Censorium: Cinema and the Open Edge of Mass Publicity by William Mazzarella (review)

Abstract

William Mazzarella, Censorium: Cinema and Open Edge of Mass Publicity Durham: Duke University Press, 2013. 304 pp.Censorium is a rich, multi-layered narrative of in India and a fine work of critical theory. It is not a history of Indian censorship, but rather analysis of discourse on censorship-or, in author's own words, an immanent critique of Indian film censorship (223). This is William Mazzarella's second book, and like his first, Shoveling Smoke: Advertising and Globalization in Contemporary India (2003), it centers on issues of production in Mumbai.In Censorium, author draws on his numerous interviews and archival research into and obscenity laws in British colonial India and postcolonial India while also engaging with thinkers such as Michael Warner, Emile Durkheim, Roland Barthes, and Immanuel Kant to first compound and then try to unravel complexities of his material. Mazzarella's interviews, mostly undertaken in Mumbai in 2003-2004, are with former censor board directors Anupam Kher and Vijay Anand, film directors such as Shekhar Kapur and Shyam Senegal, writers such as Vijay Tendulkar, and actors such as Shabana Azmi, as well as other figures in city's film and political worlds.Censorium departs from idea that is not merely about trying not to offend morals by deciding which image-objects may circulate, but that it is rather about control of publics and hence censor's ability to quell violence and stop spread of chaos-what Mazzarella describes as the problem of affect management visa-vis modern mass media (12). He focuses on two periods-the 1910s through 1920s, and 1990s-to make his case, persuasively linking colonial and postcolonial states in regard to question of how authority is justified and administered.This book is not, like Tejaswini Ganti's Producing Bollywood: Inside Contemporary Hindi Film Industry (2012), ethnography of filmmakers. It has both a larger and less tangible object of inquiry-the field of mass publicity itself. At root is illusive question that censors and, according to Mazzarella, society must reckon with: How are intensities of images absorbed by different kinds of people? In this regard, book is also very much about questions of anonymity and community, as well as relationship between elites (filmmakers, elite audiences, and state actors) and their understanding (and stereotyping) of common who in Mazzarella's framing becomes figure of the pissing man, cinema's howling, uncouth, and hence incontinent front-bencher. It is this tension-between a colonial-post-colonial, patriarchal-patronizing state and its own democratic claims-that animates many of book's discussions. Censorship, as Mazzarella explains, is not about issue of offending morals and sensibilities (the fear that films will have a bad effect, 21), it is about very definition of who belongs to the public (measured, reasonable) and who the are (whose unlettered emotions are thought to be out of control and in need of management).The justification for itself, we learn, is predicated on this divide (as are so many things in Indian society), of uneducated masses needing to catch up, which in world of cinema-watching means being able to understand and contextualize violent or sex-laden imagery they see-the difference between being a film spectator versus a consumer-citizen. At times, while reading this book, I was reminded of American car commercials that caution viewers that what they are seeing (cars at high speeds, flipping over, etc.) is a fantasy not to be tried at home. Of course, those disclaimers are about legal protections for car manufacturers rather than policing morals; in addition, images themselves are not censored, and disclaimers depend on notion that viewer will read fine print and understand it. …