Paradise Lost: Censorship and Hypocrisy Essay

I love movies. I especially enjoy those films with an artistic, literary quality that is timeless and classical. In my experience, Italian movies seldom rat to evoke such feelings in me, and Cinema Paradiso was no disappointment. This heartwarming invention ab extinct a little(a) boys love juncture with movies, and his subsequent coming-of-age in the repressive environment of ecclesiastical censorship and prevarication stirred great emotion in me, as I anticipate it would. The young Toto made me feel his awe as he go overk to earn the forbidden film images hidden from him by his friend Alfredo at the behest of the townshipship non-Christian priest.The issue of censorship ran deep through forth the film. I conceptualise censorship can actually provide a valid break away in a community in some circumstances and situations, such as the protection of children from harmful imagery, literature or speech. Pornography, for example, can and should accept its availability limit ed only to consenting adults. Falsely holding oneself out to be someone else, fraud, is also surely not a protected form of free speech and should be censored.As a unswerving civil libertarian, I have always believed that communities should set their own standards on censorship as much as possible. However as Rosenblatt (2002) points out in his persuasive essay about Cinema Paradiso, without the neutral and butt oversight of outsiders such as the United States Supreme Court change surface well-intentioned censorship can become repressive. Even in the movie, little Totos friend Alfredo felt that the local priests strictures were repressive. He told Toto, You leave the village or you will never find your life in so narrow-minded a place. The priests attempts to protect the town from movies love scenes were presented in a comical compositionner in the film, and certainly they were ridiculous, but not only for the way the scenes were produced. The censorship struck me as hypocri tical and nonsensical if viewed as necessary to protect the morality of the community. For example, precise early in the film we see young Toto stealing peeks into Alfredos projection booth. The boy sees many of the very scenes he is not supposed(p) to be seeing. Later, he views by candlelight some of the frames the censor/priest demanded Alfredo remove from the films.But Toto does this in full view of his mother who seems more(prenominal) concerned with the fire hazard Toto creates than in his viewing of forbidden imagery. distinctly the priests attempts to protect Toto from the sordid scenes were ineffective. In at least(prenominal) one place in Cinema Paradiso, the omitted kiss scene was followed direct by violent slapstick comedy. The teacher at Totos prepare severely beat and emotionally handle a young man named Boccia because he was poor at math. Totos mother physically abused Toto when she discovered he had spent the milk money on movies.In both cases, it seemed that no one had any problem with physical violence, fifty-fifty against children. Frequently in the movie several men in the reference laughed and jeered at the scatty love scenes in the movies they were watching, knowing exactly what was missing from the film. It struck me as hypocritical that a community would see flout to strike scenes of love kissing from movies (even though everyone knew exactly what was organism struck) succession having no problem with actual physical violence.Lastly, I found it hypocritical that this towns people would publicly vilify a family for being nominally Stalinist or Communist while ignoring the actual Stalin-esque repression in their midst. The scene in which the people wanted very much to see the movie playing at the Cinema Paradiso, but were turned away, was a good example of this. The filmmakers clearly wanted to portray the inappropriateness of the towns hypocritical censorship and repression because they gave us such powerfully emblematical clues.As a result of Alfredos defiant act of intercommunicate the movie into the street for the people, he inadvertently started a fire that burned-over down the old theater and cost him his sight. The man who defied the censorship of the town, signized by the refusal of the cinemas owners to allow people in the street to see the film, and who provided them the vision of the movie (and Totos vision of becoming a filmmaker) bemused his vision. And his vision he lost in a fire, an intense symbol of purging, repression, or censorship.