This is a short Bill amending the existing Act for the censorship of films. The reason why a Bill of this nature has become necessary is that, as I am sure all Senators are aware, a new kind of film has come into existence, that is, the talking film. As things are, there is not in the Censorship Board power to censor talking films. The only thing which the Censorship Board can do at present is to censor the picture and not the words. In consequence, it is quite possible that undesirable pictures might get through, because I think it will be readily understood that the picture might look all right, but that it might be associated with unpleasant words which would put a different meaning on the picture altogether. In consequence of the growth of these talking films and the necessity of dealing with them, I set up a small committee which went into the matter fully, and this Bill carries out their recommendations. The chairman of that Committee was Senator O'Farrell, who is also chairman of the Censorship Board. One of the principal difficulties which the Committee had, I think I may say, was the selection of suitable apparatus. Senator O'Farrell and Mr. Montgomery, the film censor, went over to England and inspected various apparatus there, and they finally recommended one. After the Bill becomes law, we hope that in a very short time, say, two or three weeks, the necessary apparatus will have been installed and that talking films will be properly censored. In consequence, I would ask the Seanad to pass this Bill, as I think it would be the general view of everybody that talking films should be properly censored.
Public Business. - Censorship of Films (Amendment) Bill, 1930—Second Stage.
I am entirely in favour of this measure and I think most of us will be, but I should like to take this opportunity of expressing an opinion on the present censorship as regards films generally. I think a great deal still remains to be done with regard to censorship from what we can see of some films in this country. On investigating the matter, I was informed—I do not know how far it is true—that in many cases the Appeals Board actually permitted films to be shown that had already been turned down by the censor. I think when we are dealing with a big issue like this, that may be a great menace to the future development of the youth of the country as there has been very serious criticism with regard to certain films which have been allowed to go through. I do not think I am unduly puritanical, but I think it is a matter that requires the closest attention. I understand that in some cases the Appeals Board have permitted films to be shown which the censor did not approve of. I do not know how far that is true, but I have it on reasonably good authority.
There is another matter which I ought to mention, and that is, that I believe very old films are being shown through the small towns that really have never been through the censor's hands. I have knowledge of two particular instances where such films were shown in small towns and I am satisfied from what I have heard of these films that they were certainly never shown before the censor. I should like to draw the Minister's attention to these two or three points, so that we may ensure that such films in the hands of travelling showmen shall not be displayed in the small country towns or anywhere else and that the censorship shall be effectively applied.
With regard to Senator Connolly's point that certain films that have been rejected by the censor have been passed by the Board, I would ask him what is the object of having a Board at all except for the purpose of considering appeals and, if necessary, reversing or modifying the decisions of the censor. It is a big responsibility to put on any one man to say in every single case whether a picture is fit to be shown or otherwise and what cuts, if any, should be effected. It is in order to relieve the official censor of this responsibility that it was decided under the Act of 1923 to set up a Board of Appeal and that Board has been functioning in accordance with the Act ever since. I think on the whole its decisions have not been adverse to public opinion because the number of complaints received has been negligible. It is true, since the talking film came into vogue, that the sound portion of the film, the dialogue portion, could not be, and has not been censored. In the first place, the Act did not cover the spoken word and, secondly, there was no apparatus by which the censor could hear the spoken word in order to censor it. Looking at a talking film in a visual way, merely seeing the action does not even give an indication as to what the theme of the picture itself may be and it is possibly true that pictures have been passed after merely a visual observation which were objectionable and that would not have been passed if the apparatus were there and the dialogue could be understood, but the number of pictures rejected in toto by the film censor but passed by the Board is absolutely negligible.
Really what happens is: The censor agrees to issue a certificate provided certain cuts which he indicates are made. The renter, if he objects to the cuts or portion of them has a right to appeal to the Board. That appeal is then heard de novo as if the film had been rejected. The Board is then at liberty itself to indicate cuts which will be insisted upon if a certificate is to be issued and these may coincide with the censor's cuts or they may not. They may be a little more or they may be a little less and the renter either accepts the decision of the Board merely or he rejects it. But of course, unless the Board has power to do things of that kind, or to act in that way, it would be meaningless altogether to have a Board. It is difficult to lay down any hard and fast rule. It is hard to say what type of mentality one should take as a standard. It is said you may pass certain things for cities which you cannot pass for a simple country population, but against that is the argument: are you to take the simplest mentality of the whole country as a standard upon which you should base your judgment in all cases?
The same principle will arise in regard to the censorship of publications. The Board, as made up, is composed of clergymen of different denominations, representatives of the universities and the medical profession and the general public. On the whole, where you find this board of nine, or as many of them as may be present, arguing that a certain picture is unobjectionable in the main you may take it that there is not very much wrong. There are certain types of vulgarity in pictures which cannot be said to be obscene or immoral, and it is pretty hard under existing legislation to turn down pictures in this respect. But I think you may take it that gross vulgarity is not tolerated. There are certain pictures that one would like to reject as positively worthless and a fraud upon the public, but which you cannot reject for these reasons alone. We must make up our minds that we cannot look upon the film as merely an instructive medium, something which is going to elevate, to educate, and so forth. It is not intended for that. It is merely a source of amusement and a source of profit, and as such it would be impossible, I think, in any legislation which might be devised to make the film purely and simply an educative or an elevating medium in any sense of the word.
I strongly support the Minister in his desire to censor talkies, but I think if he had the courage of what is the conviction of many people who dealt with censorship, he ought to abolish them utterly out of the country. We take to ourselves a great deal of credit for being purists as a nation, and at the same time we allow this cosmopolitan form of attacking the emotional nature of the country to go unchecked. I was a member of the Board, and the only objection I had was when the chairman happened to be fooled by the subtlety of the propaganda. When they allowed the Life and Passion of Our Lord to appear on the films the subtle Semitics who composed this pious picture had it preceded by a scene which was sufficiently objectionable to satisfy the cutting of the censors. It was promptly cut and a ten times more dangerous form of immorality was permitted to pass, and that was the position where Christ was put as a colleague of Charlie Chaplin, and presented to the minds of 12-year-old children in this country. This film went round the barns and music halls and other places in Ireland, and there is nothing to prevent a child who sees a religious picture associating in his mind the sentiments which appertain to the ordinary general bulk of picture of the cinema—pictures that cannot help being vulgar, because they must pass the frontiers of the world, and they must appeal with the three appeals only tolerable to the mass of humanity, that is sex, blood and murder. That is the reiterated and unchanged theme of every cinema picture.
The talkies are another affair. They are presumably made up in Hollywood. They never use the English language, as it is used by the English. They use a cosmopolitan lingo which is always degrading, and which is distracting the English speaking nations from the source of the language and from its own centre. It is a form of making national sentiment eccentric, and I think that without drawing on that vision of our self-righteousness we ought to abolish talkies utterly. Apart from the fact that these cinemas are drawing out of the country £250,000 per year through the renters—the fact that the penny a foot tax brings that in through the renters—you will see the people queueing up all through the city and our best sites in this city are ruined by cinema palaces.
National assets!
How are they assets?
We were told that by a high authority.
A national asset obstructing O'Connell Street with cinema palaces, in the general cosmopolitan taste. A suction of money from this country cannot be afforded. I think we have got it on very good authority that there is a quarter of a million of money going out of the country and none of it for educative purposes. If we allow talkies—this international lingo of vulgarity to be added to the cinema palaces we will do the country an incalculable harm, because, in my opinion, what is most precious to the nation is that the emotional nature of the nation be kept within its own confines. We have children with their minds thrown to the ends of the earth, where the eyes of the fool are supposed to be and nothing is censored. There is nothing educational because they cannot afford to be educational. The highest claim that a cinema producer makes is that it is a new work. It is neither drama nor rhetoric. It is a photograph that moves. It is a new vulgarity and centres across everybody's frontier invading in a new way the integrity of each nation it touches. As I say they are bound to these three things. They are bound to the appeal in its lowest terms and therefore the censors have, to a certain extent, to consider the mentality of the people who see it in its very lowest terms. They have to imagine the fool because it is to those people with uncontrolled emotions that the cinema constructors are appealing. As I once said we would require no censorship board if you projected on the screen the faces of the renters. You could see an international gang of people who have less character than anybody who ever came out of the Levant. That in itself would be an excellent censorship.
The talkie is a far more dangerous thing super-added to the picture, and I think the simplest way is to say in Ireland you will get as much cinema, or I suppose it is called kinema as you wish, but you will not have any of this cosmopolitan slang. It is not grammar. It certainly is not English, and it is in every case disastrous to those who listen to it, because it shakes the very foundations of education in the primary and secondary schools, and it adds to unrest in terms which are never satiable.
You can never supply education to the people who are made restless with the cosmopólitan appeal of these pictures. The children who see them do not realise how they are composed. They are composed in a little room and have nothing at all to say to the scenery, which can be rented or hired separately altogether from the subject. There are well-known things like the profile of camels crossing a desert which can be handed out as a background to any film. When it comes to the talkies you will never censor the talkies, because it is impossible with the change of language to know to what extent the vulgarity can affect the country inasmuch as it is always eccentric, always over the frontier, always outside our own business and our own ideas. It would be no loss to this country but in every way a gain, and a re-gaining of the position of which, as I say, we are justly or unjustly proud of dictating to the people, if not morals at least good taste. I think the censorship ought to simplify itself by saying that no talkies will be censored, that we will not have talkies, that we will not have any international slang, which is never uplifting. I have never seen a picture (except on two or three occasions when we had a German representation of Goethe's Faust) with any definite signs of artistic selection. These are the only cinema things which, I think, a child should see. If not directly, at least the association of ideas in the background of everything else was the level of Charlie Chaplin, who, by the way, is not in favour of the talkies. I do really ask the censor to simplify the thing by saying: "We will have no censorship at all of the talkies, but get rid of them."
I think I have never listened to such—I do not like to use it—high-brow balderdash.
Another example of the talkies.
I presume that Senator Gogarty, speaking of the talkies, refers to all sound pictures. I can only infer from the Senator's remarks that he very rarely, if ever, visits the places where the talking picture is exhibited. I make no apology for saying that I very frequently attend cinema shows and I never found either my ethical, my moral sense, or my sense of sanity sapped as the Senator seems to think happens. One of the best talking or sound pictures that has been shown in Dublin, I think, since the matter became a practical proposition was a talking picture of the Emancipation Centenary Celebrations. One of the finest examples of the development of that science or art was the representation of the Archbishop of Dublin addressing the people. If what Senator Gogarty said is to be taken in its applied sense that would be all censored as the very fact that it is a talking picture would be sapping the morals of those who attended it.
I can only gather one thing from the Senator's observation, that is his apprehension of the damage that this is going to do to the English language. I am quite sure that if it was suggested the talkies in the future should use compulsory Irish the Senator would put a barricade in front of every cinema house in the city. In my impression from what I have seen of the development of the talking picture I think there are tremendous possibilities before us both from the point of view of entertainment and instruction and I think it is retrograde to have the idea that Senator Gogarty gives expression to broadcasted. It is because I do not want those ideas to go without some expression of dissent that I have intervened in the discussion.
I would like to point out to the Seanad that this very short Bill has nothing to do with the general Censorship Bill that the Censor and the Board works. It is particularly short for the reason that the necessity of having a censorship of the talkies is so great. That is the reason if there is really nothing else why this particular Bill takes power to censor the talkies. Whether we agree with films being in Ireland or not, or whether we agree to other powers being given to the Censor or the Board has nothing to do with this, and I would appeal to the Seanad generally to pass this Bill as quickly as possible, because anyone who has gone to the talking pictures will realise that if the words were heard by either the Censor or the Board very many of them would not be allowed. You can only censor at present what you see, and you have no idea what the characters are saying each to the other. You do not know what the woman's position is in the case. She may be the wife or she may be the mistress. If we had machinery, and if we had the power, a great deal of unpleasantness would disappear, and I can only ask the Seanad to pass this Bill as quickly as possible, because the need is very great.
I would like to refer in a personal way to a matter that Senator Gogarty mentioned. He said that the chairman on a certain occasion allowed himself to be fooled by propaganda. The person to whom he referred is not here, and is not in a position to defend himself, and I want to say, as a member of the Board at that time, that the statement is not justified and really should not have been made. As a matter of fact, as regards the particular picture concerned, the Board, I think, very largely defers to clerical opinion on the Board, and on that occasion they were guided by it so that there is no justification for the statement. As regards talking pictures, parrot disease develops very rapidly, and that may account for some of the statements made.
I must say that I agree with what Senator Gogarty has said. I do not often agree with him; perhaps I have never agreed with him before, but on this occasion I do agree with him. If we pass this Bill we practically give our sanction to the introduction of these talkies, which, I think, are a great nuisance. I am inclined to vote against the Bill altogether simply as a protest against talkies being introduced into this country. Later perhaps we will get a ban against them altogether.
May I ask the Minister in his reply to say what would be the effect upon talkies of not passing the Bill?
At the present moment talking pictures are coming into this country and they are practically uncensored. If this Bill is rejected the pictures will still continue to come in and still continue to go uncensored. As far as what Senator Colonel Moore and Senator Gogarty have stated about talking pictures, I do not intend to express any opinion. It might possibly be that the world would be better if the moving picture had never been invented, and the world might be a better place if the talking picture had never been developed out of the simple, silent moving picture. That may be the case, but we cannot put our heads in the sand. We must recognise that there are such things as cinemas and that there are such things as talking pictures, and we must deal with them in a sensible, rational way, recognising their existence. The sensible, rational way of dealing with them is by seeing that they are properly censored and that they are not harmful to the morals of the people of this country.
There were a couple of other matters mentioned which are hardly germane to this present Bill. One of them was mentioned by Senator Connolly. He said that there were some films in some country towns that had never been passed by the Censor. I would like very much if he would send me particulars of the towns, the films, and the producers of these films.
The name of the film.
I would be glad to supply the particulars.
It surprised me very much to hear that a film would last for seven years. I certainly understood that the life of a film is extremely short. Though it has nothing to do with this particular Bill, if the Senator furnishes me with particulars I will make inquiries. I do not think there is anything further I need say.