Academic literature on the topic 'Singapore. Committee on Film Censorship'

This article aims to rethink film censorship in Singapore by investigating how the agents involved in the Singapore Board of Film Censors imagine and represent its processes. Contrary to deterministic and structural approaches, I argue for the consideration of how specific events and practices articulate film censorship in Singapore in specific ways and how these, in turn, feed back into the process of censorship. Using the case study of Ken Kwek’s Sex.Violence.FamilyValues (2012), this article problematizes idealistic representations of the censorship system as an efficient machine made up of separate components with clearly defined functions. It finds instead that the complex agency based on contingent relations and identities make any form of overall structure in film censorship impossible. This inherent ambiguity of the censorship process has serious consequences for those involved in filmmaking and implications for our theoretical understandings of the so-called ‘Singapore New Wave’.

In June of 1930, Dr. J. M. Puig Casauranc, who held the post of Jefe del Departamento del Distrito Federal (a post then somewhat akin to mayor) received a lengthy letter from theConfederación de Sociedades Mexicanasin Los Angeles, California. The letter asked Dr. Puig if a Committee for the Supervision of Film could be constituted in Los Angeles, a committee to be made up of members of the Confederation and the Mexican consulate in Los Angeles. In their letter members of the Confederation’s steering committee displayed a clear understanding of the history of Mexico’s struggle to exert some control over the content of Hollywood films.

At the end of the 1940s, individuals and groups, as well as the government in Ireland, recognized the need for and benefits of arts enterprises. The Inter-Party coalition, which came to power in early 1948 (under John Costello), recognized the importance of tourism as an industry and the potential of theatre to attract foreign visitors to Ireland. In 1949, the Cultural Relations Committee of Ireland, operating under the auspices of the Minister for External Affairs, undertook production of a series of pamphlets designed “to give a broad, vivid, and informed survey of Irish life and culture.”1 In 1951, the Republic of Ireland established the Arts Council; the first National Fleadh (Festival) for traditional music was held in Mullingar; Liam Miller founded the Dolmen Press; and Comhaltas Ceoltoiri Eireann (Traditional Irish Music Advisory) was established. Even after the 1951 election returned de Valera and Fianna Fáil to power, organizational infrastructures to support the arts continued to appear: the Irish tourist board (Bord Failte) and Gael-Linn (an organization to promote Irish language, literature, and culture) both debuted in 1952. Cork held its first International Choral and Folk Dance Festival and its first International Film Festival in 1953. Some of these developments may have anticipated the imminent inauguration of regular air passenger service to North America, but all responded to cultural opportunities precluded during what Ireland knows as the Emergency and other nations as World War II. These agencies and events all sought to project a positive, progressive image of Ireland. Most important, they all mark a departure from the isolationism that prevailed in Ireland before and during the Emergency and that characterized de Valera's tenure as Taoiseach in the 1930s and 1940s.

This paper is a reflection on a number of theatre performances held in Singapore, each of which probed problematic or traumatic historical events occurring either in Singapore itself or in other parts of Southeast Asia. These avant-garde performances were inspired by or built around actual testimonies of individuals in ways which, for this author, suggest a striking fluidity in the boundaries between testimony and performance, one that raises difficult questions about performance ethics and the processes by which collective memories are shaped. The plays also made use of visual media: one had been recorded on video while others incorporated photographic and video materials into the actual performance. At the time I witnessed these plays, I had already become interested in the way that, over the course of the twentieth century, documentary films had come to play an increasingly important role in the recording of testimony concerning traumatic events. Testimony on film, I have argued, functions simultaneously as evidential trace, and as performative event. Films of testimony develop their own trajectories as they enter into the realms of public remembering. They preserve and extend the record of personal experiences, thereby adding them to the pool of collective memory about an event. Theatrical performances, too, develop their own trajectories through repetition, as Marvin Carlson's statement (cited above) suggests. But what exactly might be different when testimony is performed as drama before a live audience? What are the purposes of such performances, and what might be their possible effects upon both participants and audiences? Is the trace left by a live theatre performance inevitably more ephemeral than those captured on film, or might it be in some respects even more powerful? These are some of the questions I raise – without necessarily being able to present definitive answers – in what follows. I conclude by arguing that in the Singapore context, because censorship laws place very specific constraints on the making of documentary films with openly political content, in recent years theatre has been able to offer a slightly greater space than film as a medium for critical reflection. How theatre directors and actors have tried to use this space is a subject correspondingly deserving of our close attention.

The purpose of the paper is to unblended analysis of sources and literature on the repressive policy of Soviet power against the representatives of Ukrainian cinema. In general, the main principles of party-state policy in the field of cinematography, including the mechanism of the influence of ideology on the cinematographic process in the Ukrainian SSR, are grounded, and the interaction between public administration and creative organizations is grounded; The main methods and forms of the repressive policy directed against the artists of Ukrainian cinema are described. The existing structure severely restricted the powers and independence of the respective republican units of management. In Ukraine, the general management of cinematography was carried out by the Council of Ministers of the Ukrainian SSR through the State Committee of the Council of Ministers of the Ukrainian SSR on cinematography - a union republican body that did not have the necessary independence in determining the main principles of the development of cinema art. Derzhkino's powers included economic, financial functions and control over the ideological content of film production. Derzhkinos powers included economic, financial functions and control over the ideological content of film production. It was in its structure that the Cinema Repertoire Control Inspection functioned, the decision of which depended on the fate of films: from the approval of the script to the release of the film on the screen. In those years, the practice of «film on the shelf» was extended, when films that were fully licensed for rental by all instances were fully prepared for rental, in the final version they did not satisfy the authorities, they were banned from showing. A more liberal requirement was the processing of unsatisfactory moments. The control over the repertoire of films that fell into the audience was reliant on the Main Directorate of Film and Film. The article uses the following research methods: comparative-historical, typologies, classifications, problem-chronological, objectivity, multifactor, which allow to study complex social phenomena, concrete events and facts in their dynamics. In the course of the study, it was found that during this period there was a structuring and centralization of the management system of the cinematographic industry, the general leadership of which belonged to the State Committee of the USSR. It is proved that during the years of stagnation the influence of the command-administrative system and the rigorous subordination to the principles of party ideology, which involved interference with creative processes, increase of authorizing powers of administrative structures and increase of censorship, was intensified. It was found out that after the thaw was extinguished, Ukrainian cinema was subject to strict regulation of the canons of «socialist realism». Ideological policy was secured by relevant party and state regulations, which provided a party assessment of the development of cinematography, criticized areas that were not interested in the party-bureaucratic system, the thematic orientation of cinema was normalized. Against the representatives of this course, the authorities used the usual spectrum of methods of struggle: blatant criticism and discredit in the media, in party and government decisions at the gathering of cinematographers; prosecution and imprisonment. The process of organization of the state campaign against the school of poetry films in the context of implementation of the policy of narrowing the sphere of application of the Ukrainian language and reducing the production of films in the Ukrainian language is analyzed. The planning of the work of film studios, censorship on the subject of films became the main tools for enhanced control over the development of Ukrainian cinema during the studied period. The interaction of public administration and creative organizations - the Union of Cinematographers of Ukraine, which was a pro-government structure and controlled by the party bureaucracy, was grounded, although one of its statutory tasks was protection of the creative, professional, copyright and public rights of its members.

On Wednesday 21 April the Minister for Communications, Information Technology and the Arts introduced a piece of legislation into the Australian Senate to regulate the way Australians use the Internet. This legislation is presented within Australia's existing system of content regulation, a scheme that the Minister describes is not censorship, but merely regulation (Alston 55). Underlying Senator Alston's rhetoric about the protection of children from snuff film makers, paedophiles, drug pushers and other criminals, this long anticipated bill is aimed at reducing the amount of pornographic materials available via computer networks, a censorship regime in an age when regulation and classification are the words we prefer to use when society draws the line under material we want to see, but dare not allow ourselves access to. Regardless of any noble aspirations expressed by free-speech organisations such as Electronic Frontiers Australia relating to the defence of personal liberty and freedom of expression, this legislation is about porn. Under the Bill, Australia would proscribe our citizens from accessing: explicit depictions of sexual acts between consenting adults; mild non-violent fetishes; depictions of sexual violence, coercion or non-consent of any kind; depictions of child sexual abuse, bestiality, sexual acts accompanied by offensive fetishes, or exploitative incest fantasies; unduly detailed and/or relished acts of extreme violence or cruelty; explicit or unjustifiable depictions of sexual violence against non-consenting persons; and detailed instruction or encouragement in matters of crime or violence or the abuse of proscribed drugs. (OFLC) The Australian public, as a whole, favour the availability of sexually explicit materials in some form, with OFLC data indicating a relatively high degree of public support for X rated videos, the "high end" of the porn market (Paterson et al.). In Australia strict regulation of X rated materials in conventional media has resulted in a larger illegal market for these materials than the legalised sex industries of the ACT and Northern Territory (while 1.2 million X rated videos are legally sold out of the territories, 2 million are sold illegally in other jurisdictions, according to Patten). In Australia, censorship of media content has traditionally been based on the principles of the protection of society from moral harm and individual degradation, with specific emphasis on the protection of innocents from material they are not old enough for, or mentally capable of dealing with (Joint Select Committee on Video Material). Even when governments distanced themselves from direct personal censorship (such as Don Chipp's approach to the censorship of films and books in the late 1960s and early 1970s) and shifted the rationale behind censorship from prohibition to classification, the publicly stated aims of these decisions have been the support of existing community standards, rather than the imposition of strict legalistic moral values upon an unwilling society. In the debates surrounding censorship, and especially the level of censorship applied (rather than censorship as a whole), the question "what is the community we are talking about here?" has been a recurring theme. The standards that are applied to the regulation of media content, both online and off, are often the focus of community debate (a pluralistic community that obviously lacks "standards" by definition of the word). In essence the problem of maintaining a single set of moral and ethical values for the treatment of media content is a true political dilemma: a problem that lacks any form of solution acceptable to all participants. Since the introduction of the Internet as a "mass" medium (or more appropriately, a "popular" one), government indecision about how best to treat this new technology has precluded any form or content regulation other than the ad hoc use of existing non-technologically specific law to deal with areas of criminal or legally sanctionable intent (such as the use of copyright law, or the powers under the Crimes Act relating to the improper use of telecommunications services). However, indecision in political life is often associated with political weakness, and in the face of pressure to act decisively (motivated again by "community concern"), the Federal government has decided to extend the role of the Australian Broadcasting Authority to regulate and impose a censorship regime on Australian access of morally harmful materials. It is important to note the government's intention to censor access, rather than content of the Internet. While material hosted in Australia (ignoring, of course, the "cyberspace" definitions of non-territorial existence of information stored in networks) will be censored (removed from Australia computers), the government, lacking extraterritorial powers to compel the owners of machines located offshore, intends to introduce of some form of refused access list to materials located in other nations. What is interesting to consider in this context is the way that slight shifts of definitional paradigm alter the way this legislation can be considered. If information flows (upon which late capitalism is becoming more dependent) were to be located within the context of international law governing the flow of waterways, does the decision to prevent travel of morally dubious material through Australia's informational waterways impinge upon the riparian rights of other nations (the doctrine of fair usage without impeding flow; Godana 50)? Similarly, if we take Smith's extended definition of community within electronic transactional spaces (the maintenance of members' commitment to the group, monitoring and sanctioning behaviour and the production and distribution of resources), then the current Bill proposes the regulation of the activities of one community by another (granted, a larger community that incorporates the former). Seen in this context, this legislation is the direct intervention in an established social order by a larger and less homogeneous group. It may be trite to quote the Prime Minister's view of community in this context, where he states ...It is free individuals, strong communities and the rule of law which are the best defence against the intrusive power of the state and against those who think they know what is best for everyone else. (Howard 21) possibly because the paradigm in which this new legislation is situated does not classify those Australians online (who number up to 3 million) as a community in their own right. In a way the Internet users of Australia have never identified themselves as a community, nor been asked to act in a communitarian manner. While discussions about the value of community models when applied to the Internet are still divided, there are those who argue that their use of networked services can be seen in this light (Worthington). What this new legislation does, however, is preclude the establishment of public communities in order to meet the desires of government for some limits to be placed on Internet content. The Bill does allow for the development of "restricted access systems" that would allow pluralistic communities to develop and engage in a limited amount of self-regulation. These systems include privately accessible Intranets, or sites that restrict access through passwords or some other form of age verification technique. Thus, ignoring the minimum standards that will be required for these communities to qualify for some measure of self-regulatory freedom, what is unspoken here is that specific subsections of the Internet population may exist, provided they keep well away from the public gaze. A ghetto without physical walls. Under the Bill, a co-regulatory approach is endorsed by the government, favouring the establishment of industry codes of practice by ISPs and (or) the establishment of a single code of practice by the content hosting industry (content developers are relegated to yet undetermined complementary state legislation). However, this section of the Bill, in mandating a range of minimum requirements for these codes of practice, and denying plurality to the content providers, places an administrative imperative above any communitarian spirit. That is, that the Internet should have no more than one community, it should be an entity bound by a single guiding set of principles and be therefore easier to administer by Australian censors. This administrative imperative re-encapsulates the dilemma faced by governments dealing with the Internet: that at heart, the broadcast and print press paradigms of existing censorship regimes face massive administrative problems when presented with a communications technology that allows for wholesale publication of materials by individuals. Whereas the limited numbers of broadcasters and publishers have allowed the development of Australia's system of classification of materials (on a sliding scale from G to RC classifications or the equivalent print press version), the new legislation introduced into the Senate uses the classification scheme simply as a censorship mechanism: Internet content is either "ok" or "not ok". From a public administration perspective, this allows government to drastically reduce the amount of work required by regulators and eases the burden of compliance costs by ISPs, by directing clear and unambiguous statements about the acceptability of existing materials placed online. However, as we have seen in other areas of social policy (such as the rationalisation of Social Security services or Health), administrative expedience is often antipathetic to small communities that have special needs, or cultural sensitivities outside of mainstream society. While it is not appropriate to argue that public administration creates negative social impacts through expedience, what can be presented is that, where expedience is a core aim of legislation, poor administration may result. For many Australian purveyors of pornography, my comments will be entirely unhelpful as they endeavour to find effective ways to spoof offshore hosts or bone up (no pun intended) on tunnelling techniques. Given the easy way in which material can be reconstituted and relocated on the Internet, it seems likely that some form of regulatory avoidance will occur by users determined not to have their content removed or blocked. For those regulators given the unenviable task of censoring Internet access it may be worthwhile quoting from Sexing the Cherry, in which Jeanette Winterson describes the town: whose inhabitants are so cunning that to escape the insistence of creditors they knock down their houses in a single night and rebuild them elsewhere. So the number of buildings in the city is always constant but they are never in the same place from one day to the next. (43) Thus, while Winterson saw this game as a "most fulfilling pastime", it is likely to present real administrative headaches to ABA regulators when attempting to enforce the Bill's anti-avoidance clauses. The Australian government, in adapting existing regulatory paradigms to the Internet, has overlooked the informal communities who live, work and play within the virtual world of cyberspace. In attempting to meet a perceived social need for regulation with political and administrative expedience, it has ignored the potentially cohesive role of government in developing self-regulating communities who need little government intervention to produce socially beneficial outcomes. In proscribing activity externally to the realm in which these communities reside, what we may see is a new type of community, one whose desire for a feast of flesh leads them to evade the activities of regulators who operate in the "meat" world. What this may show us is that in a virtual environment, the regulators' net is no match for a world wide web. References Alston, Richard. "Regulation is Not Censorship." The Australian 13 April 1999: 55. Paterson, K., et. al. Classification Issues: Film, Video and Television. Sydney: The Office of Film and Literature Classification, 1993. Patten, F. Personal interview. 9 Feb. 1999. Godana, B.A. Africa's Shared Water Resources: Legal and Institutional Aspects of the Nile, Niger and Senegal River Systems. London: Frances Pinter, 1985. Howard, John. The Australia I Believe In: The Values, Directions and Policy Priorities of a Coalition Government Outlined in 1995. Canberra: Liberal Party, 1995. Joint Select Committee On Video Material. Report of the Joint Select Committee On Video Material. Canberra: APGS, 1988. Office of Film and Literature Classification. Cinema & Video Ratings Guide. 1999. 1 May 1999 <http://www.oflc.gov.au/classinfo.php>. Smith, Marc A. "Voices from the WELL: The Logic of the Virtual Commons." 1998. 2 Mar. 1999 <http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/soc/csoc/papers/voices/Voices.htm>. Winterson, Jeanette. Sexing the Cherry. New York: Vintage Books. 1991. Worthington, T. Testimony before the Senate Select Committee on Information Technologies. Unpublished, 1999. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Peter Chen. "Community without Flesh: First Thoughts on the New Broadcasting Services Amendment (Online Services) Bill 1999." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.3 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9905/bill.php>. Chicago style: Peter Chen, "Community without Flesh: First Thoughts on the New Broadcasting Services Amendment (Online Services) Bill 1999," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 3 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9905/bill.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Author. (1999) Community without flesh: first thoughts on the new broadcasting services amendment (online services) bill 1999. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(3). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9905/bill.php> ([your date of access]).

Introduction Artist: June 2 at 11.26pm:‘To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing.’ - Raymond Williams. (Singaporean Artists’ public Facebook Post) Can the critical arts exist without ‘place’?There is an ongoing debate on ‘place’ and where it begins and ends; on the ways that cities exist in both material and immaterial forms, and thereby, how to locate and understand place as an anchoring point amidst global flows (Massey; Merrifield). This debate extends to the global art- scape, as traditional conceptions of art and art-making attached to place require re-thinking in a paradigm where digital and immaterial networks, symbols and forums both complement and complicate the role that place has traditionally played (Luger, “Singaporean ‘Spaces of Hope?”). The digital art-scape has allowed for art-led provocations, transformations and disturbances to traditional institutions and gatekeepers (see Hartley’s “ Communication, Media, and Cultural Studies” concept of ‘gatekeeper’) of the art world, which often served as elite checkpoints and way-stations to artistic prominence. Still, contradictory and paradoxical questions emerge, since art cannot be divorced of place entirely, and ‘place’ often features as a topic, subject, or site of critical expression for art regardless of material or immaterial form. Critical art is at once place-bound and place-less; anchored to sites even as it transcends them completely.This paper will explore the dualistic tension – and somewhat contradictory relationship – between physical and digital artistic space through the case study of authoritarian Singapore, by focusing on a few examples of art-activists and the way that they have used and manipulated both physical and digital spaces for art-making. These examples draw upon research which took place in Singapore from 2012-2014 and which involved interviews with, and observation of, a selected sample (30) of art-activists (or “artivists”, to use Krischer’s definition). Findings point to a highly co-dependent relationship between physical and digital art places where both offer unique spaces of possibility and limitations. Therefore, place remains essential in art-making, even as digital avenues expand and amplify what critical art-practice can accomplish.Singapore’s Place-Bound and Place-Less Critical Art-Scape The arts in Singapore have a complicated, and often tense relationship with places such as the theatre, the gallery, and the public square. Though there has been a recent push (in the form of funding to arts groups and physical arts infrastructure) to make Singapore more of an arts and cultural destination (see Luger “The Cultural Grassroots and the Authoritarian City”), the Singaporean arts-scape remains bound by restrictions and limitations, and varying degrees of de facto (and de jure) censorship and self-policing. This has opened up spaces for critical art, albeit in sometimes creative and surprising forms. As explained to me by a Singaporean playwright,So they’re [the state] making venues, as well as festival organizers, as well as theatre companies, to …self-police, or self-censor. But for us on the ground, we use that as a way to focus on what we still want to say, and be creative about it, so that we circumvent the [state], with the intention of doing what we want to do. (Research interview, Singaporean playwright)Use of cyber-spaces is one way that artists circumvent repressive state structures. Restrictions on the use of place enliven cyberspace with an emancipatory and potentially transformative potential for the critical arts. Cyber-Singapore has a vocal art-activist network and has allowed some artists (such as the “Sticker Lady”) to gain wide national and even international followings. However, digital space cannot exist without physical place; indeed, the two exist, simultaneously, forming and re-forming each other. The arts cannot ‘happen’ online without a corresponding physical space for incubation, for practice, for human networking.It is important to note that in Singapore, art-led activism (or ‘artivism’) and traditional activism are closely related, and research indicated that activist networks often overlap with the art world. While this may be the case in many places, Singapore’s small geography and the relatively wide-berth given to the arts (as opposed to political activism) make these relationships especially strong. Therefore, many arts-spaces (theatres, galleries, studios) function as activist spaces; and non-art spaces such as public squares and university campuses often host art events and displays. Likewise, many of the artists that I interviewed are either directly, or indirectly, involved in more traditional activism as well.Singapore is an island-nation-city-state with a carefully planned urban fabric, the vast majority of which is state-owned (at least 80 % - resulting from large-scale land transfers from the British in the years surrounding Singapore’s independence in 1965). Though it has a Westminster-style parliamentary system (another colonial vestige), a single ruling party has commanded power for 50 years (the People’s Action Party, or PAP). Despite free elections and a liberal approach toward business, foreign investment and multiculturalism, Singapore retains a labyrinthine geography of government control over free expression, dictated through agencies such as the Censorship Review Committee (CRC); the Media Development Authority (MDA), and the National Arts Council (NAC) which work together in a confusing grid of checks and balances. This has presented a paradoxical and often contradictory approach to the arts and culture in which gradual liberalisations of everything from gay nightlife to university discourse have come hand-in-hand with continued restrictions on political activism and ‘taboo’ artistic / cultural themes. These ‘out of bounds’ themes (see Yue) include perceived threats to Singapore’s racial, religious, or political harmony – a grey area that is often at the discretion of particular government bureaucrats and administrators.Still, the Singaporean arts place (take the theatre, for example) has assumed a special role as a focal point for not only various types of visual and performance art, but also unrelated (or tangentially-related) activist causes as well. I asked a theatre director of a prominent alternative theatre where, in Singapore’s authoritarian urban fabric, there were opportunities for provocation? He stressed the theatres’ essential role in providing a physical platform for visual tensions and disturbance:You know, and on any given evening, you’ll see some punks or skinheads hanging outside there, and they kind of – create this disturbance in this neighbourhood, where, you know a passer-by is walking to his posh building, and then suddenly you know, there’s this bunch of boys with mohawks, you know, just standing there – and they are friendly! There’s nothing antagonistic or threatening, whatever. So, you know, that’s the kind of tension that we actually love to kind of generate!… That kind of surprise, that kind of, ‘oh, oh yes!’ we see this nice, expensive restaurant, this nice white building, and then these rough edges. And – that is where uh, those points where – where factions, where the rough edges meet –are where dialogue occurs. (Theatre Director, Singapore)That is not to say that the theatre comes without limits and caveats. It is financially precarious, as the Anglo-American model of corporate funding for the arts is not yet well-established in Singapore; interviews revealed that even much of the philanthropic donating to arts organizations comes from Singapore’s prominent political families and therefore the task of disentangling state interests from non-ideological arts patronage becomes difficult. With state - funding come problems with “taboo” subjects, as exemplified by the occasional banned-play or the constant threat of budget cuts or closure altogether: a carrot and stick approach by the state that allows arts organizations room to operate as long as the art produced does not disturb or provoke (too) much.Liew and Pang suggest that in Singapore, cyberspace has allowed a scale, a type of debate and a particularly cross-cutting conversation to take place: in a context where there are peculiar restrictions on the use and occupation of the built environment. They [ibid] found an emerging vocal, digital artistic grassroots that increasingly challenges the City-State’s dominant narratives: my empirical research therefore expands upon, and explores further, the possibility that Singapore’s cyber-spaces are both complementary to, and in some ways, more important than its material places in terms of providing spaces for political encounters.I conducted ‘netnography’ (see Kozinets) across Singapore’s web-scape and found that the online realm may be the ‘… primary site for discursive public activity in general and politics in particular’ (Mitchell, 122); a place where ‘everybody is coming together’ (Merrifield, 18). Without fear of state censorship, artists, activists and art-activists are not bound by the (same) set of restrictions that they might be if operating in a theatre, or certainly in a public place such as a park or square. Planetary cyber-Singapore exists inside and outside the City-State; it can be accessed remotely, and can connect with a far wider audience than a play performed in a small black box theatre.A number of blogs and satirical sites – including TheOnlineCitizen.sg, TheYawningBread.sg, and Demon-Cratic Singapore, openly criticize government policy in ways rarely heard in-situ or in even casual conversation on the street. Additionally, most activist causes and coalitions have digital versions where information is spread and support is gathered, spanning a range of issues. As is the case in material sites of activism in Singapore, artists frequently emerge as the loudest, most vocal, and most inter-disciplinary digital activists, helping to spearhead and cobble together cultural-activist coalitions and alliances. One example of this is the contrast between the place bound “Pink Dot” LGBTQ event (limited to the amount of people that can fit in Hong Lim Park, a central square) and its Facebook equivalent, We are Pink Dot public ‘group’. Pink Dot occurs each June in Singapore and involves around 10,000 people. The Internet’s representations of Pink Dot, however, have reached millions: Pink Dot has been featured in digital (and print) editions of major global newspapers including The Guardian and The New York Times. While not explicitly an art event, Pink Dot is artistic in nature as it uses pink ‘dots’ to side-step the official designation of being an LGBTQ pride event – which would not be sanctioned by the authorities (Gay Pride has not been allowed to take place in Singapore).The street artist Samantha Lo – also known as “Sticker Lady” – was jailed for her satirical stickers that she placed in various locations around Singapore. Unable to freely practice her art on city streets, she has become a sort of local artist - Internet celebrity, with her own Facebook Group called Free Sticker Lady (with over 1,000 members as of April, 2016). Through her Facebook group, Lo has been able to voice opinions that would be difficult – or even prohibited – with a loudspeaker on the street, or expressed through street art. As an open lesbian, she has also been active (and vocal) in the “Pink Dot” events. Her speech at “Pink Dot” was heard by the few-thousand in attendance at the time; her Facebook post (public without privacy settings) is available to the entire world:I'll be speaking during a small segment at Pink Dot tomorrow. Though only two minutes long, I've been spending a lot of time thinking about my speech and finding myself at a position where there's just so much to say. All my life, I've had to work twice as hard to prove myself, to be taken seriously. At 18, I made a conscious decision to cave in to societal pressures to conform after countless warnings of how I wouldn't be able to get a job, get married, etc. I grew my hair out, dressed differently, but was never truly comfortable with the person I became. That change was a choice, but I wasn't happy.Since then, I learnt that happiness wasn't a given, I had to work for it, for the ability to be comfortable in my own skin, to do what I love and to make something out of myself. (Artists’ Facebook Post)Yet, without the city street, Lo would not have gained her notoriety; without use of the park, Pink Dot would not have a Facebook presence or the ability to gather international press. The fact that Singaporean theatre exists at all as an important instigator of visual and performative tension demonstrates the significance of its physical address. Physical art places provide a crucial period of incubation – practice and becoming – that cannot really be replicated online. This includes schools and performance space but also in Singapore’s context, the ‘arts-housing’ that is provided by the government to small-scale, up-and-coming artists through a competitive grant process. Artists can receive gallery, performance or rehearsal space for a set amount of time on a rotating basis. Even with authoritarian restrictions, these spaces have been crucial for arts development:There’s a short-term [subsidised] residency studio …for up to 12 months. And so that –allows for a rotating group of artists to come with an idea in mind, use it for whatever- we’ve had artists who were preparing for a major show, and say ‘my studio space, my existing studio space is a bit too tiny, because I’m prepping for this show, I need a larger studio for 3 months. (Arts Administrator, Singapore)Critical and provocative art, limited and restricted by place, is thus still intrinsically bound to it. Indeed, the restrictions on artistic place allow cyber-art to flourish; cyber-art can only flourish with a strong place- based anchor. Far from supplanting place-based art, the digital art-scape forms a complement; digital and place-based art forms combine to form new hybridities in which local context and global forces write and re-write each other in a series of place and ‘placeless’ negotiations. Conclusion The examples that have been presented in this paper paint a picture of a complex landscape where specific urban sites are crucial anchoring nodes in a critical art ecosystem, but much artistic disturbance actually occurs online and in immaterial forms. This may hint at the possibility that globally, urban sites themselves are no longer sufficient for critical art to flourish and reach its full potential, especially as such sites have increasingly fallen prey to austerity policies, increasingly corporate and / or philanthropic programming and curation, and the comparatively wider reach and ease of access that digital spaces offer.Electronic or digital space – ranging from e-mail to social media (Twitter, blogs, Facebook and many others) has opened a new frontier in which, “… material public spaces in the city are superseded by the fora of television, radio talk shows and computer bulletin boards” (Mitchell. 122). The possibility now emerges whether digital space may be even more crucial than material public spaces in terms of emancipatory or critical potential– especially in authoritarian contexts where public space / place comes with particular limits and restrictions on assembling, performance, and critical expression. These contexts range from Taksim Square, Istanbul to Tiananmen Square, Beijing – but indeed, traditional public place has been increasingly privatized and securitized across the Western-liberal world as well. Where art occurs in place it is often stripped of its critical potential or political messages, sanctioned or sponsored by corporate groups or sanitized by public sector authorities (Schuilenburg, 277).The Singapore case may be especially stark due to Singapore’s small size (and corresponding lack of visible public ‘places’); authoritarian restrictions and correspondingly (relatively) un-policed and un-censored cyberspace. But it is fair to say that at a time when Youtube creates instant celebrities and Facebook likes or Instagram followers indicate fame and (potential) fortune – it is time to re-think and re-conceptualise the relationship between place, art, and the place-based institutions (such as grant-funding bodies or philanthropic organizations, galleries, critics or dealers) that have often served as “gatekeepers” to the art-scape. This invites challenges to the way these agents operate and the decision making process of policy-makers in the arts and cultural realm.Mitchell (124) reminded that there has “never been a revolution conducted exclusively in electronic space; at least not yet.” But that was 20 years ago. Singapore may offer a glimpse, however, of what such a revolution might look like. This revolution is neither completely place bound nor completely digital; it is one in which the material and immaterial interplay and overlap in post-modern complexity. Each platform plays a role, and understanding the way that art operates both in place and in “placeless” forms is crucial in understanding where key transformations take place in both the production of critical art and the production of urban space.What Hartley (“The Politics of Pictures”) called the “space of citizenry” is not necessarily confined to a building, the city street or a public square (or even private spaces such as the home, the car, the office). Sharon Zukin likewise suggested that ultimately, a negotiation of a city’s digital sphere is crucial for current-day urban research, arguing that:Though I do not think that online communities have replaced face to face interaction, I do think it is important to understand the way web-based media contribute to our urban imaginary. The interactive nature of the dialogue, how each post feeds on the preceding ones and elicits more, these are expressions of both difference and consensus, and they represent partial steps toward an open public sphere. (27)Traditional gatekeepers such as the theatre director, the museum curator and the state or philanthropic arts funding body have not disappeared, though they must adapt to the new cyber-reality as artists have new avenues around these traditional checkpoints. Accordingly – “old” problems such as de-jure and de-facto censorship reappear in the cyber art-scape as well: take the example of the Singaporean satirical bloggers that have been sued by the government in 2013-2016 (such as the socio-political bloggers and satirists Roy Ngerng and Alex Au). No web-space is truly open.A further complication may be the corporate nature of sites such as Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, or Twitter: far from truly democratic platforms or “agoras” in the traditional sense, these are for-profit (massive) corporations – which a small theatre is not. Singapore’s place based authoritarianism may be multiplied in the corporate authoritarianism or “CEO activism” of tech titans like Mark Zuckerberg, who allow for diverse use of digital platforms and encourage open expression and unfettered communication – as long as it is on their terms, within company policies that are not always transparent.Perhaps the questions then really are not where ‘art’ begins and ends, or where a place starts or stops – but rather where authoritarianism, state and corporate power begin and end in the hyper-connected global cyber-scape? And, if these power structures are now stretched across space and time as Marxist theorists such as Massey or Merrifield claimed, then what is the future for critical art and its relationship to ‘place’?Despite these unanswered questions and invitations for further exploration, the Singapore case may hint at what this emerging geography of place and ‘placeless’ art resembles and how such a new world may evolve moving forward. ReferencesHartley, John. The Politics of Pictures: the Creation of the Public in the Age of Popular Media. Perth: Psychology Press, 1992.———. Communication, Media, and Cultural Studies: The Key Concepts. Oxford: Routledge, 2012. Kozinets, Robert. Netnography: Doing Ethnographic Research Online. New York: Sage, 2010. Krischer, Oliver. “Lateral Thinking: Artivist Networks in East Asia.” ArtAsia Pacific 77 (2012): 96-110. Liew, Kai Khiun. and Natalie Pang. “Neoliberal Visions, Post Capitalist Memories: Heritage Politics and the Counter-Mapping of Singapore’s City-Scape.” Ethnography 16.3 (2015): 331-351.Luger, Jason. “The Cultural Grassroots and the Authoritarian City: Spaces of Contestation in Singapore.” In T. Oakes and J. Wang, eds., Making Cultural Cities in Asia: Mobility, Assemblage, and the Politics of Aspirational Urbanism. London: Routledge, 2015: 204-218. ———. “Singaporean ‘Spaces of Hope?' Activist Geographies in the City-State.” City: Analysis of Urban Trends, Culture, Theory, Policy, Action 20.2 (2016): 186-203. Massey, Doreen. Space, Place and Gender. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995. Merrifield, Andy. The Politics of the Encounter: Urban Theory and Protest under Planetary Urbanization. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2013. Mitchell, Don. “The End of Public Space? People’s Park, Definitions of the Public, and Democracy.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 85.1 (1996): 108-133. Schuilenburg, Marc. The Securitization of Society: Crime, Risk and Social Order. New York: New York University Press, 2015. Shirky, Clay. Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations. New York: Penguin, 2008. Yue, Audrey. “Hawking in the Creative City: Rice Rhapsody, Sexuality and the Cultural Politics of New Asia in Singapore. Feminist Media Studies 7.4 (2007): 365-380. Zukin, Sharon. The Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places. London and New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.

Artikkel uurib Eesti teatrite repertuaari kujundavaid tegureid perioodil 1986–2006. Kuna sellesse ajajärku jääb Eesti iseseisvuse taastamine, toimusid olulised muutused ka Eesti teatrites, mis selgelt kajastuvad ka repertuaari kujundamises. Totalitaarriigi normeeringutest 1991. aastal vabanenud kultuuriorganisatsioonid pidid kohanema turumajanduse tingimustes toimiva ühiskonnaga. Samuti toimusid 21. saj alguses olulised muutused kunstide arengus: ühelt poolt kunstilise koodi komplitseerumine, teisalt kunsti kokkusulamine meelelahutustööstusega, samuti referentsgruppide areng ning kultuuri ühiskondliku positsiooni muutumine. Artikli teoreetiliseks aluseks on Hollandi kultuuriteoreetiku Hans van Maaneni teos „How to Study Art Worlds” (2009). The article examines the factors which shaped the repertoire of Estonian theatres from 1986–2006. Estonian society was during this period stepping from one social formation into another, from the era of the ESSR (Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic) to the epoch of the newly regained independence of the Estonian Republic. Important changes were under way in Estonian theatres as well, being clearly reflected in the repertoire development. Under the totalitarian regime, the theatre repertoire was naturally subjected to all-round ideological control in the equal forms of preliminary and repressive censorship. All items of the planned repertoire had to pass the joint preliminary censorship of the Ministry of Culture, Glavlit (General Directorate for the Protection of State Secrets in the Press and the Central Committee of the Estonian Communist Party); the finished production underwent a thorough scrutiny as well. With several of the more provocative producers, obtaining a permit to perform in front of the audience could be a long and multi-stage process because at each closed rehearsal the censors discovered new ideological “mistakes”. In the most extreme cases (Merle Karusoo’s student production “Full Rooms”, 1982), the production was not allowed on stage. In such a political period, it would have been unthinkable to use the form of devising theatre, which has by today become fairly common, where the preparation of a production does not start with the search for ways of interpretation of the written play, but the text to be performed will be ready (often, in collaboration with the actors) by the first night, and some parts of the text (or all of it) can be freely ad-libbed at the performances.In 1991, the cultural organisations of the independent Estonia had to change thoroughly their previous order of work. On the one hand – the censorship that had restricted creative work had been done away, and the paperwork required by the Ministry had lessened. In the first decade of the 21st century, the majority of Estonian theatres were reorganised into state foundations, which allowed them sovereignty in making their creative work-related decisions. On the other hand, the state financial support for theatres diminished considerably and the theatres were forced to increase their own earnings. This task was made even more complicated by the global developments in culture and economics. The postmodernist fragmentary view of the world “pushes” the theatre, which had become a cultural phenomenon of crucial importance during the period of the ESSR, into a more marginal position. The interest of especially the younger generation is rather focussed on other genres of art – film, music – and on all the genres that are closely related to the emergence of new media channels. As important is the widening of travel opportunities related to the opening of state borders, leading the Estonian theatre into a direct competition with the world theatre. In the local context, the theatre has to compete with all other cultural and entertainment institutions (cinemas, night clubs, sports clubs, other hobby clubs) for people’s free time. An important factor is also the burst of social activities in the second half of the 1980s and the highly emotional background of the (re)creation of the new state as well as the economic crisis of the early 1990s, which channelled the attention of people and society more on the topics of economic policies. The priorities seen in the repertoire of Estonian theatres at the end of the period under discussion (2001–2006) testify that equal stress was laid on the economic considerations (meeting the interests of potential target groups), new aesthetic pursuits, and on the wish to voice their opinion on Estonian social processes and to move synchronously with the ongoing processes in the world of theatre.We need to pay special attention to important changes in the development of the arts in the early 21st century on the complexity of artistic code, the primacy of conceptualism, the withdrawal of coherence and emergence of associativeness and fragmentariness. In the context of theatre development, we could primarily talk about the marginalisation of narrativity and clear message as well as the important changes regarding the aesthetics of directing, acting and theatre space. In some cases, these changes in the Estonian theatre may have been so abrupt (in order to achieve synchronicity and to join the paradigms of the Western European contemporary exploratory theatre) that a noticeable part of the audience could not relate to what the stage offered. In a longer perspective, the result of such a communication block may be that certain spectator groups would drift away from the theatre and in turn reducing the numbers of the audience, but also marginalising the social context of the theatre. As the first remedy, the theatres would increase the share of more entertaining repertoire, which can only partly be justified. In the second half of the 1990s, we can see another renaissance of Estonian original plays (Madis Kõiv, Andrus Kivirähk, Jaan Tätte), as well as the growing interest of the public in new interpretations of the works of the Estonian classics. The boom of summer productions refers on one hand to the fact that the theatre is becoming a part of the entertainment industry and internal tourism, but on the other hand, among the summer productions are several significant and artistically solid works that remain in the history of the Estonian theatre. The aesthetic development of the Estonian theatre moves together with its organisational changes. New, smaller and more mobile theatres emerge and prove to be sustainable, identifying with some smaller reference groups of the audience (Theatrum, Von Krahl). At the same time, Estonia has inherited from the former regime several theatre buildings with large halls seating 500–700 people. “Filling” these halls, especially in smaller cities (Tartu, Pärnu, Viljandi, Rakvere) proved to be a difficult task for the theatres in these cities.The present article is theoretically based on the book How to Study Art (2009) by the Dutch theorist Hans van Maanen, who sees the act of cultural communication in close functional relations fitting the creation, production, interpretation, communication, reception and the wider cultural and socio-economics of the work into a single integrated system. The notional lines of force, determining the resulting twelve subspaces, shape different socio-cultural processes and the birth process of a work of art starting from the moment of its emergence up to the possibilities for reshaping the reality. In the context of the theatre, this line could begin with the elementary preconditions for the emergence of creative inspiration (existence of the theatre tradition, theatre buildings, existence of professional actors and stage directors and potential audiences) and end with the complicated processes occurring in the sensory organs of the audience members.The main part of the article deals with the transposing of the stages, presented in Maanen’s discussion, onto the development of the repertoire politics (which can be treated as an independent subspace) of Estonian theatres during twenty years, and with identifying its strategic focal points: which levers (aesthetic, economic, political) have been prevalent in the choices made by theatres? Who (theatre administrators or other institutions) have been behind these choices? How much have these choices been influenced by the profile, location and ownership form of the theatre? How has the process of shaping the repertoire changed in twenty years?

Phillip Noyce is one of Australia’s most prominent film makers—a successful feature film director with both iconic Australian narratives and many a Hollywood blockbuster under his belt. Still, his beginnings were quite humble and far from his role today when he grew up in the midst of the counterculture of the late sixties. Millions of young people his age joined the various ‘movements’ of the day after experiences that changed their lives—mostly music but also drugs or fashion. The counterculture was a turbulent time in Sydney artistic circles as elsewhere. Everything looked possible, you simply had to “Do It!”—and Noyce did. He dived head-on into these times and with a voracious appetite for its many aspects—film, theatre, rallies, music, art and politics in general. In fact he often was the driving force behind such activities. Noyce described his personal epiphany occurring in 1968: A few months before I was due to graduate from high school, […] I saw a poster on a telegraph pole advertising American 'underground' movies. There was a mesmerising, beautiful blue-coloured drawing on the poster that I later discovered had been designed by an Australian filmmaker called David Perry. The word 'underground' conjured up all sorts of delights to an eighteen-year-old in the late Sixties: in an era of censorship it promised erotica, perhaps; in an era of drug-taking it promised some clandestine place where marijuana, or even something stronger, might be consumed; in an era of confrontation between conservative parents and their affluent post-war baby-boomer children, it promised a place where one could get together with other like-minded youth and plan to undermine the establishment, which at that time seemed to be the aim of just about everyone aged under 30. (Petzke 8) What the poster referred to was a new, highly different type of film. In the US these films were usually called “underground”. This term originates from film critic Manny Farber who used it in his 1957 essay Underground Films. Farber used the label for films whose directors today would be associated with independent and art house feature films. More directly, film historian Lewis Jacobs referred to experimental films when he used the words “film which for most of its life has led an underground existence” (8). The term is used interchangeably with New American Cinema. It was based on a New York group—the Film-Makers’ Co-operative—that started in 1960 with mostly low-budget filmmakers under the guidance of Jonas Mekas. When in 1962 the group was formally organised as a means for new, improved ways of distributing their works, experimental filmmakers were the dominant faction. They were filmmakers working in a more artistic vein, slightly influenced by the European Avant-garde of the 1920s and by attempts in the late 1940s and early 1950s. In film history, this era is also known as the Third Avant-garde. In their First Statement of the New American Cinema Group, the group drew connections to both the British Free Cinema and the French Nouvelle Vague. They also claimed that contemporary cinema was “morally corrupt, aesthetically obsolete, thematically superficial, temperamentally boring” (80). An all-encompassing definition of Underground Film never was available. Sheldon Renan lists some of the problems: There are underground films in which there is no movement and films in which there is nothing but movement. There are films about people and films about light. There are short, short underground films and long, long underground films. There are some that have been banned, and there is one that was nominated for an Academy Award. There are sexy films and sexless films, political films and poetical films, film epigrams and film epics … underground film is nothing less than an explosion of cinematic styles, forms and directions. (Renan 17) No wonder that propelled by frequent serious articles in the press—notably Jonas Mekas in the Village Voice—and regular screenings at other venues like the Film-makers’ Cinemathèque and the Gallery of Modern Art in New York, these films proved increasingly popular in the United States and almost immediately spread like bush fires around the world. So in early September 1968 Noyce joined a sold-out crowd at the Union Theatre in Sydney, watching 17 shorts assembled by Ubu Films, the premier experimental and underground film collective in 1960s Australia (Milesago). And on that night his whole attitude to art, his whole attitude to movies—in fact, his whole life—changed. He remembered: I left the cinema that night thinking, "I’m gonna make movies like that. I can do it." Here was a style of cinema that seemed to speak to me. It was immediate, it was direct, it was personal, and it wasn’t industrial. It was executed for personal expression, not for profit; it was individual as opposed to corporate, it was stylistically free; it seemed to require very little expenditure, innovation being the key note. It was a completely un-Hollywood-like aesthetic; it was operating on a visceral level that was often non-linear and was akin to the psychedelic images that were in vogue at the time—whether it was in music, in art or just in the patterns on your multi-coloured shirt. These movies spoke to me. (Petzke 9) Generally speaking, therefore, these films were the equivalent of counterculture in the area of film. Theodore Roszak railed against “technocracy” and underground films were just the opposite, often almost do-it-yourself in production and distribution. They were objecting to middle-class culture and values. And like counterculture they aimed at doing away with repression and to depict a utopian lifestyle feeling at ease with each imaginable form of liberality (Doggett 469). Underground films transgressed any Hollywood rule and convention in content, form and technique. Mobile hand-held cameras, narrow-gauge or outright home movies, shaky and wobbly, rapid cutting, out of focus, non-narrative, disparate continuity—you name it. This type of experimental film was used to express the individual consciousness of the “maker”—no longer calling themselves directors—a cinematic equivalent of the first person in literature. Just as in modern visual art, both the material and the process of making became part of these artworks. Music often was a dominant factor, particularly Eastern influences or the new Beat Music that was virtually non-existent in feature films. Drug experiences were reflected in imagery and structure. Some of the first comings-out of gay men can be found as well as films that were shown at the appropriately named “Wet Dreams Festival” in Amsterdam. Noyce commented: I worked out that the leading lights in this Ubu Films seemed to be three guys — Aggy Read, Albie Thoms and David Perry […They] all had beards and […] seemed to come from the basement of a terrace house in Redfern. Watching those movies that night, picking up all this information, I was immediately seized by three great ambitions. First of all, I wanted to grow a beard; secondly, I wanted to live in a terrace house in the inner city; and thirdly, I wanted to be a filmmaker. (Ubu Films) Noyce soon discovered there were a lot of people like him who wanted to make short films for personal expression, but also as a form of nationalism. They wanted to make Australian movies. Noyce remembered: “Aggy, Albie and David encouraged everyone to go and make a film for themselves” (Petzke 11). This was easy enough to do as these films—not only in Australia—were often made for next to nothing and did not require any prior education or training. And the target audience group existed in a subculture of people willing to pay money even for extreme entertainment as long as it was advertised in an appealing way—which meant: in the way of the rampaging Zeitgeist. Noyce—smitten by the virus—would from then on regularly attend the weekly meetings organised by the young filmmakers. And in line with Jerry Rubin’s contemporary adage “Do it!” he would immediately embark on a string of films with enthusiasm and determination—qualities soon to become his trademark. All his films were experimental in nature, shot on 16mm and were so well received that Albie Thoms was convinced that Noyce had a great career ahead of him as an experimental filmmaker. Truly alternative was Noyce’s way to finally finance Better to Reign in Hell, his first film, made at age 18 and with a total budget of $600. Noyce said on reflection: I had approached some friends and told them that if they invested in my film, they could have an acting role. Unfortunately, the guy whose dad had the most money — he was a doctor’s son — was also maybe the worst actor that was ever put in front of a camera. But he had invested four hundred dollars, so I had to give him the lead. (Petzke 13) The title was taken from Milton’s poem Paradise Lost (“better to reign in hell than serve in heaven”). It was a film very much inspired by the images, montage and narrative techniques of the underground movies watched at Ubu. Essentially the film is about a young man’s obsession with a woman he sees repeatedly in advertising and the hallucinogenic dreams he has about her. Despite its later reputation, the film was relatively mundane. Being shot in black and white, it lacks the typical psychedelic ingredients of the time and is more reminiscent of the surrealistic precursors to underground film. Some contempt for the prevailing consumer society is thrown in for good measure. In the film, “A youth is persecuted by the haunting reappearance of a girl’s image in various commercial outlets. He finds escape from this commercial brainwashing only in his own confused sexual hallucinations” (Sydney Filmmakers Co-operative). But despite this advertising, so convincingly capturing the “hint! hint!” mood of the time, Noyce’s first film isn’t really outstanding even in terms of experimental film. Noyce continued to make short experimental films. There was not even the pretence of a story in any of them. He was just experimenting with his gear and finding his own way to use the techniques of the underground cinema. Megan was made at Sydney University Law School to be projected as part of the law students’ revue. It was a three-minute silent film that featured a woman called Megan, who he had a crush on. Intersection was 2 minutes 44 seconds in length and shot in the middle of a five-way or four-way intersection in North Sydney. The camera was walked into the intersection and spun around in a continuous circle from the beginning of the roll of film to the end. It was an experiment with disorientation and possibly a comment about urban development. Memories was a seven-minute short in colour about childhood and the bush, accompanied by a smell-track created in the cinema by burning eucalyptus leaves. Sun lasted 90 seconds in colour and examined the pulsating winter sun by way of 100 single frame shots. And finally, Home was a one-and-a-half-minute single frame camera exploration of the filmmaker’s home, inside and out, including its inhabitants and pets. As a true experimental filmmaker, Noyce had a deep interest in technical aspects. It was recommended that Sun “be projected through a special five image lens”, Memories and Intersection with “an anamorphic lens” (Sydney Filmmakers Co-operative). The double projection for Better to Reign in Hell and the two screens required for Good Afternoon, as well as the addition of the smell of burning leaves in Memories, were inroads into the subgenre of so-called Expanded Cinema. As filmmaking in those days was not an isolated enterprise but an integral part of the all-encompassing Counterculture, Noyce followed suit and became more and more involved and politiced. He started becoming a driving force of the movement. Besides selling Ubu News, he organised film screenings. He also wrote film articles for both Honi Soit and National U, the Sydney University and Canberra University newspapers—articles more opinionated than sophisticated. He was also involved in Ubu’s Underground Festival held in August and in other activities of the time, particularly anti-war protests. When Ubu Films went out of business after the lack of audience interest in Thoms’s long Marinetti film in 1969, Aggy Read suggested that Ubu be reinvented as a co-operative for tax reasons and because they might benefit from their stock of 250 Australian and foreign films. On 28 May 1970 the reinvention began at the first general meeting of the Sydney Filmmakers Cooperative where Noyce volunteered and was elected their part-time manager. He transferred the 250 prints to his parents’ home in Wahroonga where he was still living he said he “used to sit there day after day just screening those movies for myself” (Petzke 18). The Sydney University Film Society screened feature films to students at lunchtime. Noyce soon discovered they had money nobody was spending and equipment no one was using, which seemed to be made especially for him. In the university cinema he would often screen his own and other shorts from the Co-op’s library. The entry fee was 50 cents. He remembered: “If I handed out the leaflets in the morning, particularly concentrating on the fact that these films were uncensored and a little risqué, then usually there would be 600 people in the cinema […] One or two screenings per semester would usually give me all the pocket money I needed to live” (Petzke 19). Libertine and risqué films were obviously popular as they were hard to come by. Noyce said: We suffered the worst censorship of almost any Western country in the world, even worse than South Africa. Books would be seized by customs officers at the airports and when ships docked. Customs would be looking for Lady Chatterley’s Lover. We were very censored in literature and films and plays, and my film [Better to Reign in Hell] was banned from export. I tried to send it to a film festival in Holland and it was denied an export permit, but because it had been shot in Australia, until someone in the audience complained it could still be screened locally. (Castaway's Choice) No wonder clashes with the law happened frequently and were worn like medals of honour in those days of fighting the system, proving that one was fighting in the front line against the conservative values of law and order. Noyce encountered three brushes with the law. The first occurred when selling Ubu Films’ alternative culture newspaper Ubu News, Australia’s first underground newspaper (Milesago). One of the issues contained an advertisement—a small drawing—for Levi’s jeans, showing a guy trying to put his Levis on his head, so that his penis was showing. That was judged by the police to be obscene. Noyce was found guilty and given a suspended sentence for publishing an indecent publication. There had been another incident including Phil’s Pill, his own publication of six or eight issues. After one day reprinting some erotic poems from The Penguin Collection of Erotic Poetry he was found guilty and released on a good behaviour bond without a conviction being recorded. For the sake of historical truth it should be remembered, though, that provocation was a genuine part of the game. How else could one seriously advertise Better to Reign in Hell as “a sex-fantasy film which includes a daring rape scene”—and be surprised when the police came in after screening this “pornographic film” (Stratton 202) at the Newcastle Law Students Ball? The Newcastle incident also throws light on the fact that Noyce organised screenings wherever possible, constantly driving prints and projectors around in his Mini Minor. Likewise, he is remembered as having been extremely helpful in trying to encourage other people with their own ideas—anyone could make films and could make them about anything they liked. He helped Jan Chapman, a fellow student who became his (first) wife in December 1971, to shoot and edit Just a Little Note, a documentary about a moratorium march and a guerrilla theatre group run by their friend George Shevtsov. Noyce also helped on I Happened to Be a Girl, a documentary about four women, friends of Chapman. There is no denying that being a filmmaker was a hobby, a full-time job and an obsessive religion for Noyce. He was on the organising committee of the First Australian Filmmakers’ Festival in August 1971. He performed in the agit-prop acting troupe run by George Shevtsov (later depicted in Renegades) that featured prominently at one of Sydney’s rock festival that year. In the latter part of 1971 and early 1972 he worked on Good Afternoon, a documentary about the Combined Universities’ Aquarius Arts Festival in Canberra, which arguably was the first major manifestation of counterculture in Australia. For this the Aquarius Foundation—the cultural arm of the Australian Union of Students—had contracted him. This became a two-screen movie à la Woodstock. Together with Thoms, Read and Ian Stocks, in 1972 he participated in cataloguing the complete set of films in distribution by the Co-op (see Sydney Filmmakers Cooperative). As can be seen, Noyce was at home in many manifestations of the Sydney counterculture. His own films had slowly become more politicised and bent towards documentary. He even started a newsreel that he used to screen at the Filmmakers’ Cooperative Cinema with a live commentary. One in 1971, Springboks Protest, was about the demonstrations at the Sydney Cricket Ground against the South African rugby tour. There were more but Noyce doesn’t remember them and no prints seem to have survived. Renegades was a diary film; a combination of poetic images and reportage on the street demonstrations. Noyce’s experimental films had been met with interest in the—limited—audience and among publications. His more political films and particularly Good Afternoon, however, reached out to a much wider audience, now including even the undogmatic left and hard-core documentarists of the times. In exchange, and for the first time, there were opposing reactions—but as always a great discussion at the Filmmakers’ Cinema, the main venue for independent productions. This cinema began with those initial screenings at Sydney University in the union room next to the Union Theatre. But once the Experimental Film Fund started operating in 1970, more and more films were submitted for the screenings and consequently a new venue was needed. Albie Thoms started a forum in the Yellow House in Kings Cross in May 1970. Next came—at least briefly—a restaurant in Glebe before the Co-op took over a space on the top floor of the socialist Third World Bookshop in Goulburn Street that was a firetrap. Bob Gould, the owner, was convinced that by first passing through his bookshop the audience would buy his books on the way upstairs. Sundays for him were otherwise dead from a commercial point of view. Noyce recollected that: The audience at this Filmmakers’ Cinema were mightily enthusiastic about seeing themselves up on the screen. And there was always a great discussion. So, generally the screenings were a huge success, with many full houses. The screenings grew from once a week, to three times on Sunday, to all weekend, and then seven days a week at several locations. One program could play in three different illegal cinemas around the city. (Petzke 26) A filmmakers’ cinema also started in Melbourne and the groups of filmmakers would visit each other and screen their respective films. But especially after the election of the Whitlam Labor government in December 1972 there was a shift in interest from risqué underground films to the concept of Australian Cinema. The audience started coming now for a dose of Australian culture. Funding of all kind was soon freely available and with such a fund the film co-op was able to set up a really good licensed cinema in St. Peters Lane in Darlinghurst, running seven days a week. But, Noyce said, “the move to St. Peters Lane was sort of the end of an era, because initially the cinema was self-funded, but once it became government sponsored everything changed” (Petzke 29). With money now readily available, egotism set in and the prevailing “we”-feeling rather quickly dissipated. But by the time of this move and the resulting developments, everything for Noyce had already changed again. He had been accepted into the first intake of the Interim Australian Film & TV School, another one of the nation-awareness-building projects of the Whitlam government. He was on his “long march through the institutions”—as this was frequently called throughout Europe—that would bring him to documentaries, TV and eventually even Hollywood (and return). Noyce didn’t linger once the alternative scene started fading away. Everything those few, wild years in the counterculture had taught him also put him right on track to become one of the major players in Hollywood. He never looked back—but he remembers fondly…References Castaway’s Choice. Radio broadcast by KCRW. 1990. Doggett, Peter. There’s a Riot Going On: Revolutionaries, Rock Stars and the Rise and Fall of ’60s Counter-Culture. Edinburgh: Canongate, 2007. Farber, Manny. “Underground Films.” Negative Space: Manny Farber on the Movies. Ed. Manny Farber. New York: Da Capo, 1998. 12–24. Jacobs, Lewis. “Morning for the Experimental Film”. Film Culture 19 (1959): 6–9. Milesago. “Ubu Films”. n.d. 26 Nov. 2014 ‹http://www.milesago.com/visual/ubu.htm›. New American Cinema Group. “First Statement of the New American Cinema Group.” Film Culture Reader. Ed. P. Adams Sitney. New York: Praeger, 1970. 73–75. Petzke, Ingo. Phillip Noyce: Backroads to Hollywood. Sydney: Pan McMillan, 2004. Renan, Sheldon. The Underground Film: An Introduction to Its Development in America. London: Studio Vista, 1968. Roszak, Theodore. The Making of Counter Culture. New York: Anchor, 1969. Stratton, David. The Last New Wave: The Australian Film Revival. Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1980. Sydney Filmmakers Co-operative. Film Catalogue. Sydney: Sydney Filmmakers Co-operative, 1972. Ubu Films. Unreleased five-minute video for the promotion of Mudie, Peter. Ubu Films: Sydney Underground Movies 1965-1970. Sydney: UNSW Press, 1997.

The island state of Singapore in Southeast Asia has a history of film censorship, one of several techniques in state repression it uses as a furtherance of state power. Yet, Singapore's success also depends on being open to global information and cultural flows. Drawing from queer theory, this thesis examines a recent case study of film censorship in Singapore, the 2010 film, The Kids are All Right. The thesis examines laws and regulations in Singapore to understand how films are interpellated into objects of moral danger, and also the reaction of some progressive Singaporeans to the censorship. The thesis also discusses the contradictions between state censorship and the recognition of its circumvention through copyright infringement and piracy. Finally, the thesis makes some suggestions about steps that can be taken to resist against film censorship, as well as directions for future research.

1 Abstract The thesis focuses on the involvement of Jiří Mařánek in the management of the Film Department of the Ministry of Information during the years 1945 - 1948. His ministe- rial engagement is related to the contemporary strengthening of the importance of literary preparation of the film and to the associated state dramaturgical supervision. Jiří Mařánek belongs to the circle of writers connected on one hand through their affiliation with the interwar avant-garde movements, on the other hand by their postwar involve- ment in the power apparatus that ended by the political and economic changes in the late forties and fifties. His professional fate speaks about the changes of cultural policy of the state, about the institutional development of the cinema and about the relations between literary and cinematic arts. It is a testimonial of what a successful professional career meant for a man of letters and what relationship it had to the cinema. We follow therefore a relatively brief but breakthrough episode of a writer and retired officer in the position of the Ministerial Counsellor, and we try to place its course and causes into a complex network of historical and social contexts and personal motivation. Focusing on this personality unburdened neither by a historical uniqueness, fundamental role of...

Soviet censors were also poorly equipped to guide filmmakers. Censorship was primarily carried out by the industry itself, which created conflicts of interest and contributed to risk aversion. When industry self-censorship proved unsuccessful, Stalin and the Central Committee apparatus intervened. Stalin’s involvement and party censorship, the outcome of which was hard to predict, introduced extreme uncertainty and lack of responsibility to the already compromised self-censorship, making it only less productive. It was not the strength of censorship, but its weaknesses that made it impossible for Soviet cinema to properly function. While industry censors multiplied, film production slowed.

This chapter details the circumstances surrounding the banning of Tan Pin Pin’s documentary To Singapore, with Love. Shot in Thailand, Malaysia and the United Kingdom, the film is an intimate portrait of nine political exiles who left Singapore during the 1960s and 1970s due to their involvement in alleged Communist struggles. The government’s decision to ban the film reveals what is at stake in this specific act of censorship. The chapter also touches on the broader issue of censorship in relation to Singapore’s promotion of itself as a global creative city. While the island state promotes and encourages creative freedom, particularly when it involves international collaboration, it also seeks to considerably restrict freedom, especially among its own citizens.

This chapter looks at the MMORPG market, the impact of prolonged exposure to violent game content on children and reviews the current regulatory measures in Singapore. Complementary strategies, apart from legislation and censorship, empower all stakeholders to manage the risks while promoting the growth of the digital game industry in Singapore are recommended. It is hoped that the range of strategies will adequately ensure that children are protected while they develop the skills and capacity to make responsible choices. With the trend moving towards online distribution of game software, increasing household broadband access to the Internet and increasing connectivity via mobile devices, the extent and frequency with which the young are accessing and engaging with violent game content online in MMORPGs needs urgent attention from the authorities and society at large. Regulatory measures based on the film censorship model should be re-considered to address business models that leverage the ubiquitous outreach afforded by the Internet. The game industry, parents, and the society at large should be more participative in influencing the direction for game content development.