Dr. Stevie Simkin is Reader in Drama and Film at the University of Winchester, UK. He is the co-editor of the Controversies series, in-depth studies of key controversial films of the past 40 years. His book about Straw Dogs for the series has been described by Peckinpah biographer Garner Simmons as ‘Exceptionally well-written …. needs to be read by anyone interested in understanding Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs as a serious work of cinematic art’.
In 2011, SEX AND ZEN 3D broke all box office records in Hong Kong, beating AVATAR’s previous opening day milestone by raking in HK$2.78 million. However, around the world, SEX AND ZEN ran into trouble with censorship bodies, and the distributors released modified versions in a number of territories. The British Board of Film Classification cut almost three minutes from the film, filtering out the most extreme sequences of sexual violence.
While we should probably not be surprised by this – sexual violence remains the BBFC’s chief preoccupation in certificating films today — there is a common stereotype of British prudishness that underlies the story: foreign films, usually from the continent, shocking buttoned-up Middle England sensibilities with graphic nudity, explicit sex, and unconventional sexual practices. In fact, one of the most significant factors in the history of film censorship in the UK has been the Obscene Publications Act (OPA), with its rather inscrutable test of a work’s tendency to ‘deprave and corrupt’ a significant proportion of those likely to see it. It might surprise some to learn that the OPA, introduced in 1857 and famously enacted in the trial of D.H. Lawrence’s novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover in 1960, did not apply to film until 1977, and it was James Ferman, in charge of the Board from 1975 to 1999, who was instrumental in bringing about the change in legislation; he believed that it would safeguard films he felt were important works of art, such as Pasolini’s parable about fascism, Salo (1975) from prosecution for indecency.
Tiptoeing around some of the more familiar rogues in the sex-on-film gallery, here are the stories behind five foreign films from the 1960s and 1970s that the BBFC had to wrestle with as it came to terms with shifts in taste, decency, and attitudes to sex amongst British filmgoers.
Puss & Kramm (Hugs and Kisses, 1968)
In 1968, BBF Secretary John Trevelyan insisted on the removal of a scene from a Swedish film Puss & Kram (released in the UK under the title Hugs and Kisses). The offending sequence featured actress Agneta Ekmanner, who undresses and stands nude in front of a mirror. Trevelyan demanded the cut in the firm belief that Swedish liberal attitudes were incompatible with those of British audiences. When a number of local authorities passed the film with the offending full-frontal shot intact, to no great public reaction (at all), and after a similar female full-frontal shot in Lindsay Anderson’s If… (1968) was waved through by the censors, the scene was restored.
Last Tango in Paris (1972)
The early years of the 1970s were dominated by a number of British and American films that seemed to open the floodgates on more explicit sex, violence and sexual violence – notably The Devils, Straw Dogs and A Clockwork Orange (all 1971) – but, again, it was a continental director who breached another taboo: Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris had received positive notices from French critics ahead of its submission to the BBFC, and new Board Secretary Stephen Murphy attempted to justify minimal cuts to the film by quoting enthusiastic reviews. Sadly, this did not stop papers such as The News of the World, the Daily Mail, the Daily Express and the Daily Mirror from concocting headlines about ‘Brando in New Shock Sexy Film’, or from publishing huffing and puffing reviews and opinion pieces after its release, provoked by the scene in which Marlon Brando’s character uses butter to lubricate his lover prior to anal sex. Mary Whitehouse demanded the resignation of the BBFC’s staff en masse (they didn’t), and another moral campaigner, Edward Shackleton, attempted to bring a private prosecution against the production company under the OPA (Judge Kenneth Jones ruled that the law did not apply to film). Ironically, when the OPA was modified to include film a few years later, the Board decided to restore the missing ten seconds. New Secretary James Ferman decided that the application of the OPA to this film meant that it could be defended on grounds of artistic value, and that its complete version was in no way obscene. It was subsequently released uncut on home video in 1988.
Emmanuelle (1974)
In an odd quirk of fate – or one might say, in an odd quirk of taste, given Ferman’s decisive role — Just Jaeckin’s Emmanuelle, perhaps the most famous soft porn film of all time, went through a bizarre reversal of the same process. The film had originally been cut by the BBFC by nearly three minutes, primarily in order to reduce the amount of graphic detail in the sex scenes throughout. A scene in which a woman ‘smokes’ a cigarette with her vagina was deleted entirely, although a rape scene was left largely untouched. However, under the same change in the law that restored Last Tango to its uncut state, Emmanuelle was hauled back in by James Ferman in 1979: Ferman was particularly intolerant of sexual violence and insisted that the rape scene was potentially in breach of the OPA. He warned the film’s distributor that if the Board’s requested cut of 61 seconds was ignored, he would inform local authorities that the film was illegal as it stood. By 1990, the movie’s rape scene was being referred to as a ‘self-evident cut on policy grounds’, and it would not be restored until 2007, by which time the examiners felt that the scene was sufficiently dated to be interpreted as a sign of its misogynistic times.
La Bête (1975)
Walerian Borowczyk’s 1975 film was a bizarre retelling of the Beauty and the Beast myth, featuring graphic sex between men and women but also, much more problematically, scenes of bestiality. It was first submitted to the BBFC in March 1977, who refused it a certificate. The BBFC examiners felt that the explicit treatment of bestiality might be ‘indecent at law’, that the conventional sex scenes went beyond what was currently acceptable anyway, and that the flashbacks and photographs of ‘a stallion’s penis mounting and penetrating a mare in close-up might be found disgusting by the general public’. It was subsequently given a reduced distribution when a handful of local authorities granted it an ‘X’; it was also screened at a number of private cinema clubs. A screening at the Prince Charles cinema in the West End prompted members of the public to write directly to Buckingham Palace to alert the heir to the throne to the ‘filth’ being screened in his name. La Bête was the catalyst for considerable soul-searching and debate at the Board, and between the Board and the Director for Public Prosecutions, on the definition of the Obscene Publication Act’s term ‘deprave and corrupt’. Eventually, a heavily cut version of the film would be granted a home video certification in 1988, with uncut theatrical and video releases following in 2001.
Ai No Corrida (1976)
Our final instalment is Nagisa Oshima’s Ai No Corrida, released in the UK under the title In the Realm of the Senses. Ferman was reluctant to cut Oshima’s complex tale of sexual obsession, but was equally sure that the sex scenes were far too explicit to be granted a certificate. His plan was to keep the film in a holding pattern until the planned changes in the OPA passed into law. The film was subsequently screened in a number of private cinemas without a BBFC certificate, once a particularly sensitive scene, in which a woman tugs a young boy’s penis, was cut, since this was considered likely to be judged an indecent image and so fall foul of the Protection of Children Act. When the film was resubmitted to the Board for a cinema release in 1989, the decision was made to include the offending scene, which was deemed crucial to the narrative: an optical zoom allowed the film, effectively, to tell what was happening without showing it, cutting the woman’s action out of the frame, and the film was passed ‘uncut’ with this delicate modification. Finally, in 2011, considering the film again in its original form without the optical zoom, the Board would finally concede that the scene was unlikely to be judged indecent, occurring as it did outside any sexualised context. Thirty-five years on, Oshima’s film was ready to face the British viewing public, penis-tug and all.
– Stevie Simkin, December 2011.
3D Sex and Zen is out on DVD on 2nd January 2012
