Ogilvy & Mather created this hysterical new advertising campaign for Reporters Without Borders. (Note: Some of the images featured here come from that campaign, others have no connection to it.)

 
More “censored” photos after the jump…

 
I once produced a series called Banned in the U.K., which was based on the premise that we can learn more about a society through what it bans that by what it permits. This week, the issue of censorship has highlighted the difference of what is permitted when viewing extreme violence as fact and fiction.

Dangerous Mind‘s Niall O’Conghaile wrote about the British Board of Film Classification’s decision to ban Tom Six’s sequel The Human Centipede II on the grounds that it “poses a real, as opposed to a fanciful, risk that harm is likely to be caused to potential viewers.”

The principal focus of The Human Centipede II (Full Sequence) is the sexual arousal of the central character at both the idea and the spectacle of the total degradation, humiliation, mutilation, torture, and murder of his naked victims….

...There is little attempt to portray any of the victims in the film as anything other than objects to be brutalised, degraded and mutilated for the amusement and arousal of the central character, as well as for the pleasure of the audience.

While the BBFC has banned Brits from viewing fictional acts of extreme and sexual violence, Channel 4 television has taken the brave decision to air raw footage (filmed on a cell ‘phone) of allegedly Sri Lankan troops systematically murdering and committing acts of sexual violence against its population in a documentary called Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields.

The material has been described as “the most horrific footage [Channel 4] has ever broadcast”. An extract from the video was aired in August 2009, which showed naked, bound men being executed with a shot to the back of the head by what appears to be Sri Lankan soldiers. This material was edited as it was considered “too gruesome” to be broadcast pre-watershed. Now the footage will be transmitted at length next Tuesday at 11pm:

Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields includes full-length videos of naked and bound Tiger prisoners kneeling whilst they are shot in the back of their heads by men in army uniforms. When extracts of some of these videos were first shown on Channel 4 News the Sri Lankan government denounced them as fake - and have refused to accept they are real - despite being authenticated by UN specialists. In new footage, a Tiger prisoner is shown tied to a coconut tree. The same prisoner is captured in a series of photos - at first alive, threatened with a knife and then dead and covered with blood.

Further videos show evidence of systemic murder, abuse and sexual violence - women’s bodies stripped of their clothes being dumped into trucks by soldiers. The film includes an interview with a woman who, with a group of civilians, handed herself and daughter over to government forces. She claims they were both raped; she witnessed others being raped, she heard screaming and shots and never saw them again.

This week, Head of News and Current Affairs at Channel 4, Dorothy Byrne defended her decision to screen the film in a radio interview:

“I believe it is absolutely justified. The UN has reported that there is credible evidence that actual war crimes took place.

“This is not just a TV programme, this is evidence. If we don’t show it and the Sri Lankan government say it never happened – how are you the viewer, a member of the public, able to make up your mind, unless you see it yourself.

“We felt we had to show it as overwhelming evidence of potential war crimes which need investigating.

“I would like to be able to say we will never again show footage again like this. I hope it is the first and last time we have to do it.”

Byrne took the decision to show the film “after serious and careful consideration.”

“This dossier of visual evidence of alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by forces of the government of Sri Lanka is of the greatest possible public interest. We believe that screening it is the only way to enable viewers to make their own informed judgments about what happened.”

Byrne is right to show the footage as “evidence”, in the same way the films of Auschwitz and Belsen were “evidence” of the atrocities committed. But it will lead to people asking why it is acceptable to broadcast genuine material of “gruesome” violence, and sexual assault, while it is not acceptable to screen fictional material, like the next Tom Six movie?

Shouldn’t it be more troubling to watch film of actual murder, rather than fictional?

The screening also opens “a door to which there is no way of closing” for once one news agency shows such footage, what is to stops others following suit?

There is usually a protocol to showing shootings in news footage: the camera freezes before the moment the gun is fired, then cuts to the dead body. This explains in simple terms what has happened. If this protocol is abandoned then the stakes are upped in terms of what a news channel can offer to attract viewers - and let’s be clear, viewing figures drive scheduling, which drives programs and their commissioning, and if real violence can deliver column inches and a healthy viewing figure, then who is going to say “no” to cell ‘phone footage of other atrocities?

But there is also a more troubling issue - would this material have been screened if it was British citizens that had been shot in the head? Do we treat foreign nations with dignity when it comes to reporting on their lives? Or do we use them as victims for our own infotainment?

This is a very tricky area but I think Byrne is right, for it is “evidence” that Channel 4 is presenting and there is a moral duty to screen it, which is what makes this footage exceptional, and important.

Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields is broadcast on Channel 4 on June 14 at 23.05hours, details here.

Below is the original Channel 4 News report on the Sri Lankan atrocities - please note some viewers may find this clip disturbing, as it contains footage of prisoners being killed.
 

 
During a screening of Jean Rollin’s first horror movie, La Viol du Vampire (aka Queen of the Vampires) in Paris 1968, police stormed the cinema and a riot erupted between the audience and the gendarmerie. The event made Rollin and his film famous, and started a career in fantasy, horror and sexploitation movie-making that has continued for over forty years.

Rollin began his career as an editor, and hung out with Nouvelle Vague film-makers such as Jean-Luc Goddard, François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, Alain Resnais and Eric Rohmer.

I met most of them at Henri Langlois’ Cinemateque Francaise; we talked, and I saw their films. It was not exactly my cup of tea. It was a movement similar to German New Wave filmmaking, some sort of rebellion against the old directors—not only their approach and vision, but also their technical style. I was always most attracted to traditional, old French cinema, but there is no doubt that the Nouvelle Vague played an important economic role. They proved it was possible for young people without experience to make successful, acclaimed films on a small budget. They gave me and others the courage to attempt the same feat.

However, Rollin had his own vision of the cinema he wanted to make, and it wasn’t long until he tried his hand as a director. As a member of France’s Left, Rollin was asked to make a documentary in support of the Spanish resistance against the fascist leader, General Franco. The experience and the success of the film encouraged Rollin to make his first feature, the fantasy horror La Viol du Vampire.

In general, the fantastic cinema is always political, because it is always in the opposition. It is subversive and it is popular, which means it is dangerous. I made films with sex and violence at a time when censorship was very strong, so that was certainly a political statement as well, although again, not a conscious one. I just happen to have an imagination which doesn’t correspond with those of certain conservative people.

Over the next decade, Rollin made thirty-two films, mainly horror-fantasy, including Le Frisson des Vampires (aka The Shiver of the Vampires), Requiem for a Vampire, Les Démoniaques and Lévres de Sang (aka Lips of Blood). To help supplement the budgets for his own film projects, Rollin made a series of sexploitation films (usually under the name Michel Gentil), the first of which, Schoolgirl Hitch-hikers has just been digitally remastered and is about to be released for the first time on DVD, to coincide with Rollin’s birthday, by Nigel Wingrove’s Salvation Films. 

Now in his seventies, Rollin continues to work and his latest fantasy horror flick, The Mask of Medusa was released in France last month.
 

 
Thirty years ago this month, a new play opened in London’s National Theater that was to change legal and theatrical history. Howard Brenton’s The Romans in Britain contrasted Julius Caesar’s Roman invasion of Celtic Britain with the Saxon invasion of Romano-Celtic Britain, and finally Britain’s involvement in Northern Ireland during The Troubles of the late 20th century. Epic in scale, Brenton’s intelligent analysis of the effects of imperialism was sidelined when The Romans in Britain became center of a farcical court trial over a simulated act of buggery.

The son of a Methodist minister, Howard Brenton was born in Porstmouth in 1942, educated at Chichester High School, and at Cambridge University, where he won the Chancellor’s Gold Medal for poetry. In 1965, he wrote his first play Ladder of Fools, described as an “Actable, gripping, murky and moody: how often can you say that of the average new play tried out in London, let alone of an undergraduate’s work.”

A highly talented and original writer, Brenton quickly proved he was unafraid to investigate controversial or contentious political subjects.  His first big success as a playwright was Christie in Love (1969), which examined the public’s fascination with murderers through the life of John Christie, who had murdered at least 6 women at his home, 10 Rillington Place. The play opened with a monster-like Christie rising from beneath a grave of torn newspapers, and then masturbating in front of the audience. His next Brassneck (1973) followed the rise of an inner city family over thirty years, from radical politics to drug dealing. While The Churchill Play (1974) questioned the rise of state security against individual liberty, and opened with a dead Churchill rising from his catafalque in Westminster.  The play briefly caused a national scandal, as it questioned Churchill’s actions as a political leader. Brenton followed this with Weapons of Happiness, an examination of a factory strike in London. In 1977, he was then commissioned to write The Romans in Britain.

Commissioned by Sir Peter Hall, director of the National Theater, a key establishment figure and founder of the Royal Shakespeare Company, who formed an odd collaboration with the left-leaning, libertarian Brenton. The key to their relationship was Hall’s genuine respect for Brenton, and his belief that playwrights should deal with contemporary political issues, in particular, at that time, the situation in Northern Ireland. To direct the production, Hall brought in Michael Bogdanov, a young, imaginative director, known for his acrobatic and physical productions for the RSC.

It was soon apparent that a key scene in the play would be troublesome. This scene centered on the anal rape of a native Celt called Marban, by a Roman centurion, played by actors Greg Hicks and Peter Sproule. The action was symbolic, but its effect was literal. Both actors bravely agreed to play the scene naked, and it was decided that Sproule, as the rapist centurion, would grasp his penis and extend his thumb to simulate an erection. He would then jab at Hicks’ behind in a simulation of sodomy. During rehearsals word went out that alleged hardcore sex was being performed by the actors under Bogdanov’s direction. This led to a planned boycott by the theater’s ushers. To stop this, Bogdanov invited the ushers, and any other concerned parties, to an open rehearsal. Beer was suppled and the audience gave the performers and their scene overwhelming approval - a literal thumbs up, one might say.

In October, The Romans in Britain opened to mixed reviews, ranging from a disparaging “These ignoble Romans are a national disgrace” in Now magazine, to discussions of the play’s political content. Only one thing remained constant, the shock of the rape scene. Its effect was later compared to that of the news of John F Kennedy’s assassination.

Tipped off by a journalist, Mary Whitehouse, a busy-body President of the National Viewers and Listeners Association, an unrelenting campaigner for censorship, who wanted anything distasteful (i.e. that she didn’t like) off TV screens, raised her concern that the play would “over stimulate” men and incite them to bugger young boys. Though she refused to see the play herself, as she was too frightened it would lead to the “corruption of her soul”, she requested the Metropolitan Police to examine whether the play was “an offence against the Theaters Act of 1968” which outlawed performances “likely to deprave or corrupt.” After a brief investigation, the Attorney General, Lord Havers, decided there was no case to answer. But Mrs. Whitehouse didn’t agree and discovered that a private prosecution could be brought against the director on grounds that he had “procured an act of gross indecency by Peter Sproule with Greg Hicks on the stage of the Olivier Theater,” a law intended to stop men wanking in lavatories.
 
More on ‘The Romans in Britain’ plus bonus clips after the jump…
 

 
Bad Boy of British cinema, Nigel Wingrove, is the only director to have one of his films banned on the grounds of blasphemy. His 1989 short Visions of Ecstasy, was refused certification by the British Board British Film Censors on the grounds of its sexualized representation of Saint Teresa of Avila making love to a crucified Christ on the cross.

The film was based on St Teresa’s own religious and highly erotic writings:

I saw in his hand a long spear of gold, and at the iron’s point there seemed to be a little fire. He appeared to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart, and to pierce my very entrails; when he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out also, and to leave me all on fire with a great love of God. The pain was so great, that it made me moan; and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain, that I could not wish to be rid of it…

When I interviewed Wingrove in 2005, for Channel 4’s Banned in the U.K., he explained the main issue was over Christ responding to Teresa’s kisses. If Christ had been represented by a wooden mannequin or a blow-up doll, rather than an actor, then Teresa could have fucked her brains out, and the film would have been passed uncut. As it was, the BBFC wanted the offending scenes removed, which meant losing almost half the film. Wingrove rightly refused and the film was banned.

In 1996, supported by the likes of authors, Salman Rushdie and Fay Weldon, film-maker, Derek Jarman, and musician Steven Severin, who composed the soundtrack for Visions, Wingrove appealed to the European Court of Human Rights under Article 10, which defends freedom of expression, to have the ban lifted. The Court dismissed his case, stating that the criminal law of Blasphemy, as it was applied in England, did not infringe the right to freedom of expression under Article 10. In other words, typical bureaucratic ass-covering.

Wingrove is currently working on his next cinema release Sisters of Armageddon, which as he tells Dangerous Minds is:

A sci-fi nunsploitation film called Sisters of Armageddon - think Planet of the Apes meets The Nun’s Story with a sprinkling of The Gestapo’s Last Orgy and a soupçon of Mad Max.

And here’s a sneak preview.
 

 
Bonus clip of the banned ‘Visions of Ecstasy’ after the jump…
 

 
A pictorial representation of China’s censored words and blocked websites (minus the pornography).  For a (slightly) larger pic of this, visit InformationIsBeautiful.