Censorship?!

Sol,

Thanks for the link but I can not help but feel that it sabotages your argument a little.

The surprising thing about most of the posts as I see it was that a surprising amount of children actually relate to the film. Now any piece of art which causes responses like "this is the first and only movie that I've see [sic] that showed how @!#$ really is" must be of some importance. To echo what Troy has said in relation to child pornography, by banning these films, we are simply turning our back on the social/political/economic reasons for their existence. Do you think if KIDS was banned, children would stop feeling the way they do? Is that not a case of shooting the messenger and ignoring the message?

When we talk of censorship, the most obvious concerns are in relation to sex and violence. But its effects are far more subtle. In a society in which information itself has become a commodity, filtered and packaged for us by the good people at channels 9, 10 etc., the most far reaching form of censorship concerns the censorship of ideas, in most cases those which undermine the social order.

All plays are driven by ideas, by theories and concepts. From my perspective, this mixture of ideas is what makes them interesting, and as is the case with KIDS raises questions/situations we would sometimes rather ignore or not have access to. At least allow people access to the material so that they can offer their own informed opinion, and if they are incapable of this, then maybe it says more about our education system than anything else.

I'm sorry. I realise I am intellectualising this, but for me the question of censorship in art is governed by a deeper philosophy we hold about censorship in general.

Ben