S.A. censorship tightened

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32522, 4 February 1971, Page 11

S.A. censorship tightened

(N.Z.P. A. -Reuter—Copyright? CAPE TOWN, February 2. The South African Government has published a bill which will effectively tighten the country’s already strict censorship laws. The Publications and Entertainments Amendment Bill, which is expected to be passed by Parliament during the newly-opened session, is aimed primarily at closing loopholes in the law regarding films. When passed, it will prohibit open discussion of decisions by the Publications Control Board—the over-all censorship watch-dog—on films that it has banned or of

cuts made in films that it has passed for screening in an expurgated version only. The bill was released in Cape Town yesterday after its first reading in the House of Assembly yesterday. The great majority of films shown in South Africa are usually cut on the grounds of objectionable violence, nudity or unpopular political themes. The number of films banned has increased sharply during the last few years. The bill will also clamp down on the screening of privately-imported films. The present law can only ban or make cuts in films for public showing and the screening of banned films in private homes has recently become one of the most fashionable upper-class entertainment fads.

This will be checked by the new bill, whicl) gives the Publications Control Board wide-ranging power to impose conditions on a film’s screening—such as prohibiting any person from showing a banned film to any other person. The only detail of a film that has not been approved by the board that can be published will be the film’s title. Observers said that it was clear that the bill would lead to stricter film censorship by allowing the board to work in secrecy, with no way of challenging its decisions or finding out how or why they had been made. The Johannesburg evening newspaper, the "Star,” yesterday criticised the bill as giving off ** a nasty whif of thought control.”

It said that like many other South African Government policies, ideas on censorship were going backwards while progress was being made everywhere else. "Around the world, artistic and intellectual restriction has ■ been slackening. What adults may read, hear and see on stage or screen is being left increasingly for the individual to decide.

“Yet here a new bill seeks drastically to extend the power of an already-over-blown censorship apparatus,” the “Star" said in an editorial. Recently-banned films include “Bonnie and Clyde” and most of the films of the American Negro actor, Sydney Poitier, including the Oscar-award-winning “In the Heat of the Night.”