RESTRICTIONS ON FILMS.

Auckland Star, Volume LXI, Issue 196, 20 August 1930, Page 6

RESTRICTIONS ON FILMS.

A Committee Avas set up at Home by the Conservative Government last year to inquire into "the supply and censorship of cinematograph films for public exhibition in the colonies, protectorates and mandated territories." We are concerned at present with only one feature of the report which the Committee has now issued —the stress that it lays on the necessity for supervising- and restricting films shown in semi-civilised or primitive communities. Depiction of vice and crime such as are common on the film screen are not likely to have an elevating effect upon such audiences. But there is to be considered also the more serious danger that Oriental or African or other relatively undeveloped people may draw from such pictures the wholly erroneous conclusions that law and order and social morality are non-existent" in the Europeanised world, and they may become more bitterly, antagonistic than ever to the civilisation that lias given birth to the state of things portrayed in the "movies." This certainly is a, danger to be taken seriously into i account, and all possible precautions should be 1 devised against it.