FILM POSTERS

Dominion, Volume 24, Issue 65, 10 December 1930, Page 10

FILM POSTERS

Censorship Requirements EFFECT NOT YET SEEN Avoiding Prohibition Although the censorship of film posters has been in operation since October 2, it will be some time, probably about twelve months, before the full effect of it is apparent. At their meeting on Monday evening members of the Wellington School Committees’ Association expressed the opinion that more discretion should be exercised in the control of posters, but in fairness to the authorities it was stated yesterday that practically all posters as at present seen on cinema hoardings were in circulation before the censorship came into force. It takes anything from twelve to eighteen months for a film to complete the New Zealand circuit, so that posters released with pictures just prior to the censorship will be seen for quite a time to come. The censorship could hardly be made retrospective, for this would mean that a poster already exhibiting in one part of the Dominion would be prohibited in another. Further, a picture and its posters may be examined by the censor, but probably three months will elapse before it gets a sale or is released. It is only as these pictures and their accompanying posters get into circulation, and the picture already screening, complete their circuit, that the practical results of the poster censorship will become apparent to the pubFew full-size posters as seen on hoardings actually come before the censor. Small prints of posters appear in most of the Press sheets sent out with pictures by the overseas, film corporations, and it is these, for the most part, that are submitted to the censor. The censor, Mr. C. W. Tanner, endeavours to meet the film people in every way possible, and very often ( a poster that might otherwise be ruled out can be altered slightly by a poster artist so that it will not come under the censorship ban. When this can be done, Mr. Tanner never hesitates to point it out and suggest how the offending past can be obliterated to bring a poster within the law, Now the film exchanges are becoming familiar with the requirements of the censorship, it is not uncommon for them to arrange for the alteration of a poster likely to offend against the regulations before submitting it to the censor. Law and Artistic Sense “There is nothing illegal in being ugly; and jurisprudence and aesthetics have little in common,” states an article on offending hoardings in “Community Planning,” the official organ of the Town Planning Institute of New Zealand. „ , . “Perhaps the fault has in all ages lam chiefly with the artistic-minded portion of the community,” the article continues. “If these are unable to agree among themselves for half an hour together ns to whether objects meant for the eye to rest on ought to be regarded as examples of beauty or the reverse, it is perhaps not unnatural to find the courts adopting the rule that offences to the sense of sight, if nothing more, are not the kind of injury of which the law will ' take cognisance.”