Abstract
With what we can call an extended concept of film censorship, this thesis investigates how different sections of the Norwegian film business practise censorship. How do the film distributors and the local cinema-bosses in the Norwegian municipal cinema system, practice film censorship? Is it possible that different age limits in fact reduce freedom of expression? Pedersen uses three films as case-studies to illustrate which censoring effects different practises, in different instances, have.
With Michel Foucault's analysis of power as a starting point, she argues that the film medium is woven in a web of power, where the iam is to control the moving images and, not to forget, their public. Why do we feel this need to control, then? Maybe it's because we presume that the picyures have some sort of power to control us? In his book «Iconology» (Chicago, 1988),W. J.T. Mitchell argues that in Western culture, our attitudes towards the pictures in general, are dominated by idolatry disguised under a cover of ritual iconoclasm. This means, in short, that we have a tendance to see the pictorial sign as an equivalent to, and not a sign for, what it represents. Pedersen uses his theories in relation to the film medium, as a possible explanation for why we still, after over a hundred years with cinema, seems to fear the medium, and expresses a need for cinema censorship.