For my library assignment, I was tasked with picking two books on something that interests me and that somewhat relates to the Forbidden Texts theme. It was a little challenging, but I finally settled on controversial cinema and the use of violence in movies. I don’t think that topic exactly counts, but we are going to be watching some controversial movies throughout the semester and some of these movies were based off of books that were forbidden/controversial. The first book that I chose was Controversial Cinema by Kendall R Philipps. This book talks about what makes certain movies controversial, such as the violence, sex and language used in these movies. It mentions censorship and how certain movies get censored by governments of various countries and what makes these movies get the censorship. The second book that I was able to pick out from the first book’s bibliography was titled Violence and American Cinema by J. David Slocum. This book goes more into detail on the violence shown in movies starting from the golden age of cinema, so about the 1920s to the 2000s and how much the violence has changed. As the decades passed by, violence in movies started to get more extreme and graphic in nature and many people were not pleased by this. All of this relates to controversial cinema because violence is one of the major factors that determined whether certain movies were controversial. Take A Clockwork Orange, directed by Stanley Kubrick. The film was released in 1971 and it received an X rating upon release for all of the violence, sexual and non-sexual. Nowadays the violence in the movie isn’t that bad compared to what we have today, although the assault scenes are still pretty bad. The movie has been looked over and received an R rating now. The film Robocop, released in 1987 had to be edited 10 times to receive the R rating because of all the extreme violence in it. Movies have been controversial for many different reasons and finding out why they were banned was quite the read for me.