Film Censorship as Social Practice

Title: Film Censorship as Social Practice and Elective Mutism in Minority Cinema
Insight article by Jay Carreria, Staff, The Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy
Keywords: culture and society, gender law and society, media and society, social justice and social change

Film studies have predominantly focused on the well-established system of signification, as defined by the presence of image and sound. Shilina-Conte argues in both her essay film, This Video Does Not Exist (forthcoming), and her book, Black Screens, White Frames: Gilles Deleuze and the Interstices of Cinema (forthcoming from Oxford University Press), that this approach overlooks the interstices in film and film history. In one sense, interstices as the “fissures between images” can be interpreted as the absence of sound or image, as in the case of blank (black or white) screens. Blank screens have often been relegated to a subordinate status in cinema. In another sense, the interstitial method Shilina-Conte proposes also “generates a rearticulation of the center, margins, and peripheries in film history.” Such methodology highlights marginalized areas of study in traditional film history, including minority cinemas.

Shilina-Conte’s multimodal project on cinematic absence addresses film censorship, which global filmmakers still encounter today. Each filmmaker must find their own answers to the occlusions forced upon their work. One example is the Thai filmmaker, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, the subject of Shilina-Conte’s article-in-progress, “‘If censorship is still with us, then maybe this is how we should watch the movies’: Black Screen Footage in Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Syndromes and a Century” (forthcoming in The Controversial Film in a Global Context, Bloomsbury). The filmmaker chose to respond to the censorship in his film by replacing the entire duration of the excised scenes with darkness and silence in order to inform the audience of the extent of the missing content. Following this, he invited those who watched the film in the theater to view the censored scenes on YouTube, thereby asking them to fill in the gaps by themselves. Shilina-Conte does something similar in her own work. She invites her audience to fill in the gaps in their understanding of cinema by examining the interstices in films such as Weerasethakul’s Syndromes and a Century and by considering their significance in the context of global film history. Ultimately, Shilina-Conte’s innovative multimodal work calls attention to that which has been suppressed or overlooked in traditional film study, while also responding to current “scholar-practitioner” discussions in film and media.

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Tanya Shilina-Conte, Department of English, University at Buffalo