Expert: Alessandro Machi - 10/29/2007

Question
Does Film Censorship reflect or impose standards? im trying to position myself on a public debate. of course having knowledge of both sides. thanks

Answer
Hi Sue, this is such a short but great question that even though I can not give a short concise answer I would like for it to exist in the pool of questions so others can mull it over as well.

I would be on the fence on this question.  I believe in double realities and therefore in any situation one could probably find evidence that both scenarios, imposing and reflecting, are occurring simultaneously.

The good news for you is you can pick either side and come up with a compelling case.  

Probably one area that is more cut and dried would revolve around race and ethnicity issues.  Those two issue probably reflected the standards of the time, and yet one could probably then find a film that came along and broke the existing standard and caused change to occur.

Perhaps one could argue that the standards came about after enough people expressed outrage over a certain type of event being chronicled in a movie, which would make film censorship be slightly more a reflection of the times.

Another intriguing and perhaps related question would be does religion impose or reflect film censorship more so than common law.