Offensive to a Reasonable Adult: Film Censorship & Classification in 'Secular' Australia

By Robert Cettl

Welcome to Wowserland.

In its short history, Australia has banned / censored the most films of any Western so-called 'democracy', With no Bill of Rights, nor free speech protection, Christian morals groups historically dominate the censorship of all film, their particular fear and loathing reserved for sexually explicit films. Indeed, so great is the Christian opposition to sexually explicit films that Australia now bans film depictions of sex acts that are legal to perform between consensual adults: you can do it but you can't watch it.

From Alfred Hitchcock's Blackmail to the notorious A Serbian Film and Human Centipede 2, the Australian censorship system has banned/censored the works of some of the finest world filmmakers - Catherine Breillat, Volker Schlondorff, Hector Babenco,Luis Bunuel, Federico Fellini, Larry Clark,Virginie Despentes, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Tinto Brass, Russ Meyer, Eduardo Cemano, James Whale, Tod Browning, Howard Hawks, Jim Jarmusch, Milos Forman, Nagisa Oshima, Gaspar Noe, Michael Winterbottom, Dennis Hopper, Melvin Van Peebles, Andrew Blake, Ingmar Bergman, Bo Arne Vibenius.

Christian moral hypocrisy is laid bare in Offensive to a Reasonable Adult, a meticulously researched and referenced chronological study of the evolution of the Australian film censorship and classification apparatus. A century of censored cinema: with formerly secret Office of Film and Literature Classification reports, political correspondence and never-before revealed details of banned and censored films.

Film censorship in Australia and the attempt to smother the adult / sex industry clearly reveals the Christian moral agenda to control not only Australia's viewing habits but their sexual habits as well - this is politiciation of sexually explicit material as discourse entitled to free speech protection: from the banning of birth control literature as 'obscene' to the birth of the Australian Sex Party.

• Language: English
• Publisher: XinXii
• Release date: Dec 17, 2011
• ISBN: 9780987242594

Robert Cettl

A freelance author and former Australian National Film & Sound Archive (NFSA) SAR Research Fellow, Robert Cettl (HBA, GCTESOL, GDIS, MTESOL) is an English lecturer at the University of Jinan, Shandong, China. Robert's non-fiction writing is published through McFarland & Co. Inc. and Bloomsbury Academic in the USA and collected by such as Yale University Library, the British Film Institute and the national libraries of Australia and China. He is also an experimental ethnographic filmmaker whose digital feature films are collected by the NFSA and soon to be released on Video-on-Demand and whose short videos about living and working in China can be found on his YouTube channel.