Silencing Cinema

This is an excellent book with a wide-ranging group of essays covering film censorship on a global scale ... Compelling, revealing, and passionate, this is a book that demands attention. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-level undergraduates and above. - CHOICE (W. W. Dixon, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, USA) By shedding light on the different nuances and complexities of film censorship around the world, this collection contributes new insights to the field of cinema studies ... This is a scholarly but accessible book, likely to attract academics who work on cinema, censorship and transnational culture(s) more generally, but also recommended to undergraduates and other readers interested in the topic. - The Kelvingrove Review In times like these, when everything seems to be allowed and no taboo is left unexplored, the desire for censorship seems strange. However, the contributions to Silencing Cinema make clear that the call for censorship is as old as film history itself, and that censorship is not limited to top-down pressures that led to the banning of certain films or certain subjects (as in Nazi-Germany and Soviet-Russia), or to blocking particular scenes (e.g. nudity and violence in Hollywood). The book indicates that censorship permeates all levels of society: it is in the minds of legislators, filmmakers and viewers, and it influences their actions, their viewing habits and experiences. ( ) The articles in this book give a general and at the same time well-nuanced history of many years of censorship as well as its influence on film production and film distribution in a series of countries. Where necessary, the articles highlight complex film censorship practices as those in the USA, or they introduce a totally unknown history as that of the Nigerian film censorship. (...) In that sense, the editors prove that the book's subtitle Film Censorship around the World is completely justified. - Gerwin van der Pol, Tijdschrift voor Communicatiewetenchappen, 2014, 42 [2]: 208-209