The link to Wise Kwai’s Thai Film Journal:
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/vine/journal_view.php?journalid=100000335&entryid=453506&view=public
The link to the article in Time Magazine:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1670261,00.html
An excerpt of this article:
“In the opposite corner is Ladda Tangsupachai, 58, head of the Cultural Surveillance Department at the Ministry of Culture and a prime mover behind the legislation. Her department already scrutinizes television shows, magazines, Internet cafes and schoolgirl fashions; they are keen to take on movies. "Uneducated" is the term Ladda uses to describe Thai filmgoers. "They're not intellectuals — that's why we need ratings," she says.
Film-industry folk support the idea of classifying movies, provided they have a voice in the process. But many believe that simply transferring the regulatory role from the police to the Ministry of Culture is a jump cut from the frying pan into the fire, especially in the postcoup climate, when political and social conservatism are on the rise. Ladda counters that the audience is on her side when it comes to choosing a flick. "Nobody goes to see films by Apichatpong," she says. "Thai people want to see comedy. We like a laugh." “
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--I just browsed through a book called CAVELL ON FILM and found an interesting passage written by John Stuart Mill quoted in this book. He seemed to be an interesting philosopher. I have no knowledge about John Stuart Mill, so I don’t say I agree with his thinking. But I think some of his writing is very interesting.
John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) wrote a book called ON LIBERTY (1869), which you can read from:
http://www.bartleby.com/130/
Here are some excerpts from ON LIBERTY by John Stuart Mill:
1.” But the strongest of all the arguments against the interference of the public with purely personal conduct, is that when it does interfere, the odds are that it interferes wrongly, and in the wrong place. On questions of social morality, of duty to others, the opinion of the public, that is, of an overruling majority, though often wrong, is likely to be still oftener right; because on such questions they are only required to judge of their own interests; of the manner in which some mode of conduct, if allowed to be practised, would affect themselves. But the opinion of a similar majority, imposed as a law on the minority, on questions of self-regarding conduct, is quite as likely to be wrong as right; for in these cases public opinion means, at the best, some people's opinion of what is good or bad for other people; while very often it does not even mean that; the public, with the most perfect indifference, passing over the pleasure or convenience of those whose conduct they censure, and considering only their own preference. There are many who consider as an injury to themselves any conduct which they have a distaste for, and resent it as an outrage to their feelings; as a religious bigot, when charged with disregarding the religious feelings of others, has been known to retort that they disregard his feelings, by persisting in their abominable worship or creed. But there is no parity between the feeling of a person for his own opinion, and the feeling of another who is offended at his holding it; no more than between the desire of a thief to take a purse, and the desire of the right owner to keep it. And a person's taste is as much his own peculiar concern as his opinion or his purse. It is easy for any one to imagine an ideal public, which leaves the freedom and choice of individuals in all uncertain matters undisturbed, and only requires them to abstain from modes of conduct which universal experience has condemned. But where has there been seen a public which set any such limit to its censorship? or when does the public trouble itself about universal experience? In its interferences with personal conduct it is seldom thinking of anything but the enormity of acting or feeling differently from itself; and this standard of judgment, thinly disguised, is held up to mankind as the dictate of religion and philosophy, by nine-tenths of all moralists and speculative writers. These teach that things are right because they are right; because we feel them to be so. They tell us to search in our own minds and hearts for laws of conduct binding on ourselves and on all others. What can the poor public do but apply these instructions, and make their own personal feelings of good and evil, if they are tolerably unanimous in them, obligatory on all the world?”
2.” In our times, from the highest class of society down to the lowest, every one lives as under the eye of a hostile and dreaded censorship. Not only in what concerns others, but in what concerns only themselves, the individual or the family do not ask themselves—what do I prefer? or, what would suit my character and disposition? or, what would allow the best and highest in me to have fair play, and enable it to grow and thrive? They ask themselves, what is suitable to my position? what is usually done by persons of my station and pecuniary circumstances? or (worse still) what is usually done by persons of a station and circumstances superior to mine? I do not mean that they choose what is customary, in preference to what suits their own inclination. It does not occur to them to have any inclination, except for what is customary. Thus the mind itself is bowed to the yoke: even in what people do for pleasure, conformity is the first thing thought of; they like in crowds; they exercise choice only among things commonly done: peculiarity of taste, eccentricity of conduct, are shunned equally with crimes: until by dint of not following their own nature, they have no nature to follow: their human capacities are withered and starved: they become incapable of any strong wishes or native pleasures, and are generally without either opinions or feelings of home growth, or properly their own. Now is this, or is it not, the desirable condition of human nature?”
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