Censorship

State control over what a film is allowed to contain, be called, and reach.

Under martial law it operated at three points rather than one. Before production, because scripts had to be submitted and approved before shooting. During release, because a board could bar a film outright. And at the border, because films could be blocked from export, which is how a Philippine film was kept out of the Berlinale.

The wording is worth knowing by heart, because it came back. An executive order in 1983 gave the board the power to bar any film considered subversive in content or as undermining faith in the government. In 2024 the classification board gave an X rating to a documentary citing concern that it would undermine the faith and confidence of the people in their government. Same sentence, forty-one years apart.

Source: The martial-law legal chain is EO 585 (1980), EO 745 (1981) and EO 868 (1983), summarised with the quoted language at MTRCB, Wikipedia. The script-approval requirement is in the NCCA’s own history of Philippine cinema, summarised free here. The 2024 recurrence is the Alipato at Muog case, handled with its full timeline in Lesson 3.7. The scholarly account of the era’s censorship by a Filipino critic who lived through it is Joel David’s free “A Second Golden Age”.

First used in: 3.4 · The golden age a dictatorship paid for