We began the night with the shark from Jaws eating Robert Shaw.
James Ferman first saw it a few weeks before he became film censor. How could I pass
this as a PG? he asked himself. It would give children nightmares. So, as censors do,
he rushed off to a child psychiatrist, who said, What's so bad about nightmares? It's
just kids working through their problems. So Ferman passed it PG, and
Jaws
is now family folklore. Mind you, he did cut out the shot of Shaw spewing up blood:
it gave him nightmares.
So began the learning curve, steep and swift, of the man who recently retired from the
BBFC. He was giving his valedictory address last week at the British Film Academy. It
lasted over three hours, and by the time I went home we hadn't even got to
Crash.
Very instructive it was, too, in ways that perhaps censors cease to appreciate. For what
the evening's strange mix of experience and innocence confirmed again and again was the
British genius for hypocrisy - for sanitising some of the lewdest, most degenerate and
horrific material submitted for a censorship certificate so that the film companies
selling it could take their profit without undue offence to public decency.
I saw Ferman not in a new light, but in a clearer one: not so much a film censor, more
a trading standards officer for the film industry. Only reasonable, of course, since it's
still the trade that appoints British film censors to be judges in their own cause.
"Rape," said Ferman next. There was a lot of it about in the Seventies.
We then saw a lot of it: Emmanuelle raped in an Indonesian bordello, Emmanuelle raped in a
Tokyo cabincar. And an Emmanuelle-type raped, whipped and branded on her bottom in the
French classic The Story of 0, which Ferman advised on in the so called
"rough cut".
We saw how much rape there had been: Ferman attributed it to
the backlash by male
film-makers against the Women's Libbers. Anyhow, he wasn't having it, at least not
too much of it: especially not if the lady, after being gang-banged and buggered, simply
adjusted her dress and went off as if it had been a thoroughly therapeutic experience.
Rape without consequences was dangerous fantasy stuff: it was OUT.
Then he showed the piece de resistance of the genre, though that phrase is
not very apt since the two women raped in Michael Winner's Death Wish 2
could put up next to no resistance at all to the gibbering multi-racial rapists who
gang-banged them fore and aft. I cut three minutes 42 seconds of that stuff, said
Ferman, a record I think. Winner was furious. We then saw "that stuff"
uncensored and really it did look the worst screen violence against women I've ever seen.
Winner, we were told, later became "Censorship Officer" for the Directors'
Guild.
"Nudity," Ferman went on, "doesn't seem to bother many people
nowadays." Usually the bare bottom is at the bottom of the list; female tops are
there, too. Violence, drugs, swearing - those are the great British worries.
Ferman was told that one producer, a very big name in Hollywood, previewed his
ultraviolent films to the worst elements in Los Angeles and, when he noted their attention
wandering, snipped away at the film until it was an uninterrupted series of violent acts:
no compassion got a look-in. But what could Ferman do with such people? What he'd done was
to "classify up", not reject a movie, but censor it a bit for older age groups.
It wasn't a perfect solution. But that's what he was paid to do, and now with the
Convention on Human Rights a part of British law, it would mean his office couldn't take a
high hand and reject what it considered obscene out of hand: it had to be made decent.
That's what freedom of expression meant.
The certainty that this is what it meant became a little less certain when he showed a
clip from the Stallone thriller Cliffhanger, which had Craig Fairbrass
using a man's head as a football. Fair-brass, one gathered, was a very popular character
in London's East End, and it hurt Ferman to deprive him of his spectacular run-up to the
prostrate victim, all the while doing a jaunty little soccer-style commentary, before
kicking the man into goal. Ferman took out most of his kicks, but preserved the entire
sequence for his private collection and has shown it with great effect to MPs and others.
I
show them the cut version first, which looks bad enough. Then I show them the uncut
version. That clinches it: the MPs all cheer the censor's team.
We were wondering at this point when penises were going to enter the discussion. Now
they did. He told us how he'd been courageous, yes courageous enough to give
a certificate to the Japanese film Ai No Corrida (In the Realm of the Senses),
a story of perverse love, in which a man and woman go the limit - the limit being reached
when she strangles him "with his permission", said Ferman, which made it all
right, and castrates him. He showed us the scene where she fellates him, erect. The
lawyers had said it would not tend to corrupt and deprave a significant number of people.
It looked so ugly, I could believe it.
But problems arose when the same lady began pulling a naked child's pubescent penis,
hurting him. Couldn't pass that: the Protection of Children Act, and all. So Ferman had
what he called "an optical" made, that enlarged the area around the child's
private parts, but left the latter out of sight below the level of the cinema screen. A
triumph of trompe-l'oeil art.
So with this reconciliation of art and commerce, the evening ended with great applause
and a vote of thanks from the film people whose wares Ferman had perused, purified and
passed over for 23 years. Perhaps only Michael Winner would have sat on his hands.
