censorship
josh.spero
I hadn't thought this one through very well. As someone who was put off horror films by a window crashing onto a hand in one of the Amityville movies at least two decades ago, watching Time Shift: Dear Censor last night, which promised to show some of cinema's most notorious scenes, was probably unwise. Happily, standards of gore, violence and sex have dropped so fast in the past 20 years that what was censorable in 1991 is PG now.A compact history of the British Board of Film Censorship (it became the less finger-wagging Classification in 1984), made with extensive access to its letters Read more ...
David Nice
Whatever the quality of the material with which they're grappling, there are two undeniable truths about the Belarusian actors who've put their already curtailed freedom on the line by coming to the Almeida Festival this week: they're skilled practitioners of their art and courageous human beings. Read their biographies in the programme and you'll see that the words "detained", "arrested", "attacked", "dismissed" crop up rather a lot. In Europe's last dictatorship, stepping out on stage and speaking a line, a word even, can lead to imprisonment.Be cynical if you will about Western actors Read more ...
josh.spero
When people talk incessantly of freedom of speech, it means they are proud to have it or desperate to have it or desperate to defend it, or a mixture of all three. In Hong Kong, where I went at the end of May for the fourth edition of ART HK, people in the art world are constantly mentioning how free their speech is or else using a symbol to prove it - Ai Weiwei, the artist now imprisoned by China for "economic crimes" (ie subversive art). By speaking of Ai and displaying his work, one might almost get the impression China was not just to the north and three decades away from total Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Over here we had our own obscenity trial in 1960. Before Lady Chatterley’s Lover made it into the dock, it’s always said that sex in the UK didn’t exist while no sooner had the judge pronounced it not guilty of obscenity than everyone was at it very promptly. Thus does the collective memory simplify. As is usually the case, America got there first. Literature of a provocative nature was put on trial when in 1957 Allen Ginsberg’s priapic epic Howl found itself up before the beak.The difference between the Chatterley trial and Howl’s day in court are instructive, the former being at least Read more ...
Veronica Lee
George Bernard Shaw’s 1894 play was deemed too scandalous for public performance in Britain and was banned by the Lord Chamberlain until 1925, and its New York premiere in 1905 caused such outrage that the cast were arrested. Its offence was that Shaw was writing about the world’s oldest profession, prostitution, and alluded to a possible incestuous coupling. His greatest crime, though, was the play’s attack on Victorian hypocrisy.For prostitution, of course, could not exist with what we now would call a solid customer base, and it was a profession allowed to flourish with the collusion of Read more ...