Censorship

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Censorship

AMERICAN FILM CENSORSHIP
BRITISH FILM CENSORSHIP
PRESSURE GROUPS AND THE MEDIA
EXHIBITION AND DISTRIBUTION
SEX AND VIOLENCE
FURTHER READING

Among the most debated aspects of film culture are issues of censorship and control. Many controversial films have been cut or banned by censorship bodies or local or state authorities. Yet it would be wrong to see film censorship as largely the removal and prohibition of whole movies or specific images. Film censors tend to see themselves as classifiers, administering certificates that aim to control the type of audience that sees a particular movie. If they lack such a certificate, some films' reception is restricted; studios or distributors can also act to prohibit a film by withdrawing it from circulation for contractual, legal, or political reasons. The controlling of the film image is most noticeable after production, but a significant amount of the regulation occurs during production moreover in the preproduction stages. In the classical period of film production (between the 1930s and the 1960s), films were often censored during the script stage, with studios removing content that could potentially run afoul of the censors. Studios were keen to comply with censors to avoid the expense of making cuts as well as delays in the film's release.

It is not just the content of film that is regulated, with all areas of film culture coming under scrutiny. This ranges from the granting of an exhibition license to permitted modes of promotion, publicity, and merchandising (the content and nature of posters and trailers and the suitability of associated toys). The pervasiveness of film culture also means that movies are more than just cinema screenings; the censorship and regulation of film is present in other areas of exhibition, where a particular production can experience an alternative reception. For instance, a film may be cut for language or scenes of an unsuitable nature when it is shown as in-flight entertainment, made available for DVD home rental, or broadcast later on television. In the United Kingdom, editing swear words for television is known as "funstering," allegedly after British television's first screening of Lethal Weapon (1987), when "Let's get the fuckers!" was replaced with "Let's get the funsters!" In terms of film content, though, the more common concerns are screen violence, sex, and sex crime.

AMERICAN FILM CENSORSHIP

A system of film censorship existed in the United States as early as 1907, when it was introduced in Chicago under pressure from social reformers. The rapid emergence of the nickelodeons gave rise to concerns not only about the fire hazards within them, but also the content of films being viewed by unaccompanied children in these darkened venues. In Chicago an ordinance decreed that all films within the city had to be screened first to the police for approval. Similar concerns existed wherever the nickelodeons emerged and, in New York one proprietor was arrested for projecting a film to children that showed a Chinese opium den. On Christmas Eve in 1908, the New York City police commissioner, as part of his tough stance on nickelodeons, revoked the licenses of 550 such film venues, requiring them to apply for a new entertainment license. The film industry, then based in New York, funded a Board of Censorship for the city in March 1909. As more states adopted a practice of film censorship, the US film industry formed its own national regulatory body, the National Association of the Motion Picture Industry, in 1916. This failed to satisfactorily control the content of film, and in 1921 the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America was created, an association fronted by Will Hays, formerly the US Postmaster General. This too failed to establish the desired control, and under pressure from the Roman Catholic Church, the Production Code, a list of guidelines and prohibitions developed from Hays's earlier unsuccessful thirty-six rules, was adopted on 31 March 1930. The code was prepared by a Catholic layman, Martin Quigley, and a Jesuit priest, Father Daniel

WILL H. HAYS
b. William Harrison Hays, Sullivan, Indiana, 5 November 1879, d. 7 March 1954

Dubbed by Variety as the "czar of all the Rushes," William Harrison Hays is best remembered for overseeing the creation of the Production Code that would informally bear his name. However, Hays's responsibilities and influence extended far beyond a censorial arena. His centrality in manufacturing positive public relations for the Hollywood film industry, maintaining political contacts through four presidential administrations, and consolidating control of international distribution channels cannot be overstated.

Following his early career as a church elder and small-town lawyer, Hays gained public prominence as chairman of the Republican National Committee in 1918. Demonstrating a gift for diplomacy and political machinations, he won the public support of several studios for Warren Harding's presidential campaign. In return, Harding appointed him Postmaster General shortly after coming to office in 1921. At this time, studio chiefs were facing a three-pronged threat: an onslaught of criticism in the popular press for their apparent celebration of vice and the scandalous offscreen behavior of their creative personnel, the hearing of pro-censorship bills in thirty-six states, and a looming federal antitrust suit instigated by the Federal Trade Commission. To combat these problems, the studios hired Hays in March 1922 to head a newly created trade organization, the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association of America (MPPDA).

Hays's first ambition for the MPPDA was to generate publicity for a "reformed," civically responsible Hollywood. Under Hays, beginning in 1925, the MPPDA's Committee on Public Relations labored intensively to mollify policy makers and shapers of public opinion. Such good relations would help quell the threat of government regulation and at the same time mute small exhibitors' complaints about the "smut" pushed upon them by the industry's block-booking practices. Second, Hays organized a system of voluntary self-regulation to ensure that propriety was maintained in the content of all studio productions. The Motion Picture Production Code was drafted in 1930, but its purpose was not only to regulate screen content; its implementation would also draw attention away from the industry's monopolistic trade practices and prevent lost revenues caused by the arbitrary proscriptions of state censor boards.

Finally, by nurturing local political alliances developed during the Coolidge administration, Hays helped prevent successful antitrust legislation from taking effect for almost twenty years after his appointment to the MPPDA. Indeed, the studios' efforts toward vertical integration were actually sanctioned under President Franklin Roosevelt's National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 and spared from the Justice Department's investigation throughout World War II. Above all, Hays aimed to ensure that the international market remained open to Hollywood product. In 1926 he successfully lobbied Congress to allow the Departments of State and Commerce to financially support Hollywood exports overseas via a Motion Pictures Division. Through such efforts, American domination of international distribution channels is maintained to this day.

BRITISH FILM CENSORSHIP

Film censorship in the United Kingdom began initially with the aim of controlling flammable nitrate film stock. In 1909 the first Cinematograph Act was passed, giving local authorities the right to license buildings for the screening of film only if they met the required fire-prevention standards. However, the terms of the act were wide open and were very soon interpreted for other purposes. In 1910 the London County Council successfully applied the act to restrict the showing of films on Sundays. It was recognized that the act had also enabled local authorities to have legal powers of film censorship. Sensing the difficulties of allowing regional bodies to make their own regulation decisions, fearful of government intervention but also keen to polish its own image as a respectable form of entertainment, the film industry approached the Home Secretary in 1912 with a request to establish an independent and centralized board of censorship. In late 1912 the film industry established the British Board of Film Censors (BBFC, later the British Board of Film Classification) with approval from the Home Office.

The BBFC began viewing films on 1 January 1913 with the declared aim of being "a purely independent and impartial body, whose duty it will be to induce confidence in the minds of licensing authorities and of those who have in their charge the moral welfare of the community generally." The Board had a significant effect on the censorship of films, but it did not change its essential nature. The local authority remained the final court on whether a film should be screened, censored, or banned, even if it had been passed uncut by the BBFC. The local councils largely supported the BBFC's decisions, but there have been notable exceptions such as Monty Python's Life of Brian (1979), a film accused of blasphemy by pressure groups but which was classified "AA" (admission prohibited to anyone under 14). It was banned by eleven local authorities, with sixty-two enforcing the classification and twenty-eight reclassifying it "X" (admission prohibited to anyone under 18). In a rare instance, the film Dawn (1928), the World War I story of nurse Edith Cavell, was banned by the BBFC at the insistence of the Foreign Office, which did not wish to upset Germany. But, in opposition, it was passed by many local authorities.

From 1913 to 1932 the BBFC published in its annual reports a list of prohibited film content. Not a code, these lists became known after 1916 as O'Connor's rules (after the new BBFC president T. P. O'Connor, who presented a forty-three-point list). Subject to ridicule, the lists were discontinued in 1932, with films later judged on individual merits. In 1929, for instance, the list included the prohibition of "stories tinctured with salacious wit," "sensual exposition of Eugenic doctrines," "women fighting with knives," "libels on the British nursing profession," "provocative and sensuous exposure of girls' legs," and "abdominal contortions in dancing." From its beginning, the BBFC had an advisory two-point certification system—the "U" certificate, which indicated films especially suitable for children, and the "A" certificate, which indicated films generally suitable for public exhibition—and in 1921 these were formally adopted for the first time.

There had been repeated debates concerning an adults-only category, with proposals for an appropriate certificate being made as early as 1921. In response to the increasing number of American horror films, a new category of film classification was created in January 1933. The new "H" (for "Horrific") classification was purely advisory and did not alter the admission procedures that were already in place, still allowing children into the films if accompanied by a parent or bona fide guardian. This "horrific" category mixed horror films with non-horror films, such as Abel Gance's 1938 antiwar movie J'accuse! and a 1945 United Nations war crime film. The "H" became a film certificate only in June 1937, when it was made the first adults-only certificate in the United Kingdom (admission prohibited to anyone under 16). In January 1951 the "H" was subsumed into the newly created "X" certificate (admission prohibited to anyone under 16; increased to the age of 18 in 1970; in 1982 replaced by a new "18" certificate). Arthur Watkins, the secretary of the BBFC in 1951, described "X" films as not "merely sordid films dealing with unpleasant subjects but films which, while not being suitable for children, are good adult entertainment." The BBFC currently operates eight film and video classifications—from "Uc" (Universal, but especially suitable for very young children), to "R18" (for screenings in licensed sex cinemas, for sex videos that are available only in licensed sex shops, and to persons aged 18 and over).

PRESSURE GROUPS AND THE MEDIA

Although government and local authorities are most responsible for the regulation of movies, moral protest groups can exert enormous pressure on a film that they have deemed to be against their beliefs. National and local elected officials, television broadcasters, and cinema chains have been targeted by organized campaigners who write letters of complaint or form demonstrations outside specific venues. The many pressure groups who have targeted films have included the religious organization the Festival of Light, which in the United Kingdom argued that The Devils (1971) and The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) were blasphemous; and family protection groups such as mediawatch-uk (formerly the National Viewers' and Listeners' Association, founded in 1965, and led by Mary Whitehouse), which has campaigned against violent films such as Baise-moi (2000). In the United States, the gay rights group Queer Nation (formed in 1990) attacked Basic Instinct (1992) as homo-phobic; feminist groups such as Women Against Violence Against Women assailed Dressed to Kill (1980) as misogynistic; and ethnic protest groups have variously picketed against the racial representations of Native Americans in A Man Called Horse (1970), Italian Americans in The Godfather (1972), Puerto Ricans in Fort Apache the Bronx (1981), Cuban Americans in Scarface (1983), and Asian Americans in The Year of Living Dangerously (1982), Black Rain (1989), and Rising Sun (1993). The popular press can be the most effective tool in generating a moral campaign against a marked film. Thus pressure groups have taken out full-page newspaper ads condemning a production. For instance, the Catholic League advertised in the New York Times against Disney and Miramax for distributing Priest (1994), a film it considered blasphemous for its depiction of sexual acts among members of the clergy.

In the United Kingdom the British press was central to debates surrounding the cinema release of Crash (1996), which The Standard and its reviewer, Alexander Walker, pronounced as depraved. In the 1980s and 1990s, the main target in the United Kingdom was film on video, reflecting the concern that the age of the viewer within the home cannot be controlled (nor the power of the viewer to replay or pause an image). Originally, certification did not apply to video in the United Kingdom, with no age-related limitations. In the initial boom of the video age, from 1979 to 1982, many controversial films slipped out on release with sensational covers exploiting content in order to attract consumers among a mass of video shop choices. It was the covers for videos such as Lager SSadis Kastrat Kommandantur (SS Experiment Camp, 1976) and Cannibal Holocaust (1980) that drew attention to these films. This developed into a moral panic orchestrated by the press and newspapers such as the Daily Mail, with its "Ban the Sadist Videos" campaign; in response, the Director of Public Prosecutions drew up a list of sixty actionable titles, of which thirty-two were to become banned films, including the notorious titles—so-called "video nasties"—I Spit onYour Grave (also known as Day of the Woman, 1978), The Driller Killer (1979), and The Evil Dead (1981).

In 1982 a series of prosecutions took place against five films that had been charged under the Obscene Publications Act, with police seizing all tape copies. With the press fueling the moral panic by publishing stories of supposed criminal and delinquent behavior directly linked to the content of "video nasties," a new government bill was introduced, the Video Recordings Act (VRA) of 1984, which implemented video classification under the control of the BBFC. The number of examiners at the BBFC rapidly increased from four to fifty to address the quantity of videos that needed classifying. In 1994 the Criminal Justice Act extended the terms of the VRA, with an emphasis on the effect horrific videos may have on children. The act had been influenced by a section of British politicians, supported by the group Movement for Christian Democracy, that viewed the death of a two-year-old child, James Bulger, at the hands of two ten-year-old children, as the result of exposure to video violence. The film at the center of this panic, Child's Play 3 (1991), became the scapegoat in a media witchhunt that lead to The Sun newspaper famously carrying a full front-page image of charred tape copies of the movie within the headline "For the sake of ALL our kids…BURN YOUR VIDEO NASTY."

EXHIBITION AND DISTRIBUTION

Central to decisions on the regulation and censorship of film are questions of audience suitability and maturity. Domestic reception of film has raised concerns over unregulated consumption, with video and television versions of films receiving greater censorship. But in one famous case, a film that had been made specifically for British television, Peter Watkins's The War Game (1965), was banned from being shown on the BBC following government intervention. Made to mark the twentieth anniversary of the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima, this drama-documentary depicting the horrors of a nuclear attack on Britain was withdrawn, as the government said it contained "inaccuracies." The struggle to have this important political film seen by the public began with a limited theatrical release at London's National Film Theatre in 1966. With an "X" certificate and cinema chains refusing to exhibit the film, its national release was mainly through church and community halls, where it was booked as an educational screening by groups opposed to nuclear weapons such as CND and the Quakers. Despite The War Game's winning of an Academy Award^® for Best Documentary in 1967, the BBC refused to lift its ban on the film until 1985.

Historically, the BBFC had refused to classify political films, waiting until 1954 to grant an "X" certificate to Sergei Eisenstein's 1925 film, Bronenosets Potyomkin (Battleship Potemkin). It had banned the film in 1926 famously declaring that cinema "is no place for politics." The recently introduced "X" certificate was designed to allow many of the foreign films of directors such as Akira Kurosawa, Ingmar Bergman, and Michelangelo Antonioni to be passed uncut. The censor was now prepared to view this new world cinema as art cinema, to take into account the film's artistic intentions and the maturity of its probable audience. The view of the BBFC was that a foreign film shown only in art cinemas and by a smaller audience was "less likely to produce criticism." Such a view allowed Vittorio De Sica's La Ciociara (Two Women, 1960), with its depiction of a double rape, to be passed uncut, though when the film went on general release and was shown to a wider audience, the scene was removed.

As an extreme example of controlled distribution, Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange (1971)—a film that had been banned in the Canadian provinces of Alberta and Nova Scotia, among other places—had been passed uncut by the BBFC but was unavailable for screening or broadcast in the United Kingdom for more than twenty-five years, after Kubrick requested that Warner Bros. withdraw all prints from circulation. British newspapers had begun reporting cases of copycat acts of violence, in which juveniles were apparently inspired by the content of the film; it was rumoured that Kubrick began receiving death threats, and in 1973 the film was withdrawn. Its removal was heavily enforced by lawyers, which resulted in the successful prosecution of the Scala, a cinema that dared to present a screening in 1992, and an injunction (later lifted) on British television's Channel 4 to prevent it from showing twelve extracts from the film in 1993. The film was released again in the United Kingdom only following Kubrick's death in 1999.

The cult that grew around A Clockwork Orange made the poster for the film an iconic image. Other posters and advertising material for films have been denied exposure, and though replacement images are found, the cultural impact of the movie is adjusted. In the United Kingdom, one of the most powerful poster-regulating authorities is London Transport, which owns the advertising sites on the underground and key billboards on its aboveground properties. In 1959 it banned a poster for a double bill of The Alligator People and Return of the Fly, for fear that it would frighten children who would be in central London in large numbers for Christmas shopping; in 1989 it removed part of a poster for Peter Jackson's film Bad Taste, which featured an alien with its middle finger raised, that was deemed offensive; and in 1994 it filled in a gap in the split skirt of Demi Moore displayed in the advertising for Disclosure, which it considered erotically charged.

SEX AND VIOLENCE

The sensational and exploitable elements of sex and violence have created the biggest debates in film censorship. Under the new "X" rating in the United States, a wave of 1970s "porno chic" or "middle-class porn" appeared on movie screens, exploiting the commercial possibilities of an adults-only rating. In films such as Deep Throat (1972) and The Devil in Miss Jones (1973), explicit, nonsimulated, penetrative sex was presented as part of a reasonable plot and with respectable production values. Some state authorities issued injunctions against such films to protect "local community standards"; in New York the print of Deep Throat was seized mid-run, and the film's exhibitors were found guilty of promoting obscenity. Caligula (1979), financed by Penthouse magazine, was one of the few of these films to make it to the United Kingdom but only after heavy cuts and initial seizure by British customs. In New Zealand Deep Throat was eventually passed in 1986, yet it remains to be shown; only one cinema tried to organize a screening but was thwarted by the city council that owned the building's lease. Such is the tight regulation of sex in the cinema that its history has been one of a series of certificated firsts. In the United Kingdom this has included the first film to show pubic hair (Antonioni's Blowup, 1966), the first film to depict full frontal nudity (the Swedish production Puss Misterije organizma [W.R.—Mysteries of the Organism], 1971), and the first theatrically distributed film to depict the act of fellatio (Intimacy, 2001). Definitions of sexual explicitness vary widely across national cinemas, with Belle époque (1992) and The Piano (1993) banned in the Philippines.

Sex crime has generated particular concern. In 1976 the BBFC claimed that, in that year, it had viewed fifty-eight films depicting "explicit rape," declaring scenes that glorified it as "obscene." As opposed to questions of "indecency," which have been applied to sexual explicitness, films charged with being obscene have been viewed as having "a tendency to deprave and corrupt" and been liable to prosecution. The art-sex film Ultimo tango a Parigi (Last Tango in Paris, 1972), with its acts of sodomy and degradation, is one of the most notorious films to depict sexual violence. The film was banned by several UK and US local authorities. The film was also banned in Portugal (from 1972 to 1973) and in Italy (from 1972 to 1987), with federal authorities there filing five separate charges against named participants in the production, including lead actors Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider.

An explicit rape is part of the extreme horrors of The Evil Dead, with a woman assaulted by trees in a possessed forest. This scene was originally left uncut by the British censor but later removed: the chief censor, James Ferman, said "initially we did not think anybody would identify with a tree." In Germany the film was originally banned for having violated the "dignity of humankind." It was not until 1992 that the decision was overturned, with the German High Court ruling that the zombies in the film were not human and therefore their dignity had not been violated. Key guidelines exist within film censorship regarding screen violence. In the United Kingdom the censor is most concerned with what is known as the process shot, the point at which the weapon makes contact with the victim's body. The shots prior to this, showing the wielding of the weapon, are known as the "occasion"; the shots that follow, depicting the effect of the action, are known as the "price." The employment of "everyday implements" in violence is a concern, with the slasher film The Burning (1981) first receiving cuts for its explicit process shots and then later banned on video for its scenes of mutilation and harm using garden shears. Censors are also concerned by "overkill," or the repeated use of a weapon on a victim, and by its being tugged or twisted. There is also the issue of "personalized violence": in a film such as Cliffhanger (1993), attacks on Sylvester Stallone's character were subject to more cuts because of the audience's assumed empathy with the lead actor.