By what right or qualification can one group of people decide what their fellow citizens may or may not see at the movies? Why do the images that supposedly injure one group of people leave another unaffected? 

In this special talk Professor William Mazzarella spoke about these persistent questions vis-à-vis the longer history of film censorship in India, and illustrated how a set of colonial debates around the force and meaning of mass mediated images continues to animate present day controversies over the power, promise and danger of film.