Censorship

PRESSURE GROUPS AND THE MEDIA

Although government and local authorities are most responsible for the regulation of movies, moral protest groups can exert enormous pressure on a film that they have deemed to be against their beliefs. National and local elected officials, television broadcasters, and cinema chains have been targeted by organized campaigners who write letters of complaint or form demonstrations outside specific venues. The many pressure groups who have targeted films have included the religious organization the Festival of Light, which in the United Kingdom argued that The Devils (1971) and The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) were blasphemous; and family protection groups such as mediawatch-uk (formerly the National Viewers' and Listeners' Association, founded in 1965, and led by Mary Whitehouse), which has campaigned against violent films such as Baise-moi (2000). In the United States, the gay rights group Queer Nation (formed in 1990) attacked Basic Instinct (1992) as homo-phobic; feminist groups such as Women Against Violence Against Women assailed Dressed to Kill (1980) as misogynistic; and ethnic protest groups have variously picketed against the racial representations of Native Americans in A Man Called Horse (1970), Italian Americans in The Godfather (1972), Puerto Ricans in Fort Apache the Bronx (1981), Cuban Americans in Scarface (1983), and Asian Americans in The Year of Living Dangerously (1982), Black Rain (1989), and Rising Sun (1993). The popular press can be the most effective tool in generating a moral campaign against a marked film. Thus pressure groups have taken out full-page newspaper ads condemning a production. For instance, the Catholic League advertised in the New York Times against Disney and Miramax for distributing Priest (1994), a film it considered blasphemous for its depiction of sexual acts among members of the clergy.

In the United Kingdom the British press was central to debates surrounding the cinema release of Crash (1996), which The Standard and its reviewer, Alexander Walker, pronounced as depraved. In the 1980s and 1990s, the main target in the United Kingdom was film on video, reflecting the concern that the age of the viewer within the home cannot be controlled (nor the power of the viewer to replay or pause an image). Originally, certification did not apply to video in the United Kingdom, with no age-related limitations. In the initial boom of the video age, from 1979 to 1982, many controversial films slipped out on release with sensational covers exploiting content in order to attract consumers among a mass of video shop choices. It was the covers for videos such as Lager SSadis Kastrat Kommandantur ( SS Experiment Camp , 1976) and Cannibal Holocaust (1980) that drew attention to these films. This developed into a moral panic orchestrated by the press and newspapers such as the Daily Mail , with its "Ban the Sadist Videos" campaign; in response, the Director of Public Prosecutions drew up a list of sixty actionable titles, of which thirty-two were to become banned films, including the notorious titles—so-called "video nasties"— I Spit on

Your Grave (also known as Day of the Woman , 1978), The Driller Killer (1979), and The Evil Dead (1981).

In 1982 a series of prosecutions took place against five films that had been charged under the Obscene Publications Act, with police seizing all tape copies. With the press fueling the moral panic by publishing stories of supposed criminal and delinquent behavior directly linked to the content of "video nasties," a new government bill was introduced, the Video Recordings Act (VRA) of 1984, which implemented video classification under the control of the BBFC. The number of examiners at the BBFC rapidly increased from four to fifty to address the quantity of videos that needed classifying. In 1994 the Criminal Justice Act extended the terms of the VRA, with an emphasis on the effect horrific videos may have on children. The act had been influenced by a section of British politicians, supported by the group Movement for Christian Democracy, that viewed the death of a two-year-old child, James Bulger, at the hands of two ten-year-old children, as the result of exposure to video violence. The film at the center of this panic, Child's Play 3 (1991), became the scapegoat in a media witchhunt that lead to The Sun newspaper famously carrying a full front-page image of charred tape copies of the movie within the headline "For the sake of ALL our kids…BURN YOUR VIDEO NASTY."