Criticism
The Society for the Promotion of Community Standards (SPCS) has repeatedly criticised the OFLC for not banning films such as Baise-moi, Irréversible, Takashi Miike's Visitor Q and Lies which it classes as highly pornographic and violent.
SPCS has recently targeted films scheduled for exhibition in the Beck's Incredible Film Festival and the New Zealand International Film Festivals. SPCS criticisms fail to note that New Zealand censorship laws have required censors to consider artistic and literary merit since the debate over Stanley Kubrick's first cinematic adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita in 1960.
Having apparently exhausted its avenues of appeal over censorship decisions, in 2006 the SPCS began to criticise the financial management of the OFLC. It complained to the Auditor General that the OFLC was inefficient and mis-managed taxpayer funds. The Auditor General dismissed the SPCS' complaint, stating that "no evidence of waste was found during the course of the audit" of the OFLC.
In June 2007, Exit International Director Dr Philip Nitschke described the decision by the Classification Office banning The Peaceful Pill Handbook as "very disappointing" while recognising "that the Censor was under intense political pressure over this decision". The book was banned because it promotes and encourages criminal activity by offering instruction in how to smuggle and manufacture controlled drugs in violation of a number of statutes, not because it advocates reform of the law to permit the seriously ill and elderly access to pentobarbital.
Read more about this topic: Office Of Film And Literature Classification (New Zealand)
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“I am opposed to writing about the private lives of living authors and psychoanalyzing them while they are alive. Criticism is getting all mixed up with a combination of the Junior F.B.I.- men, discards from Freud and Jung and a sort of Columnist peep- hole and missing laundry list school.... Every young English professor sees gold in them dirty sheets now. Imagine what they can do with the soiled sheets of four legal beds by the same writer and you can see why their tongues are slavering.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)
“The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.”
—Walter Benjamin (1892–1940)
“I, with other Americans, have perhaps unduly resented the stream of criticism of American life ... more particularly have I resented the sneers at Main Street. For I have known that in the cottages that lay behind the street rested the strength of our national character.”
—Herbert Hoover (1874–1964)