Censor (Prano Bailey-Bond, 2021)

[tenia]

Kermode championing a film is almost like a warning sign for me these days, especially after he recommended that terrible Censor film! (He's right on FWWM and The Devils, however)

To be fair, a lot of people hyped Censor.

[The Curious Sofa]

To be fair, a lot of people hyped Censor.

A lot of it had to do with supporting a new British female director who was rather eloquent in talking up her movie. The film takes on an interesting subject; the banning and censoring of horror movies in the video nasty period, by aping the look of 70s Argento, but is let down by clumsy writing for the characters working at the BBFC. Then the plot takes a sharp turn, abandoning the potentially interesting set-up, and goes down a an entirely different and overly familiar path. Still, all the references to British horror film history were enough to dazzle the easily impressed Kermode.

[MichaelB]

I genuinely wanted to like Censor, but I rapidly found it exasperating - the worst bit being when I perked up at the thought that it was about to go in a different and potentially far more interesting direction... a few seconds before the end credits started rolling.

In particular, there should be a moratorium on Lynchian industrial rumbling to denote Something Sinister Happening - that tired cliché came close to wrecking the otherwise distinctly superior Saint Maud as well.

(This tangentially reminds me of the way that in the 1980s loads of companies rushed to copy the groundbreaking Channel Four ident without understanding why it worked - it wasn't the then excitingly new computer-style animation, which was what was copied, it was that it was anchored to a concept so strong that it's still underpinning the channel to this day, that of multiple building blocks coming together to create a 4, in acknowledgement of the fact that C4 wasn't a single monolithic entity like the other telly companies. By copying the surface and ignoring the substance, its imitators just ended up being completely forgttable, and the same is true of people who superficially imitate David Lynch's approach to sound design without appearing to think about why it works so brilliantly for him. Peter Strickland - a lifelong Lynch fan - and his sound designers actually have thought this through, which is why his films have brilliant sound design but in a way that doesn't sound like imitation Lynch.)

[colinr0380]

Without having seen the film to confirm my suspicions, I must admit to having avoided Censor entirely as soon as it was being talked up in interviews of how the main character gets obsessed with 'deviant horror movies' as if it was something kind of beneath the director, and once they started talking in interviews about having to 'research' the area with a couple of the most obvious titles that set alarm bells ringing for me that it may have been using the idea of video nasties as a device rather than having any particular affinity with the subject. Plus, you know, you cannot simultaneously be on the side of transgressively gory horror films and celebrated by the BBFC (to the extent of the director appearing on their podcast) - it would be like a punk icon going to a Royal wedding! Something's gotta give in that equation.

[MichaelB]

Plus, you know, you cannot simultaneously be on the side of transgressively gory horror films and celebrated by the BBFC (to the extent of the director appearing on their podcast) - it would be like a punk icon going to a Royal wedding! Something's gotta give in that equation.

I suspect you've never had any direct dealings with anyone at the BBFC and have consequently bought wholeheartedly into the popular caricature, because I have no problem whatsoever with accepting that you can do both. Every single examiner that I've met - and we must be talking five or six by now - would fit right in here, and very enthusiastically.

[colinr0380]

There's no need to suspect, I'm not affilated with the BBFC at all. I must admit to an interest in perusing their archives and thought processes behind the censorship decisions though, and a film about that would be really interesting to see some time. I guess the nearest we have got to that so far is still Atom Egoyan's The Adjuster.

[The Curious Sofa]

I knew a woman who had been a compliance officer for the BBFC, and she was both knowledgeable and passionate about film. They weren’t Mary Whitehouse–style moral crusaders imposing their personal values on what they watched; rather, they were required to enforce government guidelines and laws, and did their best within that framework. Yet from what I remember, Censor portrays them exactly as prejudice would have you believe.

[MichaelB]

Yes, that was my other beef with it - a complex and fascinating subject became increasingly one-note and generic. Hence my ultimate disappointment when I briefly thought it was starting to get interesting... but that turned out to be the very last shot!

[colinr0380]

I knew a woman who had been a compliance officer for the BBFC, and she was both knowledgeable and passionate about film. They weren’t Mary Whitehouse–style moral crusaders imposing their personal values on what they watched; rather, they were required to enforce government guidelines and laws, and did their best within that framework. Yet from what I remember, Censor portrays them exactly as prejudice would have you believe.

I guess that portraying censors in the old fashioned terms would be necessary for a film set in, and critiquing, the 1980s though? Where the view of censors through the right wing Mary Whitehouse crusading lens as an 'old boys club' acting with impunity ("I'm more Feminist than the Feminists" as James Ferman was once notoriously quoted as saying with sincere conviction when he cut the rape scene from the original Emmanuelle film) would be quite different from today's Liberal-Matriarchal (of the ilk as portrayed in that Adolescence series) 'Enforcer of State policy' flipside of the same censorious coin.

(i.e. I doubt either regime would have been that happy about The Human Centipede 2 (Full Sequence) arriving on their desks!)

[MichaelB]

I guess that portraying censors in the old fashioned terms would be necessary for a film set in, and critiquing, the 1980s though?

I can completely understand why this approach was dramatically necessary.

[Mr Sausage]

Was it the reality back in the 80s during the moral panics? I know nothing about this so I’m curious: how you described actual BBC censors above—does it hold true for the 80s? Is it more recent? Has there been a change in the composition of the censors over time or not so much?

[MichaelB]

I first started liaising directly with the BBFC in 1989, so I don't have any first-hand knowledge of what happened before, but it's certainly the case that John Trevelyan (who ran it from 1958 to 1970) was considerably more liberal than the "chief censor" caricature might suggest, whereas James Ferman (1975-98) was a fascinatingly contradictory figure, passionately defending Pasolini's Salò and David Cronenberg's early films while hacking big chunks out of the work of Lucio Fulci.

Although during the "video nasty" era there was a whopping amount of media and political pressure being applied to an organisation that was decidedly frail by then, since the number of theatrical releases (and, by extension, fees paid to the BBFC) was dropping substantially as cinemas closed and home video took over - because BBFC certification wasn't compulsory for video until the mid-80s, they got next to no income from that. And they also had to abide by court decisions concerning certain titles, even if they disagreed with them.

John Waters said that it was rather tougher dealing with the BBFC than it was with the MPAA because while American censors are generally pretty moronic, British censors aren't, and are therefore less susceptible to attempts at pulling the wool over their eyes.

[The Curious Sofa]

My main problem with Censor is that it quickly becomes clear this is an unreliable-narrator story, with much of the second half

Spoiler

unfolding inside the protagonist’s mind. In what becomes an endless dream-sequence, the director is more interested in stylistic flourishes that nod to Argento and Bava rather than in saying anything meaningful about the BBFC, video nasties, or censorship itself. And the twist, that our censor is in fact a psycho killer right out of a video nasty, is irony laid on far too thick.

Despite being clumsily handled, the first act that deals with the BBFC is the most interesting part of the film, but by the second half that all becomes irrelevant.

[Orlac]

It's quite fascinating reading the back-and-forth between the BBFC and Hammer Films in the 50s/60s. Censor Audrey Field constantly seemed un-amused by Hammer's scripts, her comments being very barbed.

[MichaelB]

I know it's bad form to review the film that you think it should have been as opposed to the film that it actually was, but my disappointment with Censor was similar (although, in fairness, not as extreme) to that which my wife and I both experienced watching Hysteria - which took an absolutely fascinating subject and turned it into crass, unfunny farce, with wasted opportunities galore. (How can you tackle a subject like Victorian sexuality without even the most token nod to its colourful and hugely distinctive vocabulary?) "I bet that was made by Americans", said my deeply unimpressed wife at the end, and sadly she turned out to be right, at least in terms of the director and screenwriters' nationality.

But, in fairness, Censor, Hysteria and the similarly disappointing Their Finest are about subjects that I know a great deal about, and so I'm instinctively not going to respond well to oversimplifications.

[GaryC]

the similarly disappointing Their Finest are about subjects that I know a great deal about, and so I'm instinctively not going to respond well to oversimplifications.

Interesting. What was your issue with that? (I'm on record as liking it quite a bit, and indeed much of Lone Scherfig's work, but no doubt I know less about its subject than you.)

[MichaelB]

Again, I just felt it was a very superficial take on potentially far richer subject matter - but I was up to my eyeballs in the history of the Crown Film Unit for several years when I was at the BFI, so I'm absolutely not the film's target audience. (Or I assume I wasn't!)

That said, I bought a copy of the source novel afterwards, although admittedly I haven't got round to reading it yet.