Impact (Mar 1972)

his picture to be bastardized by cuts. Inevitably he backs down and opts for profits over principles, but in the meantime it’s all out in the open and the letters to the editor start pouring in. It’s the kind of situation the Board dislikes intensely. It would much rather remain unobtrusively in the background, a distant bureaucratic machine functioning smoothly well out of the limelight of the public gaze. It would much rather no one ever gave it a second thought. In fact the Theatres Branch has been functioning smoothly and regularly in Ontario now for some 45 years, administering all of the many provisions and regulations empowered to it under the Theatres Act. And as a quick perusal of the Act reveals, there are many more than one might think. For its role is not simply limited to regulating, censoring, approving and classifying all 16mm and 35mm films publicly exhibited in this province (8mm films and videotapes do not fall under the Board’s jurisdiction, thus explaining the existence of the Cinema 2000 and of the many small Yonge Street Peep Show emporiums). It also regulates and controls all film advertising material, all posters, ads, billboards, commercials and film trailers; it licenses and inspects all theatres to make sure that the strict safety and hygiene standards called for by the Act are rigidly enforced; it approves the plans for and consults on the construction of all new theatres in the province; it licenses all film distributors and film exchanges; it licenses, tests, and inspects all theatre projectionists. In other words its powers in the area of film exhibition are just about all-encompassing. Similar Boards exist in seven other provinces (Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland do not have them) and procedurally they all function very much alike. In the matter of censorial standards however, there is a considerable discrepancy between them, and Ontarians accustomed to regarding their province as progressive in terms of moral sophistication may be dismayed to learn that Quebec, British Columbia, Manitoba, The Board would much rather remain unobtrusively in the background, a distant bureaucratic machine functioning smoothly well out of the public gaze... and now perhaps even Saskatchewan are all generally rated more liberated. This kind of inter-provincial inconsistency is a major headache to Canadian film distributors who could conceivably find themselves with one picture playing in eight different versions across the country. Yet given the fact that censorship is here to stay at least for the time being (and no country in the world allows films to circulate without any controls whatsoever), most of them seem to concur that the Board system as it is now practised is not at all a bad solution to a very complex problem. One has only to examine the alternatives to discover why they might think so. In the United States for instance, where State Censor Boards were declared unconstitutional a few years back, the responsibility for overseeing public morality in the motion picture houses rests firmly on the shoulders of the local law enforcement agencies, and this can create countless problems. For if there’s anything more arbitrary than a civilian censor, it’s a police censor, and with obscenity laws being as vague and ill-defined as they are it’s hardly surprising that, in the wake of the current floodtide of sexually explicit films, raids, arrests, trials, fines and sometimes even jail sentences for offending distributers and theatre managers are becoming almost commonplace in some areas of the States. Although the police don’t win all the cases, and some sort of precedent is gradually being established that will eventually curtail their powers in the censorship area, the whole situation amounts to a lot of bad publicity for the film industry. And bad publicity is bad business. At least in Ontario and the other provinces a film company knows where it stands. It sends a film in to the Board, pays the censorship fee (yes the Board charges for its services) has it screened, cut, classified as the case may be, and ships it off to the theatres bearing the stamp of approval of an official government agency. And that’s that. The company’s covered, the exhibitor’s covered, the patrons who actually pay to see the picture are covered. Or at least that’s the way it’s supposed to be. In fact however, legally speaking, it’s not quite the case. The passage of a film by a provincial Censor Board does not automatically exempt it from police surveillance and even police seizure. It should but it doesn’t. Just last December in both Manitoba and Saskatchewan, raids were conducted and arrests made in con