Controversial in its homeland, the film deals with communal strife in India and contains rioting sequences which are unprecedented at PG, including children being doused with petrol and threatened with immolation.6 APRIL: TV movie, Fifties schlock, soft porn (Gang Bang, Lily in Winter, The Navy vs Night Monsters – not hard to work out which is which) Fairly typical paddle in the post- modern flood of images. An arm being ripped off on screen by a monster plant in Night Monsters is too strong for PG still. Mamie Van Doren telling an alien victim, “I’ve seen men in deep shock before, it doesn’t bother me,” is beyond any kind of classification.7 APRIL: Another manga, two soft-porn tapes, a stultifying TV movie and a problem Seventies movie about nuns A day to point up the weird nature of the job. The Nun and the Devil exists in a morass of contexts: the 16th-century sources and the Stendahl novel it’s based on; the history of representations of religious eroticism; the earlier success of Ken Russell’s The Devils (released in a cut form in the early Seventies); and its mix of the Italian art movie and the sado-erotic exploitation movie. There’s a problem with one scene with a naked, manacled nun astride a horse being tortured.
Shot with a sense of the perverse beauty of the image, it could nevertheless be seen to contravene the OPA (Obscene Publications Act) I do not want to cut this and write a long report at home (It later passed 18 uncut.)10 APRIL: Can’t escape nuns. Early Almodovar film, Dark Habits, submitted on video about heroin-addict nuns. Clearly 15 as this is camp stuff, unlikely to be accused of glamorising drugs. Grotesque low-budget martial-arts movie (nothing against martial-arts movies, this is just a particularly poor example) and a TV movie – the latter viewed with Stephen Whittle, Chief Advisor (Editorial Policy) at the BBC, who wanted to see how examiners classify material. Examiners become used to predicting the twists in formulaic narratives; Stephen seemed also able to predict when they would occur – to the minute!12 APRIL: Children’s TV material yesterday, and catching up with replying to letters from members of the public. Bombay discussed again at the weekly meeting today: whether it is possible to pass this film PG when there is a sequence of near-immolation of children and when some sequences are as upsetting as The Killing Fields.
Hindi-speaking examiner Imtiaz Karin explained what happened to the film in India, where it was withdrawn by the police the day after it opened because it was felt to be too inflammatory. The Hindi version has now been passed PG.19 APRIL: A re-run of a classic moment in BBFC history – 3 November 1971 to be precise, as Straw Dogs, submitted by the BFI, is screened on film in the theatre Watched by the entire examining team in lieu of a meeting. Most of us are extremely familiar with the film and it has often been revived in the cinemas in its original X version (the one where, according to the myth, the BBFC’s cut made the rape scene look even more like buggery). No real need for everybody to see it, apart from lodging it as a precedent in all our minds, and a key piece of history. Like the original examiners, we were enthusiastic about the film.
Why did the BFI submit the much shorter US print (in which the rape scene was much shortened to get an MPAA [Motion Picture Association of America] R rating in the Seventies? Straw Dogs passed 18, no cuts, and is still a hugely powerful cinematic experience.21 APRIL: Two martial-arts movies – Secret Force and Shaolin Martial Arts. The latter is a Shaw Bros epic from the Seventies with typically fantastic (in both senses) fight choreography; given 18 for its gore. Madonna – Innocence Lost, a US TV-biopic with a lookalike actress playing Madonna and Dean Stockwell as her Dad sitting in the suburbs worrying about her as she goes to New York to be a superstar. I pass it as a 12 because of some mild sex scenes in which Madonna uses her sexuality to make it (“Wow, Madonna, you make love just like a man”). Then Transgression, a low-budget independent US thriller about a newsreader inviting a sexually sadistic serial killer to phone in and make contact with her. The heroine becomes a murderer herself in the process as the killer reveals her own dark desires to her. A bleak and depressing experience, rather like Henry, Portrait of a Serial Killer, but nowhere near as morally complex and frequently exploitative.
Some examiners want a reject, although with a lot of cutting the sequences in which the sexual violence becomes titillatory could be removed, leaving the video less likely to be considered obscene. Some doubts about whether this can be achieved.! Extracted from `Inside Stories: Diaries of British Film-Makers at Work’, published this week by BFI Publishing at pounds 9.99. `IoS’ readers can order the book for pounds 8, including p&p, by calling 0171 957 8906.. Last year Swan Lake underwent a sex change. Matthew Bourne’s radical production for Adventures in Motion Pictures famously swapped tutus for bare chests and rewrote the plot to create a powerful psychological drama. Now it’s out on video (Warner Vision, pounds 14.99), and we have 25 copies to give away.
