Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

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

2014; George Washington University; Volume: 87; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/anq.2014.0068

1534-1518

Rashmi Sadana,

South Asian Cinema and Culture

Reviewed by: Censorium: Cinema and the Open Edge of Mass Publicity by William Mazzarella Rashmi Sadana William Mazzarella, Censorium: Cinema and the Open Edge of Mass Publicity. Durham: Duke University Press, 2013. 304 pp. Censorium is a rich, multi-layered narrative of censorship in India and a fine work of critical theory. It is not a history of Indian censorship, but rather an analysis of the discourse on censorship—or, in the 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 media production in Mumbai. In Censorium, the author draws on his numerous interviews and archival research into censorship 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 the 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 Benegal, writers such as Vijay Tendulkar, and actors such as Shabana Azmi, as well as other figures in the city’s film and political worlds. Censorium departs from the idea that censorship is not merely about trying not to offend public morals by deciding which “image-objects” may circulate, but that it is rather about the control of “mass publics” and hence the censor’s ability to quell violence and stop the spread of chaos—what Mazzarella describes as “the problem of public affect management vis-à-vis modern mass media” (12). He focuses on two periods—the 1910s through 1920s, and the 1990s—to make his case, persuasively linking the colonial and postcolonial states in regard to the question of how public authority is justified and administered. [End Page 1321] This book is not, like Tejaswini Ganti’s Producing Bollywood: Inside the Contemporary Hindi Film Industry (2012), an ethnography of filmmakers. It has both a larger and less tangible object of inquiry—the field of mass publicity itself. At root is an illusive question that the censors and, according to Mazzarella, society must reckon with: How are the intensities of images absorbed by different kinds of people? In this regard, the book is also very much about questions of anonymity and community, as well as the relationship between elites (filmmakers, elite audiences, and state actors) and their understanding (and stereotyping) of the common man, who in Mazzarella’s framing becomes the 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 the book’s discussions. Censorship, as Mazzarella explains, is not about the issue of offending public morals and sensibilities (“the fear that films will have a bad effect,” 21), it is about the very definition of who belongs to “the public” (measured, reasonable) and who “the masses” are (whose unlettered emotions are thought to be out of control and in need of management). The justification for censorship itself, we learn, is predicated on this divide (as are so many things in Indian society), of the uneducated masses needing to catch up, which in the world of cinema-watching means being able to understand and contextualize the 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 the car manufacturers rather than policing morals; in addition, the images themselves are not censored, and the disclaimers depend on the notion that the viewer will read the fine print and understand it. And yet, the disclaimer is also meant to counter the influence and intensity of the images on impressionable minds. In the Indian schema, the illiterate spectator...