On film censorship for TRANQUEBAR

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Monday, 16 May 2011 07:07

FOR 'POPCORN ESSAYISTS', AN ANTHOLOGY ON FILM, ALSO PUBLISHED AS A CENTRE-SPREAD in THE HINDUSTAN TIMES A piece on the censorship of film might seem like a curious inclusion in an anthology celebrating this wondrous and evocative medium. But, having been an employee of the British Board of Film Classification for over seven years, I may never be able to separate my appreciation of film from a sense of its classification. In fact, months after having left that job, I continue to sit in the dark of a theatre, counting f-words and assessing the imitability of knife-play and head-butts rather than giving myself up to the pleasures offered by the film. Will I at some point be able to revert to being a regular popcorn punter at the cinema? Probably not. Not that I regret the seven years I spent at the Board: an experience that taught me much about the power of cinema and media effects. Nevertheless, I certainly did not imagine I would develop a sense of loyalty so strong to what was once (and, in some circles, still is) considered a shadowy secretive censorship organization. Not least because I’m supposed to be a part of an artistic fraternity that values the freedom of expression over all else. In fact, when a book of mine - a historical novel called ‘Rani’- was banned by the UP government, my sense of outrage was completely at odds with the job I did day in and day out at the Board. ‘Rani’ had caused annoyance, real and contrived, for its fictionalized portrayal of Rani Lakshmibai as a pacifist who was drawn into a warm and trusting relationship with her British political advisor. Regardless of how much of the story was true, protestors chose to ignore the fact that the book was a work of fiction and, more relevantly, that it is the place of historical fiction to offer alternative stories to the one that, rightly or wrongly, has remained the accepted version. But it is the same attitude that this constituency takes towards films that deal with historical material, recent examples being ‘Jodhaa-Akbar’ in India and Hollywood’s ‘300’, both of which caused similar outrage for their directors’ audacity in re-telling well-worn historical myths or ‘playing with history’, as though history were indeed something in which interpretation has not already played a huge part. But that was, at least in part, what my job entailed: to examine the creative efforts of others with a view to assessing their propensity to offend or harm. Generally speaking, the classification system was more than adequate to address the concerns of most, any work with powers to offend merely being bumped up the classification scale to the giddy heights offered by the highest categories (in Britain, ‘15’, ‘18’ and ‘R18’ for the restricted porn category). However, very occasionally, a work would come along that caused classification to slip further up the scale into the sensitive area of censorship, mostly in cases where material was thought likely to cause ‘harm to the viewer or harm to society through the actions of the viewer’. The line, quoted from the UK’s Video Recordings Act 1984, was one that, in my seven years at the Board, came to be imprinted on my brain.   Back in 2001, however, I walked into my interview at the Board’s Soho Square offices, wondering whether to make plain my anti-censorship views. ‘I’m liberal bordering on libertarian,’ I had told myself in the mirror while getting ready earlier that morning, deciding only while on the tube to Soho that it would be wise not to say anything so sweeping and pompous if I wanted the job. The Board’s setting itself felt indeed like a total mismatch to its stuffy reputation. Soho – with its residual stubborn seediness – continues to be the closest one can get to a red light district in London, dotted with sex shops and featuring the occasional tired looking woman standing in a dingy doorway wearing fishnet stockings and cheap perfume.   But this has been the Board’s location for almost 100 years, ever since the idea of some form of regulation was conceived by a late Victorian government panicking about the powerful new medium that was drawing large crowds to public screenings in Kennington Common. Later, Britain’s nascent film industry decided too to encourage the setting up of a body that would bring uniformity to the classification of films which would otherwise have been a messy and time-consuming business carried out by individual local authorities. Hence the birth of the Board, now a far cry from its former haughty avatar, an up-to-date organization that prides itself on being accessible and transparent and enjoying a thoroughly modern sensibility. Unlike the case in India, film classifiers’ posts are not grace-and-favour government appointments as the job is advertised in the national media and candidates are drawn from normal walks of life, generally needing only some experience of working with children and great quantities of common sense, although specialisms that include languages and an understanding of new technologies and digital media are usually considered an advantage. Regularly conducted public consultation exercises keep the Board in touch with the tastes and sensibilities of the British public and printed guidelines are drawn up and revised every five years. Classification decisions are logged and made available for public consumption and all complaints and comments made by the public are personally responded to by the Examiners who classified the work in concern. And yet, for all those claims to modernity, one may sensibly query if there is any relevance to a censorship body in the 21st century when the internet remains a relatively untrammeled, free-floating entity difficult to control or regulate, particularly when so much material can be donwnloaded directly onto people’s private screens? Most viewers’ instinctive reaction would be an emphatic ‘no’. But what is a regulatory body to do when, for instance, a film with immense appeal to young people (‘Rules of Attraction’) comes in with a ‘15’ request and contains a scene showing a young woman slowly undressing before sitting in a bathtub, taking off her rings and slitting her wrist vertically with a razor blade in an extreme close up shot. Advice from a suicide prevention specialist revealed that few know of how lethal vertical cuts on wrists can be, leading to a speedy and certain death. The scene in the film, played to the beguiling soundtrack of Nilsen’s ‘Can’t live, if living is without you …’, presented a glamorized suicide scene and showed what was, in the Board’s parlance, known as ‘an imitable harmful technique’. There seemed no option but to trim the scene back if the category requested by the film’s distributors was to be achieved. Of course, there is some residual public tolerance for classification work that involves the protection of children and young people. But, occasionally, the Board still censors for adults too, despite its claims that adults should be free to choose their own viewing as long as the material is legal. This is probably where the organization risks seeming to be as moralistic and patronizing as its reputation once was. An example emerged recently in a low-budget American work called ‘Terrorists, Killers and Other Wackos’ which comprised a motley collection of clips collected from the floors of editing rooms, cobbled together and set to a jaunty soundtrack. Nothing was sacrosanct: real deaths, suicides, executions, horrific injuries, close-up sight of a man having his hand sliced off at the wrist. All served up without any documentary or other context and with the express intent to entertain. It made for jaw-dropping, eye-watering viewing and the DVD would almost certainly have found a ready market, probably among feckless young men at drink-driven parties. It was also readily acknowledged that the work was very unlikely to lead to anyone rushing out to copy or imitate the gory actions on view. However, there was an extremely disturbing quality to such unashamedly exploitative material that made it impossible to release without some amount of soul-searching and debate. In-house opinion was predictably varied but, in the end, the work became one of the Board’s rare rejects, disallowed from being ever legally distributed or sold in the UK. The rationale, made available in press releases and on the Board’s website, was that the work was very likely to have a brutalizing (or, at the very least, numbing) effect on the average viewer’s attitude to human suffering, leading even to the impairment of the moral development of younger viewers in particular, underage viewing within the home remaining one of the Board’s on-going concerns. However, despite my own personal revulsion at the work, I continued to find it difficult to accept that the organization I worked for had a remit that included protecting the moral fabric of the nation. It felt even more ludicrous that I should be put in the position of deciding if other people were likely to be ‘corrupted and depraved’ by watching a work that had done no worse than leave me suffering the odd nightmare and a couple of restless nights. The position my job cast me in felt superior and patronizing. Who was I to tell people what they could and couldn’t watch? All the while seeming relatively undisturbed myself by watching the very same material. A hard-hitting French art-house feature called ‘Baise Moi’ was one such example that came up early on in my life at the Board, a film unusually cut by the Board even at ‘18’. The story was about a pair of young women, one a rape victim, who embark on a nihilistic spree of sex and violence against men. There was much in it to recoil at and it was certainly not the kind of film I’d have gone out of my way to watch as a normal cinema-goer. Nevertheless, there was nothing in the film that, in my opinion, went beyond the kind of material that adults can and should be allowed to view, if that is their choice. But (and again only after immense amounts of argument and debate), the Board decided to cut a scene that showed a penetration shot in close up during a rape scene. For long the Board has rightly held a strong line against sexual violence scenes that set out to endorse or eroticise rape. But this was far from such a scene, far more likely to turn the stomach rather than titillate. I was amongst those colleagues who were outraged by the 10 second cut that felt almost tokenistic, arguing that the penetration shot was, in fact, important in conveying the horrible invasiveness of rape. But, lengthy reports notwithstanding, the scene was cut and has remained so in all subsequent video and dvd versions of the film despite occasional attempts by the film makers to appeal the decision. It offered me an early lesson in the BBFC’s power and in my own need to accept that I worked for an organization whose every action I may not always agree with. In the years that followed, there were many more arguments during the weekly Examiner meetings that I would come to lose. I was never exactly inured to the annoyance and frustration one could feel at such times but there was invariably some small satisfaction in knowing that there was still room within the Board for varied views and energetic debate. Very occasionally, the minority view would triumph too. The only time I actually wept while viewing something at work was when a quasi-documentary called ‘Paramedics’ came in to be classified. Purportedly charting the lives and work of paramedics called out to deal with highway accidents, the documentary contained sight of dead and injured bodies, some in extreme and lingering close up. It made for distressing viewing that reduced me and a number of other (predominantly female) colleagues to tears, there being a very strong sense of ‘there, but for God’s grace, go you or I’, especially as I had recently been involved in a road accident myself. There was, of course, general consensus that a work could not be cut merely for being distressing and many colleagues felt that that the work in fact offered a courageous and unusual look into the work of paramedics. However, the discomfiture caused to a few of us in the sight of dead and bloated faces shown with little regard for their privacy or dignity was taken into account and, after further viewings by the Board’s Presidential tier, the work was eventually cut.    Most BBFC cuts are, unsurprisingly, made in the category of porn (sensibly, an entirely legal product in the UK, although hard core material can only be sold in licensed sex shops). The potential for harm and imitability is considered at its highest in this area, qualities enshrined by the Video Recordings Act, the law that steers most of the BBFC’s difficult decisions. Astonishingly, the Obscene Publications Act 1959, brought in to unsuccessfully proscribe ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’, is also still much in use at the BBFC, notably in the area of porn. It is, thankfully, a law that is almost never used to proscribe printed material any more but the moving image is apparently still fair game. Are people really likely to be depraved and corrupted merely by watching porn performers do odd things to each other on screen? All but the very prudish would probably – at least, secretly – think not. But such acts as the dripping of hot wax on certain body parts have remained on the Department of Public Prosecution’s list of obscene material for a long time and there will be little appetite in government to take on what could turn into a rather (forgive the pun) sticky issue. And so the BBFC soldiers on into the 21st century, doing what it does with sincerity and good intent. It’s not the only body like it. All countries operate a regulatory system of some sort on their film industries. I have visited the lumbering and rather Orwellian I & B Ministry in India too and, despite initial misgivings, found myself impressed by a complex system that takes on board not just different regional languages and film industries but a range of cultural sensibilities too. It all seems like an inordinately huge fuss and bother for what is, by a large, a simple mode of entertainment enjoyed innocently by millions the world over. Standing outside any multiplex in the world as a film finishes, one would be hard put to imagine anyone in the happy crowds drifting past come to some sort of dire harm as a result of the film they’ve just seen. But, as a brief part of that strange regulatory machine which does precisely that, I did eventually manage to convince myself of the necessity for some form of limited and judicious censorship as far as films are concerned. It’s down to the medium itself: one so powerful and moving and inclusive that it transcends all other forms of entertainment, becoming something dangerously akin to reality, to life itself.

Last Updated on Thursday, 07 December 2017 12:31