The C-Word - censorship in films - Brief Article - Editorial

Film Comment, Nov, 2000 by Gavin Smith

Since its very beginnings in the mid-Sixties, this magazine has been firmly opposed to censorship in all forms -- after all, where would the movies be without sex and violence?

But in recent years we've admittedly been guilty of taking our stance for granted. Our last `serious consideration of the subject was ten years ago, when former FILM COMMENT editor, Time critic, and veteran foe of censorship Richard Corliss wrote about the MPAA's introduction of the NC-17 category. Since then, we've been silent, taking a hohum, so-five-minutes-ago attitude toward the censorship skirmishes of the Nineties (Kids, Dogma, anything by Paul Verhoeven), dismissing the seemingly annual reruns of the same old arguments as deja vu all over again. But it's always fatal to movie criticism to adopt an ivory tower mentality toward such fundamental issues. Because one day we woke up and discovered that, in this election year, the terms of the censorship debate were shifting, as were the means of enforcement. You may have been following the media coverage of the latest round of anti-Hollywood political scapegoating, but if you want the big picture (and the subtext), you'll have to read regular contributor Howard Hampton's story "Blood and Gore Wars," starting on page 30.

It's one of the great ironies of the past decade that as politicians have sought to outdo each other in the Family Values department, the low-brow end of pop culture -- movies, TV, music, advertising, magazine publishing, you name it -- has become ever more permissive. Where the great battles over sexual content back in the Seventies were fought over such highbrow fare as A Clockwork Orange, now it's movies like There's Something About Mary that push the envelope. Traditionally, censorship in America has targeted sexual content and turned a blind eye to violence, but things have been evening out since the outrage over Littleton. Meanwhile, porn-related imagery has become more and more prevalent (from Howard Stern to Boogie Nights to MTV), the unrated director's-cut DVD is a standard marketing hook, and teen movies like American Pie have achieved an unprecedented level of raunchiness. As our self-righteous moral arbiters have been decrying Hollywood's immersion in sex and violence, they've also been cheerleading for free market and the loosening of trade restrictions to ensure that said sex and violence is spread throughout the world.

One fact about censorship: it's always the product of political whim. This issue of FILM COMMENT also features an article by Ian Christie on the extraordinary flowering of cinema in the Soviet Union following the Cold War thaw of the early Sixties. When the constraints on freedom of expression under communism were relaxed, a new generation of filmmakers arose, creating a new kind of cinema. When that cinema became politically inconvenient a few years later, world-class filmmakers like Andrei Tarkovsky found themselves boxed in by the reassertion of state censorship. We also have a report on a controversial new digital-video film, Baise-moi, a heady cocktail of B-movie violence and hardcore porn that scandalized France this summer and was ultimately banned. The stupidity of censorship knows no national boundaries. With the advent of DV and the Internet, it's more politically tempting than ever.