Censoring the moving Image

From its birth in the dying days of the nineteenth century to its hi-tech proliferation today, cinema has been a mote in the eye of the censors. Its popular appeal and widespread dissemination made it an obvious and easy target: it was widely accused of corrupting morals, spreading dangerous ideas and having a particularly malign effect on children and members of the ´lower orders´. The spread of new forms of communications technology, such as DVD and the Internet, has democratized the moving image and made the task of the censor much harder than it once was, as the specially commissioned interview with David Cooke, Director of the British Board of Film Classification, included in this volume reveals.