard to “child pornography” involving nude poses defined as lewd or depicting real consensual teen sex, no criminal sanction should apply to any of the parties involved.
I have no wish to see such material personaly but my private studies show that thought-crime law criminalizes the innocent (including children) on a massive scale, which is more obscene than any film.
Incidentaly I do not take drugs.Seriously.
Lungs, you do make some reasonable points, but they are so wrapped up in emotive and unproven assertions that I am finding it very difficult to come up with a coherent response.
Trevor Loughlin said: “If a real rather than simulated crime has taken place then the existing criminal law should be used against those involved in the films production,with the film used as evidence.”
… and I think this is the point really. If someone commits a crime, then they should face prosecution and - if they filmed themselves committing a crime - that film should be admissible as evidence. And, if a crime has been committed, then simply banning a film and leaving it at that doesn’t sound like much of a response.
If you want to take an example like “Bumfights” then I think it’s worth considering what the issue actually is. Surely, the objection here is that homeless people are being induced to take part in fights - not that someone happens to have filmed it.
I don’t seriously think that anyone is going to go out and start attacking people after watching a film such as this. This is a claim made about the influence of films and TV (and, radio, books, the internet and pretty much every other media that has been invented) that is often made, but really doesn’t stand up to any sort of investigation.
Ultimately, there is what people think and what people do - and it’s what people do that the legal system should be looking at and not what people think, or say.
Incidentally I am not desensitised to extreme material. For example, I find Steve-O of Jackass fame’s “Naked girl on fire” stunt immoral and very disturbing, even though the parties involved seemed to escape uninjured, because of the horrendous possibilities had things had gone wrong. The same for the Danish copycats. However I respect the right of all parties involved to take this risk and find their pyrophilliac experiment quite “stimulating” but have no plans to set anyone’s backside on fire for a stupid stunt or perverted purposes.
It has to be said that the Danish students copy of this stunt was dangerous because they had none of the technical knowledge of professional stuntmen (for example the girl wore a sweater that could have set on fire) and the best way to prevent tragedies is to educate people about risks-in this case the laws of physics and thermodynamics. For example a water alcohol mix was used that gave out more light then heat in the original stunt.
To ban this video under violent pornography laws would be the wrong approach.
I have to say stunts are a special case because copycats do injure themselves through ignorance, and viewing a picture of people with horrendous burn injuries should be compulsory before watching this material. My mother worked as a nurse under Sir Harold Giles and some of her stories about burnt servicemen made it clear to me that fire is not a joke.
Another example would be the need to educate people how terribly dangerous autoerotic asphyxiation can be, as Jane Longhurst found out to her cost. An example would be the fact that it is possible to induce heart failure merely by breath holding techniques! Criminalizing people who view such websites will not prevent such tragedies.
As for paedophilia, reformed predatory paedophiles (accompanied by a police officer at all times) should be made to lecture schoolchildren on the means by which they may be sexually exploited by adults and graphic description of the potential for injury, disease and abduction should be given.
One further matter I must clear up. The only remaining argument for subjecting people who view extreme material to lifelong santions and
checks is that interest in this material may indicate a potential precrime. The statistics in fact show that this is not in fact the case.
Worse still, many of the most horrendous crimes against children are committed by people with no record of REAL sex crimes, never mind the sort of thought crime laws some people on this board support.
The fact has to be faced that the ONLY route to prevent this sort of crime is to develop true precrime technology, that is to build a quantum mechanical device to gather data from future events. Which is precisely what I am doing.
You really threw me here, Trevor.
Not being a fan of “Jackass”, I haven’t seen the stunt you’re referring to - and probably won’t - but I fully agree with you that the best way to address copycat stunts is through education, not trying to ban people from seeing these things in the first place.
As for allowing paedophiles to lecture children on the dangers they pose, I can see where you are coming from but I do think that it should be possible to teach children to remain safe without subjecting them to a lot of graphic detail.
And then I got to your remarks on “precrime technology” and a “quantum mechanical device” and I thought: Don’t be bonkers, please.