Roundabout
Swinging the Censor
By KATHARINE WHITEHORN
About the time that I was seeing Les Enfants, Prince Charles and Princess Anne were being taken to see Ben-Hur—not, one supposes, in a rare burst of realism for royals but as a jolly treat. In the same spirit I saw Ben-Hur myself' for escapism. I don't know how the royal children took it, but I had nightmares afterwards—and am an adult and not a particularly delicate flower Nor do I know if the Secretary of the British Board of Film Censors decided this himself, °r whether, believing like the makers of horror fill°, that two heads are better than one, he consulted Lord Morrison of Lambeth; but either waY , cannot see how he ever came to give it an This may strike some as odd : but consider what we were looking at. Passing lightly over some odiously sentimental scenes in which $ pair of boyhood chums are reunited, we arrive by easy stages at a point where one of them 1135 sent the other to the galleys, and the galleY is about to be rammed by another ship, sending al hands to the bottom. One man wrestles to get torn and bleeding leg out of a leg iron; another scrambles out of the hold waving the blol stump of one arm, having presumably hacked 0, the hand to get rid of the handcuff. (I imagine this was a genuinely one-handed man, with the stuol repainted. Later, we come to the famous and thrilling chariot race—followed by a lengthy an complicated dying among a lot of blood, surgeons knives cutting, wounds and the, lot. Soon we art having a lovely gloat at diseased skin in a leper colony, finishing up with the blood from the nails in the hands of Christ on the cross.
To numbers of people, this is just good, clean fun. All those I know who did think so, how- ever, were people who found it ridiculous or boring or who were interested in how.the effects had been achieved technically : in other words, they were all people who were utterly uncon- vinced by it. Obviously it was not for such an audience that the film was made; all that ketchup vas not spilt in vain. It was to a much nastier emotion that the physical, sickening details of violence were to appeal. It is not, of course, violence itself which is questionable in a movie or a play; terror and pity, following violence, have been suitable first night emotions since Aristotle. But there arc two vastly different ways of treating violence, an illustration of which is the very ramming-scene itself. To see, though , s oar-slots, the galley-slaves' view of the shin bearing on them, to feel with them the terror of knowing that the ship will split and sink— that is the stuff of which all violent drama is made; of which, come to that, the original children's classic was made. But the man with the bloody arm-stump provokes quite a different feeling. You, the audience, are looking on : with "r'sgust or guilty delight as the case may be; you hteel your own reactions to his torn flesh and not 15. This is necrophilia, not pity; Sehadenfrende and not terror. In this: the question of how well the revolting 1'Uages are put across becoMes important : there 15 a qualitative change between ham and horror. When almost no one could feel repelled by all that cheerful red paint, the horrid images had no more to do with actual pain than a bang-bang- Yniere-dead Western has to do with real death. But as soon as you get a convincing image, you get something that leaves its mark on the mind whether you accept it or not. The most obvious way of stopping this. of Course, is censorship. We have a board of film ,, rusnrs, though their poWers are woolly and 11111,.ited; presumably these could be stepped up. censoring censorship is not the answer. The case aga nst vensoring anything is absolute : like pacifism or vegetarianism or the less gentlemanly forms of Christianity, it does not depend on the value of individual cases but on one unalterable premise: in this case, that nothing that could be censored can be so bad in its effects, in the long run, as censorship itself. This is obviously so even with films: a censorship which banned Ben-Hur would undoubtedly have to ban Hiroshima Mon Amour, though in one case the nastiness was there to amuse, in the other the nastiness—in the sense of visual horror—was part of a valid and enor- mously moving moral point. It would be nice to think that a censor could allow a genuine work qf artistic seriousness and ban a titillating piece of sadism, but it would take a miracle to make such a distinction stick.
And in the event Hiroshima got an 'X' certifi- cate, Ben-Hur an 'A.' Possibly the censor, squint- eyed from all that Bardot and all those dinosaurs, passed it partly from inertia and partly from the feeling that no one could really have spent all that money on a family movie and put in anything foul; if the galley-slaves had been making love indecently instead of cutting off their limbs, it might have been different. For it is a mark of the way current film-sifting is wide of the mark that good clean fun of the breast-and-bedsprings variety gets an 'X' certificate soon as look at her, while this creeping gangrene of sickly detail goes by unchallenged. (1 cannot myself see what harm a Bardot film ever did: it is only what goes on in ordinary heads and beds anyway.) One can only suppose that they are so puritanical that they do not realise that all this is sexual—but that Bardot is clean sex and blood-baths perverse.
Even among those who oppose any form of legislation for morals and for protecting people against themselves, however, it is always ad- mitted that children must be protected. And that is exactly what, as things are, they are not being. For one thing. the 'ATU' distinction is meaning- less: all it means is that unsuitable films can be seen by children with indifferent parents, not by children with careful ones. On the contrary. they are being deliberately led up the garden path by a bogus distinction which seems to do more than it does. Nine-tenths 'U' plus one-tenth 'H' does not equal 'A': it equals 'H.'
And there is. in any case, a great difference between control and censorship. Censorship is prohibition, as it were: control the pure food and drug acts. By all means sell alcohol, but when the alcohol becomes so strikingly bad that it will actually tear your guts apart, let it at least be coloured an unpleasing purple (like methylated spirit) so that the public know what they are drinking—and keep it for adults .only. As con- sumers, we have a right to know what we are getting, even at the cinema.
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