Wednesday 14th May 2025, 3.30pm
Screen 2, Queens Film Theatre
The event will include a wine reception in the foyer of the QFT
All welcome! 

Abstracts: 

Boycotts, Famines & Prosecutions: Censoring Films in the Irish Free State, 1924.
James Montgomery faced significant opposition in the year following his appointment in November 1923 as the Irish Free State's first national film censor. His appointment followed the Censorship of Films Act (1923), one the earliest pieces of legislation passed by the first Free State Dáil. This act’s surprising priority indicates the extent to which the new government saw regulation of cinema as embodying a fundamental expression of the Catholic nationalist identity of an emergent independent state. While the legislation was passed with little opposition in the Dáil, Montgomery faced not just the mundane tasks of establishing the Office of the Film Censor (FCO) but the active hostility of film distributors, who had been accustomed to a less efficient, laxer censorship regime. Newspaper reports and FCO documents offer insights into Montgomery’s stormy first year in office.

‘Nothing but chaos’: inconsistency, idiosyncrasy and local film censorship. 
The two-tier system of British film censorship permits local areas to undertake their own censorship of cinema. While variously termed by those charged with enforcing it as ‘chaos’, ‘inadequate’ and ‘anomalous’ the system nevertheless prevails. This paper argues that understanding local film censorship requires a shift from a focus on decades, locations and contentious films to recognise how local interventions in film culture varied according to period, location, and political and social currents. Using archival material from local councils, it demonstrates how action on From the Manger to the Cross; Street Corner; Should Parents Tell; The Wizard of Oz, and Snow White and the Seven Dwarves challenges the characterisation of censorship as either Kevin Rockett’s (2004) ‘blunt instrument’ or Annette Kuhn’s (1998) ‘potentially productive process’ and instead reveals complex, locally-inflected dialogue around popular taste, exhibition and the cinema. 

Bios:
Denis Condon lectures on cinema at Maynooth University, Ireland.  His publications include Early Irish Cinema, 1895-1921 (2008) and as co-editor Music and Visual Cultures: Threshold, Intermediality, Synchresis (2021). He is currently working on the book The Explosion of Images: Ireland’s First Cinemas and the collaborative website Ireland’s First Cinemas.

Sian Barber is a Reader in Film Studies at Queen’s University Belfast with expertise in British film history, censorship and controversy. Her fourth monograph Beyond the BBFC: local and regional film censorship in the UK was published by Manchester University Press in April 2025. She has also published in the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, Media History, Historical Research and the Journal of British Cinema and Television.