Censorship, Regulation, and Media Policy in the Twenty-First Century: A Roundtable on Critical Approaches

For this issue of the Velvet Light Trap the editors created a new roundtable section in order to facilitate a more informal discussion of censorship and regulation. In order to seek diverse perspectives and methodologies the editors collected commentaries from prominent scholars who could provide insight on the challenges and possibilities of studying censorship in media studies today.

The authors were given the following questions and were asked to address them using their area of expertise: How should critical studies approach the study of censorship in the twenty-first century? Are the old paradigms still useful in a modern setting? In a global context? Is our vocabulary sufficient? What past formations need to be reinvestigated or newly theorized? What possibilities are there beyond manifest censorship?

• The Challenge of Censorship:"Figuring" out the Audience
• Martin Barker

As films circulate in the public domain, in just about all forms of debate about them commentators will call upon "figures of the audience" to warrant moves to judgment. Such "figures" are presumptive accounts of what a film might do or must do to its audience (or a particular segment of it). Professional reviewers do it when they presume and address qualities among their readers. Citizen reviewers usually do it by adopting the languages of the communities of debate to which they belong. Moralists do it with twitchy accounts of a "they" who might be influenced. And academics do it—more loftily, most commonly deriving involvements and responses from theorizations of the "text," although, as I tried to show in a previous case (Barker; Barker, Arthurs, and Harindranath), not as distant or distinct from mainstream concerns as we like to believe ourselves. "Figures of the audience" play a key role in offering cultural maps of what and whom films are for. Yet they remain underexplored—and very rarely checked or tested.

Met in everyday talk, these "figures" are often fragmentary, hints, allusions. But from time to time they become more elaborated, constructed as "coherent" discourses. That's particularly so when critics mount attacks on films or when censors seek to justify cuts or restrictions. My contribution to this review of current issues around censorship focuses on two emergent needs: (1) the need to draw out the working "figures of the audience" in circulation—including in our own domains—and to examine critically (I would even say suspiciously) the work that they do in permitting conclusions about films' cultural meanings and significances; and (2) the need to conceive and design and then actually carry out programs of research that can check and test the claims within these. The latter in particular is damned hard, but we have tried.

In 2006 a team of researchers here at Aberystwyth carried out commissioned research for the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC). Focused around five films (À ma soeur [Catherine Breillat, 2001], Baisemoi [Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi, 2000], The House on the Edge of the Park [Ruggero Deodato, 1980], Ichi the Killer [Takashi Miike, 2001], and Irreversible [Gaspar Noë, 2002]), the task was very challenging. The BBFC wanted to know several things: How do audiences respond to watching sexual violence onscreen? What do they mean when they explain such violence by reference to "context"? What impact did the BBFC's cuts have on audience responses and understandings? And how were responses affected by the availability of different cuts and versions of the same films? The research was made especially complicated by our agreement with the BBFC that this research had to be based on the responses of naturally occurring audiences, as against the artificially gathered responses typical of so much mass communications research.

The context is very important. The British system for classifying/censoring films has altered substantially in the last decade—and moved even farther from the American parallel. Following the retirement in 1998 of its longtime director James Ferman, the BBFC shifted sharply to try to overcome suspicions of its role, to relegitimate itself with politicians, with public opinion formers, and with the general public. Roadshows to meet and discuss with the public, new education initiatives, and a...