Bøker av Julian Petley

This collection focuses on 1970s films from a variety of countries, and from the marginal to the mainstream, which, by tackling various 'difficult' subjects, have proved to be controversial in one way or another. It is not an uncritical celebration of the shocking and the subversive but an attempt to understand why this decade produced films which many found shocking, and what it was that made them shocking to certain audiences. To this end it includes not only films that shocked the conventionally minded, such as hard core pornography, but also those that outraged liberal opinion - for example, Death Wish and Dirty Harry. The book does not simply cast a critical light on a series of controversial films which have been variously maligned, misinterpreted or just plain ignored, but also assesses how their production values, narrative features and critical receptions can be linked to the wider historical and social forces that were dominant during this decade. Furthermore, it explores how these films resonate in our own historical moment - replete as it is with shocks of all kinds.

Starting in 1979, the birth of the domestic video industry - and the first year of the Thatcher government - this critical study explains how the censorship of films both in cinemas and on video and DVD has developed in Britain. As well as presenting a detailed analysis of the workings of the British Board of Film Classification, Petley casts his gaze well beyond the BBFC to analyse the forces which the Board has to take into account when classifying and censoring. These range from laws such as the Video Recordings Act and Obscene Publications Act, and how these are enforced by the police and Crown Prosecution Service and interpreted by the courts, to government policy on matters such as pornography. In discussing a climate heavily coloured by 30 years of lurid 'video nasty' stories propagated by a press which is at once censorious and sensationalist and which has played a key role in bringing about and legitimating one of the strictest systems of film and video/DVD censorship in Europe, this book is notable for the breadth of its contextual analysis, its critical stance and its suggestions for reform of the present system.