This entertaining and insightful book is the first devoted exclusively to the films that have earned a special place in motion picture history by pushing the “cinematic envelope” with their treatment of provocative subjects and themes. Obscene, Indecent, Immoral & Offensive: 100+ Years of Controversial Cinema chronicles the history of Hollywood censorship and the films that were banned, censored, and condemned by the Production Code Administration and the Legion of Decency. Stephen Tropiano offers readers insightful and accessible analysis of films that were branded “controversial” at the time of their release due to explicit language, nudity, graphic sex, violence, and their treatment of “adult” subject matter and themes. The films profiled include The Birth of a Nation, Anatomy of a Murder, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Baby Doll, Blackboard Jungle, Bonnie and Clyde, The Wild Bunch, A Clockwork Orange, Natural Born Killers, Caligula, Rosemary's Baby, Life of Brian, The Last Temptation of Christ, and The Passion of the Christ.

Thoroughly researched and fully APA referenced chronological history of film censorship and classification in Australia. Case by case histories of banned films punctuate a detailed account of the evolution of the Australian Film Classification system and the concurrent development of the Australian adult XXX industry, culminating in the establishment of the Australian Sex Party. Former SAR Research Fellow at Australia’s National Film & Sound Archive Robert Cettl gained exclusive access to both the national collection and the highly restricted Australian adult industry archive, the Eros Collection, at the Flinders University of South Australia Library to piece together the complete history of film censorship in Australia. Progressing through individual banned and censored films – including works by such internationally renowned directors as Hitchcock, Whale, Bunuel, Forman, Godard, Oshima, Pasolini, Hopper, Lyne, Breillat, Noe, Brass, Bertolucci, Fellini, Ford, Clark, Despentes, Winterbottom, Von Trier – Cettl maps out the specification of “offensive” material in parallel to the emergence of Australia’s adult XXX industry and the Christian morals-driven pressure groups that advocate tighter censorship restrictions. In a country that has the dubious honor of being the most censorial of Western democracies, film censorship is based on the principle of “offense to a reasonable adult”, an undefined refrain that religious minorities have used to manipulate censorship decisions in their favor. The history of these groups and the political support for their right-wing Christian agenda – driven by what Australians term “Wowserism” – makes Australian film censorship unique in its delineation of :the “aesthetics of offense” as grounds for the suppression of free dissemination, to the point of seeking mandatory ISP Internet filtering and Internet blacklisting of all material classified RC (or “refused classification”), much of which is available for dissemination throughout Europe and the USA, in violation of UN Human Rights Article 19. In this comprehensive study of the socio-political ideology surrounding the censorship of primarily sexually explicit material (“pornography”), Cettl delineates the aesthetic construction of “offense” as a transgressive genre and charts the morality-driven religiosity behind their construction as Other to a civilized society, questioning whether the categorization of such material as other makes of it legitimate discourse. With extensive case histories, never-before-published government censorship reports, press clippings and secret internal memos between some of Australia’s most powerful and influential politicians, Offensive to a Reasonable Adult exposes the quagmire of Australian censorship law and the morals-cabal of “wowsers” that dominate the censorship agenda in the so-called “Clever Country”.

Censorship has been an ongoing issue from the early days of filmmaking. One hundred years of film censorship, encompassing the entire 20th century, are chronicled in this work. The freewheeling nature of films in the early decades was profoundly affected by Prohibition, the Depression and the formation of the Legion of Decency--culminating in a new age of restrictiveness in the movies. Such powerful arbiters of public taste as Will H. Hays of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America and Joseph Breen of the Production Code Association fomented an era whereby films with contentious material were severely censored or even condemned. This held sway until rebellious filmmakers like Otto Preminger challenged the system in the 1950s, eventually resulting in the abandonment of the old regime in favor of the contemporary "G" through "NC-17" ratings system.

Focusing on key texts, leading scholars explore how Hollywood has given an enduring life to the classics of Broadway theater.

Is the government ever justified in restricting offensive speech? This question has become particularly important in relation to communications which offend religious sensibilities. It is often argued that insulting a person's beliefs is tantamount to disrespecting the believer; that insults are a form of hatred or intolerance; that the right to religious freedom includes a more specific right not to be insulted in one's beliefs; that religious minorities have a particularly strong claim to be protected from offence; and that censorship of offensive speech is necessary for the prevention of social disorder and violence. None of those arguments is convincing. Drawing on law and philosophy, this book argues that there is no moral right to be protected from offence and that, while freedom of religion is an important right that grounds negative and positive obligations for the state, it is unpersuasive to interpret constitutional and human rights provisions as including a right not to be caused offence. Rather, we have good reasons to think of public discourse as a space for the expression of all viewpoints about the ethical life, including those which some will find offensive. This is necessary to sustain a society's capacity for self-reflection and change.