We started, in the previous module, with the question of how law understands and frames the object of its enquiry. This is especially complicated when this object is as complex as what I am calling the practice of cinema.

It is now time to push that enquiry a little further. Let us look at one of the constantly recurring themes in any discussion of cinema.

Try this small exercise. Conduct a discussion. Just ask a few people whether they think that cinema should be treated on a different footing (for instance with regard to censorship issues) than, say, literature or painting. If they do think that cinema should be treated differently, then why? Make a note of all the common points that emerge.

In this module, we shall be looking at most of the common points that inevitably emerge in any such discussion. We will show how cinema gets to be perceived by the law, and what are the assumptions that the law makes about the nature and impact of cinema, and we will also where these ideas come from.

One of the words, repeated over and over again in debates on cinema and its impact, is the word ‘Evil’. ‘Evil’ is perhaps the most used phrase in the vocabulary of the regulation of cinema. A quick survey, both of popular discourse as well as juridical discourse quickly reveals the ease with which cinema is narrated in terms of evil: the evil influences of cinema, the capacity of film for evil, the evil that it is doing etc. Evil also emerges as the primary justification for why the cinema is seen to need a different kind of regulation than the other arts.

Is there a difference in the way that the word evil is invoked in cinema, as against other modes of expressive speech such as literature? Is "evil" used in the cinema as just another descriptive word that has slipped into common parlance, reduced into a thoughtless cliché? Or is the invocation of the idea more than a mere coincidence? Can there be fascinating history to this use, and can that history have consequences for how we might understand even contemporary debates on film censorship?

A very respected film historian, Tom Gunning, says that there is a critical difference between literature and cinema here: unlike literature, the question arises for the cinema, as to whether it is inherently evil. That there is something intrinsic to the medium itself, not merely to a class of films which could be said to embody evil. So “evil", says Gunning, is something that literature expresses; it is not inherent in the very signifiers of the text, the materiality and perceptual qualities of literature. But with cinema...doubts arise about its innocence from its origin”

1. Discuss this difference that Gunning is making between literature’s capacity to represent evil, and cinema’s capacity for evil.

2. Gunning says that evil in not something inherent to the very signifiers of the text. By implication, can it be understood that there are some inherent qualities of the technology of film that makes it a candidate for evil? Return to the notes that you have made from your discussion on the qualities of cinema, and see if any of them make cinema a candidate for the category of being evil in it.

We shall now try to reconstruct a genealogy of evil in relation to cinema. We shall do this by tracing backwards the history of HOW notions of evil has always inflicted legal accounts of cinema, in India and internationally. We need to begin by looking at the various milestones of evil in law’s response to cinema.

In the history of censorship in India, one of the most significant landmarks is a Supreme Court case, K.A. Abbas v. Union of India. For the full text of the famous Abbas judgement, click here

K.A. Abbas was a very famous film maker who is also famous for having directed Amitabh Bachan’s debut film, Saat Hindustani (A remake of Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai). Abbas saw himself as a very "realistic" filmmaker who wanted to use cinema for social transformation. He was also a member of the Khosla Committee on Film Censorship that was set up by the Government of India (which we shall discuss later). In the course of its working, Abbas got into a quarrel with another member who ridiculed filmmakers in India saying that none of the films they made could even qualify for political censorship. Abbas then made a film A Tale of Four Cities with the express intention of challenging the constitutional validity of pre-censorship of cinema in India.

Note:

The difference between pre-censorship and censorship: Where you need permission before you can even circulate any material it is pre-censorship (e.g. a film cannot be shown without censor certificate; on the other hand, after the circulation of some material, if it found to be offensive, action can be taken against it and the circulation can be stopped; e.g. a book which is found to be obscene)

The significance of the K.A. Abbas case is primariloy this. After he won his legal case for saving A Tale of Four Cities from being censored, he amended his petition to raise a larger constitutional challenge; he said that pre-censorship for cinema was in violation of Art. 19(1)(a): that it was against the fundamental right of freedom of speech and expression. The case therefore dealt with the question of cinema as an institution itself, and went beyond any specific film, and it still remains the leading judgment pronounced by the Supreme Court on the question. The Court upholding the differential treatment afforded to cinema has necessarily to construct an argument of difference as well.

In the Abbas judgement, Justice Hidayatullah stated:

“Further it has been almost universally recognized that the treatment of motion pictures must be different from that of other forms of art and expression. This arises from the instant appeal of the motion picture, its versatility, realism (often surrealism), and its co-ordination of the visual and aural senses. The art of the cameraman, with trick photography, vista vision and three-dimensional representation thrown in, has made the cinema picture more true to life than even the theatre or indeed any other form of representative art. The motion picture is able to stir up emotions more deeply than any other product of art. Its effect particularly on children and adolescents is very great since their immaturity makes them more willingly suspend their disbelief than mature men and women. They also remember the action in the picture and try to emulate or imitate what they have seen. Therefore classification of films into two categories of "U" films and "A" films is a reasonable classification. It is also for this reason that motion pictures must be regarded differently from other forms of speech and expression. A person reading a book or other writing nor hearing a speech or viewing a painting or sculpture is not so deeply stirred as by seeing a motion picture. Therefore the treatment of the latter on a different footing is also a valid classification”

1. What, according to the judgment, are the essential qualities that distinguish cinema from any other form? How do these compare with the discussion that you have conducted on the qualities of cinema? Are there are any similarities? If there are not, then is it because cinema is no longer an object or technology of "mystery and astonishment", the way that it used to be?

2. The judge seems to be saying that the problem of cinema arises not so much from its inability, as it were, to represent reality, as much as the fact that it is precisely able to do it too effectively. What do you make of this statement?

3. Finally, the judgment seems to rely heavily on the idea that that cinema has the ability to impact differential classes of people, especially children who are prone to believe whatever is happening, who cannot distinguish between the illusion on the screen and reality. Would you agree or disagree with this statement. Elaborate.

Hidayatullah's paragraph has more or less become the cornerstone for the way in which the law deals with cinema, and is quoted in almost every successive case related to the Cinematograph act in India.


Of course it did not help Abbas’s case that he himself had written in a similar way on the nature of cinema, and the court in this case gleefully quoted Abbas himself to buttress their argument. They cited Abbas’s argument “even if we believe that a novelist or a painter or a musician should be free to write, paint and compose music without the interference of the State machinery, I doubt if anyone will advocate the same freedom to be extended to the commercial exploitation of a powerful medium of expression and entertainment like the cinema. One can imagine the results if an unbridled commercial cinema is allowed to cater to the lowest common denominator of popular taste, specially in a country which, after two centuries of political and cultural domination, is still suffering from a confusion and debasement of cultural values. Freedom of expression cannot, and should not, be interpreted as a license for the cinemagnates to make money by pandering to, and thereby propagating, shoddy and vulgar taste."