NCAC recently fielded a plea for help from a Boston University student filmmaker, at the College of Communication, whose film Wake Up had been removed from regular class consideration and critique for reasons which depended very much on point of view. The student thought it was art. The faculty called it pornography. What was not in dispute was that the [...]
Violence against those who create and disseminate controversial words and images is not new. But for the last couple of centuries, commitment to free speech has trumped fear of violence in Western liberal democracies. As late as 1989, Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses continued to be published and read in the face of a fatwa issued against its author and in [...]
LOS ANGELES TIMES Friday, October 17, 1997 The first round of papers has been filed in a federal appeals court in San Francisco challenging the constitutionality of the Child Pornography Prevention Act of 1996. At the same time, the new movie version of Vladimir Nabokov's book Lolita, starring Jeremy Irons, is opening all over Europe, even though it is not [...]