Criticism
The Society for the Promotion of Community Standards (SPCS) has repeatedly criticised the OFLC for not banning films such as Baise-moi, Irréversible, Takashi Miike's Visitor Q and Lies which it classes as highly pornographic and violent.
SPCS has recently targeted films scheduled for exhibition in the Beck's Incredible Film Festival and the New Zealand International Film Festivals. SPCS criticisms fail to note that New Zealand censorship laws have required censors to consider artistic and literary merit since the debate over Stanley Kubrick's first cinematic adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita in 1960.
Having apparently exhausted its avenues of appeal over censorship decisions, in 2006 the SPCS began to criticise the financial management of the OFLC. It complained to the Auditor General that the OFLC was inefficient and mis-managed taxpayer funds. The Auditor General dismissed the SPCS' complaint, stating that "no evidence of waste was found during the course of the audit" of the OFLC.
In June 2007, Exit International Director Dr Philip Nitschke described the decision by the Classification Office banning The Peaceful Pill Handbook as "very disappointing" while recognising "that the Censor was under intense political pressure over this decision". The book was banned because it promotes and encourages criminal activity by offering instruction in how to smuggle and manufacture controlled drugs in violation of a number of statutes, not because it advocates reform of the law to permit the seriously ill and elderly access to pentobarbital.
Read more about this topic: Office Of Film And Literature Classification (New Zealand)
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“... criticism ... makes very little dent upon me, unless I think there is some real justification and something should be done.”
—Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962)
“It is the will of God that we must have critics, and missionaries, and Congressmen, and humorists, and we must bear the burden. Meantime, I seem to have been drifting into criticism myself. But that is nothing. At the worst, criticism is nothing more than a crime, and I am not unused to that.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“I hold with the old-fashioned criticism that Browning is not really a poet, that he has all the gifts but the one needful and the pearls without the string; rather one should say raw nuggets and rough diamonds.”
—Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889)