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:
“I consider criticism merely a preliminary excitement, a statement of things a writer has to clear up in his own head sometime or other, probably antecedent to writing; of no value unless it come to fruit in the created work later.”
—Ezra Pound (1885–1972)
“When you overpay small people you frighten them. They know that their merits or activities entitle them to no such sums as they are receiving. As a result their boss soars out of economic into magic significance. He becomes a source of blessings rather than wages. Criticism is sacrilege, doubt is heresy.”
—Ben Hecht (1893–1964)
“However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but a spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you. When the play, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)