Censorship Committee Research Articles

I Remember My Father, Midang, Sŏ Chŏngju

I Remember My Father, Midang, Sŏ Chŏngju Paul Suhr (bio) I remember my father. He told me once how much he had disappointed his own father. My grandfather took him to Seoul to enroll in a private school. After the registration, he took my thirteen-year-old father to the Imperial School of Law. They could not get onto the campus. Standing outside looking in, my grandfather told his son that one day he hoped he would attend the school and become a lawyer. This did not happen. A few months afterwards, my father, along with three other students, was arrested and expelled from the school for throwing rocks at Japanese policemen on horseback. The Japanese prosecutor told the boy that he was too young to get involved in such matters and asked him whether he missed his mama. The boy, my father, broke down in tears. He was released soon afterwards. When the boy returned home, his father sat across from him at the dinner table. Both were silent. The father seemed to put a spoonful to his mouth. All of a sudden the spoon fell from his lips and dropped onto the table. My father heard the sound. After a long silence, he saw his father stand up and leave. Twelve years later my grandfather died, heartbroken, his dreams shattered by his son’s expulsion from school. My father was jailed again later in life on the suspicion of sedition by Japanese authorities. Perhaps, after all, my [End Page 83] grandfather’s broken dream was finally realized when I became a lawyer in the United States. My father’s death was mourned nationally in Korea in 2000. His funeral was broadcast on all major networks. Three former presidents sent his surviving family personal condolences. One president personally attended the funeral. Some ten years after his death, young Korean censors appointed by extreme anti-Japanese groups accused my father of collaboration with the Japanese for writing some verses and articles in praise of the emperor during the final years of the Japanese occupation of Korea. Japan was then exerting its mighty military power in China, the Philippines, Malaysia, and Singapore. At the time, my father believed that Korea would never become independent again. In the face of all odds and under the silent threat of another imprisonment, his life-long resistance to Japanese militarism probably caved in. I wrote to the prosecutor that it is an egregious violation of due process to accuse someone of such a serious charge, someone who had been dead more than ten years and therefore could not answer. He said that Korea is a sovereign country and its laws are not tainted by the Magna Carta or any other such foreign law. The censorship committee expunged my father’s poetry from all school textbooks. My father was a very generous person. One day when I was about seven years old, someone came to borrow money from him. The man said he had worked with my father in Manchuria. My father was not rich but he lent this man money. Afterwards I heard from my distressed mother that this stranger was the person who had confiscated my father’s overcoat for unpaid debts during a severe winter in Manchuria. I recall that the stranger never repaid the money, but returned about three years later to deliver a small cord of wood and request yet another loan from my father. I think my father loaned him money again. Frequently my father gave money to poor students. He brought home poor relatives and supported them throughout his life. [End Page 84] My father supported the troops on the battlefields during the Korean War. He toured the battlegrounds to encourage the soldiers. After a few weeks of seeing the tremendous, horrific carnage firsthand, he completely lost his mind. When he was brought back home by the army officers upon the recapture of Seoul by General MacArthur, he was unable to recognize either my mother or me. It took many years for him to recover from the shellshock. I remember his moving tribute to the war victims when he wrote, “Standing by the Han River Flowing Again.” I...

აზერბაიჯანული პრესა თბილისში /XIX საუკუნე/

The presented article analyzes the history of Azerbaijanian periodical press, produced in Tbilisi – in the administrative and cultural center of the South Caucasus. On the basis of the archival sources, it is illustrated that Azerbaijani periodical editions have been under the strict control of the Caucasus Censorship Committee.

The Enemy, the Communist, and Ideological Closure in Soviet Cinema on the Eve of the Great Terror: ( The Peasants and The Party Card )

The Enemy, the Communist, and Ideological Closure in Soviet Cinema on the Eve of the Great Terror(The Peasants and The Party Card) Andrey Shcherbenok (bio) The figure of the contemporaneous internal enemy was an integral part of Soviet cinema throughout the 1930s. This figure was novel—Soviet cinema in the 1920s found little material in a Soviet reality dominated by the New Economic Policy (NEP) to warrant a violent political plotline; although ideological debates and anxieties were intense,1 the demarcation lines between "us" and "them" remained blurred, while the representations of the most obvious candidate for the role of the enemy—the nascent NEP bourgeoisie—tended to belong stylistically to comedy rather than political drama. As a result, Soviet avant-garde film, with its inherent predilection for vehement political struggle, concentrated on the past rather than the present: the Revolution and the Civil War—the events, although recent, clearly belonging to a quite different historical period—were the subject matter of the films that such directors as Sergei Eisenstein, Aleksandr Dovzhenko, and Vsevolod Pudovkin made before 1929. The situation changed with the Great Break of 1928–29 that inaugurated the collectivization of agriculture and the industrialization drive. The radicalization of adversarial internal politics, with its sharp dividing lines between communist proponents of the new policies and their mortal enemies, coincided with an important development in cinematic art—the introduction of Socialist Realism, which strove to combine the political consciousness and propagandism of the Soviet avant-garde with the engaging potential of mass-entertainment cinema. Socialist Realist films promoted individualized and psychologized characters that replaced the collective hero of the avant-garde, making cinema an important vehicle for the process that Oleg Kharkhordin describes as the individuation/ [End Page 753] individualization that the Soviet subject underwent after 1929.2 This development was greatly facilitated by the introduction of sound in 1931, which made cinema closer to theater with its traditional models of psychologization. Thus the development of the figure of the contemporaneous, internal, and individualized political enemy in the 1930s was overdetermined by political practice, ideological discourse, the introduction of the new aesthetic, and the development of cinematic technology. Enemies of all kinds—wreckers, foreign spies, and double-dealers—routinely appear in 1930s Soviet films of all genres, including even musical comedies.3 Their centrality to the plot and their articulateness as characters, however, vary greatly. In many of the 1930s films, the enemy only appears in subplots to give the protagonist an opportunity to display his/her heroism, as in N. A. Kosheverova and Iu. A. Muzykant's Arinka (1939), where an unnamed enemy appears literally from the woods trying to derail the train, or in E. V. Cherviakov's Honor (1938), where a similar attempt to derail the train is made by one of the minor characters. Many industrial dramas of the period include sabotage as one of the obstacles faced by the builders of socialism, as in F. M. Ermler and S. I. Iutkevich's Counterplan (1932), S. I. Iutkevich's Miners (1937), or S. A. Gerasimov's Komsomol´sk (1938). Finally, the detective genre provides, as in Evgenii Shneider's High Award (1939) or A. V. Macharet's The Mistake of Engineer Kochin (1939), its share of foreign spies to be traced and captured by the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD). While the many Soviet films of the 1930s tend to use the enemy as an auxiliary figure to sustain the plot and do not concentrate on the enemy himself, some of them address the subject in a much more thorough and complex manner. Not surprisingly, these films did not pass unnoticed by the Soviet authorities. Ermler's The Peasants (1935), one of the two films I analyzet in this article, was included among just a few feature films to be put in a special preservation safe in the recently opened Soviet film archive;4 the other, I. A. Pyr´ev's The Party Card (1936), was specifically promoted by Stalin, who overruled the initial rejection of the film by the censorship committee and gave it its title.5 Not only are these two films among the first to address seriously the topic...

The politics of filmmaking: An investigation of the Central Film Censorship Committee in the mid-1930s

Threatened by the thriving leftwing film industry, the Nationalist Party became more conservative. They set up the Central Film Censorship Committee as an important link in the system of film censorship, further tightening the control over film production. It was a substitute for the former Film Censorship Committee under the Ministries of Education and Interior. The committee achieved its original goals, but the result of its work did not fully conform to the party’s initial expectations.

Censorship in Lithuania: A Tool of Russian Policy; 1831–1865

This paper deals with the specificities of Russia’s policy of censorship conducted in the Northwest Province by the Vilnius Censorship Committee between 1831 and 1865. In the general context of the Province an attempt is made to give answers to the questions: (1) by whom and in what way the attitudes of the censors of Vilnius were regulated with respect to the Lithuanian and Polish press ‘under local conditions’ and (2) what requirements of the Censorship Committee were caused ‘by local conditions’ and by the implementation of Russia’s policy in the Northwest Province. The study is based on official documents, censorial lawsuits, and the censored manuscripts. It is maintained that the opinion and initiative of the governor general of Vilnius were crucial in formulating the ‘local’ policy of censoring. The principal aim of the censorial activity was to ensure the integrity of the Russian Empire by preventing the spread of disintegrational anti-Russian ideas and those of propagating the independence of Poland and ‘Polish patriotism’. Attempts were also made to weaken the influence of the Catholic Church, in particular among the peasantry and to create conditions favouring both religious tolerance and the dissemination of Orthodoxy.

New forms of strategy — No change of heart

Sharing the preoccupations of my fellow writers, I was the first to express the conviction, now become a general stand, that the release from ban of a few books by well-known white writers is not a major victory for the freedom to write, and that the action carries two sinister implications: first, those among us who are uncompromising opponents of censorship with wide access to the media can be bought off by special treatment accorded to our books; second, the measure of hard-won solidarity that exists between black and white writers can be divided by `favouring' white writers with such special treatment, since no ban on any black writer's work has been challenged by the Directorate's own application to the Appeal Board. I don't claim any prescience or distinction for early arrival at this conviction--Burger's Daughter(1979), my novel, happened to be the first released as a consequence of the Directorate's new tactics. It was natural for me to examine the package very carefully when my book came back to me--apparently intact, after all the mauling it had been through. It was inevitable that I should come upon the neat devices timed to go off in the company of my colleagues. It was not surprising that they should recognise for themselves these booby-traps set for us all, since a week or two later Andre Brink received the same package containing his novel The Dry White Season (1979). And then, in time for April and the seating of the new Chairman of the Appeal Board, came Afrikaans literature's Easter egg, all got up for Etienne le Roux with the sugar roses of the old Appeal Board's repentance and the red ribbon defiant of Aksie Morale Standaarde, the NGK and Dr Koot Vorster--of course, Magersfontein O Magersfortein was not released as the two other books were, as a result of the Director's own appeal against his Committee's bannings, but it's release on ultimate appeal by the author's publishers transparently belongs to the same strategy in which the other two books were `reinstated'. I am one who has always believed and still believes we shall never be rid of censorship until we are rid of apartheid. Personally I find it necessary to preface with this blunt statement any comment I have about the effects of censorship, the possible changes in its scope, degree, and methodology. Any consideration of how to conduct the struggle against it, how to act for the attainment of immediate ends, is partial, pragmatic, existential response seen against a constant and over-riding factor. Today as always, the invisible banner is behind me, the decisive chalked text on the blackboard, against whose background I say what I have to say. We shall not be rid of censorship until we are rid of apartheid. Censorship is the arm of mind-control and as necessary to maintain a racist regime as that other arm of internal repression, the secret police. Over every apparent victory we may gain against the censorship powers hangs the question whether that victory is in fact contained by apartheid, or can be claimed to erode it from within. What exactly has changed since the 1st April 1980? What exactly does the `born again' cultural evangelism staged with the positively last appearance of Judge Lammie Snyman and the previews of rippling intellectual musculature displayed by thirty-seven year old Dr Kobus van Rooyen, mean? The Censorship Act remains the same. It is still on the statute book. The practice of embargo will continue. The same anonymous committees will read and ban; a censorship committee having been defined in 1978 by the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court as an extra-judicial body, operating in administrative capacity, whose members need have no legal training, before whom the appellant has no right of audience, who in their deliberations are not required to have regard to the rules of justice designed to achieve a fair trial, whose proceedings are not conducted in public and who are not required to afford any reason for their decision. …

The South African censor: No change

On 11 July 1979 Nadine Gordimer's novel Burger's Daughter was banned by the South African Directorate of Publications on the grounds – among others – that the book was a threat to state security. ( Excerpts from the censor's arguments were printed on the back cover of Index on Censorship 1/1980.) After an international outcry the Director of Publications on 1 August 1979 appealed against the decision of his own censorship committee to the Publications Appeal Board. A committee of literary experts was appointed, and a hearing on the appeal was set for 3 October. But the hearing did not take place; in early October 1979 the book was simply released for distribution. Some weeks later a similar pattern was shown in the treatment of André Brink's Afrikaans-language novel A Dry White Season. The book was banned, the censorship board – not the author – appealed against its own decision, and the book was un-banned. In the article which follows, Nadine Gordimer reflects on these events, and on the new censorship policy they herald. Her article was originally a paper presented to a University of Cape Town conference on censorship held in April 1980. It was first published in Critical Arts: A Journal for Media Studies, Vol 1, No 2, June 1980, ( available from the School of Dramatic Art, University of the Witwatersrand, 1 Jan Smuts Avenue, Johannesburg 2001, South Africa). The papers from the censorship conference will be published by David Philip, Capetown.

NEW FORMS OF STRATEGY — NO CHANGE OF HEART

Sharing the preoccupations of my fellow writers, I was the first to express the conviction, now become a general stand, that the release from ban of a few books by well-known white writers is not a major victory for the freedom to write, and that the action carries two sinister implications: first, those among us who are uncompromising opponents of censorship with wide access to the media can be bought off by special treatment accorded to our books; second, the measure of hard-won solidarity that exists between black and white writers can be divided by `favouring' white writers with such special treatment, since no ban on any black writer's work has been challenged by the Directorate's own application to the Appeal Board. I don't claim any prescience or distinction for early arrival at this conviction--Burger's Daughter(1979), my novel, happened to be the first released as a consequence of the Directorate's new tactics. It was natural for me to examine the package very carefully when my book came back to me--apparently intact, after all the mauling it had been through. It was inevitable that I should come upon the neat devices timed to go off in the company of my colleagues. It was not surprising that they should recognise for themselves these booby-traps set for us all, since a week or two later Andre Brink received the same package containing his novel The Dry White Season (1979). And then, in time for April and the seating of the new Chairman of the Appeal Board, came Afrikaans literature's Easter egg, all got up for Etienne le Roux with the sugar roses of the old Appeal Board's repentance and the red ribbon defiant of Aksie Morale Standaarde, the NGK and Dr Koot Vorster--of course, Magersfontein O Magersfortein was not released as the two other books were, as a result of the Director's own appeal against his Committee's bannings, but it's release on an ultimate appeal by the author's publishers transparently belongs to the same strategy in which the other two books were `reinstated'. I am one who has always believed and still believes we shall never be rid of censorship until we are rid of apartheid. Personally I find it necessary to preface with this blunt statement any comment I have about the effects of censorship, the possible changes in its scope, degree, and methodology. Any consideration of how to conduct the struggle against it, how to act for the attainment of immediate ends, is partial, pragmatic, existential response seen against a constant and over-riding factor. Today as always, the invisible banner is behind me, the decisive chalked text on the blackboard, against whose background I say what I have to say. We shall not be rid of censorship until we are rid of apartheid. Censorship is the arm of mind-control and as necessary to maintain a racist regime as that other arm of internal repression, the secret police. Over every apparent victory we may gain against the censorship powers hangs the question whether that victory is in fact contained by apartheid, or can be claimed to erode it from within. What exactly has changed since the 1st April 1980? What exactly does the `born again' cultural evangelism staged with the positively last appearance of Judge Lammie Snyman and the previews of rippling intellectual musculature displayed by thirty-seven year old Dr Kobus van Rooyen, mean? The Censorship Act remains the same. It is still on the statute book. The practice of embargo will continue. The same anonymous committees will read and ban; a censorship committee having been defined in 1978 by the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court as "an extra-judicial body, operating in an administrative capacity, whose members need have no legal training, before whom the appellant has no right of audience, who in their deliberations are not required to have regard to the rules of justice designed to achieve a fair trial, whose proceedings are not conducted in public and who are not required to afford any reason for their decision". …