`The Piano'

I refer to the recent correspondence that has been conducted in your newspaper over the issue of film censorship and, in particular, Mr. John Thomas's letter in The Jakarta Post, June 29, 1994, concerning The Piano.

Mr. Thomas misses the point -- the question is not whether The Piano is good, bad, intellectual or otherwise. It is whether people have the right to make up their own mind about it. He has seen it and thinks it "banal and naive." Others disagree. But the majority of people in Indonesia will not be able to exercise their own judgment.

Perhaps Mr. Thomas considers himself to be a better judge of quality than the rest of us. I am not so sure. In any event, viewing a film, deciding one does not like or agree with its content, and then congratulating the censors for preventing others from seeing it so that they might form their own opinions strikes me as a considerable act of intellectual snobbery and hypocrisy.

GILES WARD

Jakarta