Central to decisions on the regulation and censorship
of film are questions of audience suitability and maturity.
Domestic reception of film has raised concerns over
unregulated consumption, with video and television
versions of films receiving greater censorship. But in
one famous case, a film that had been made specifically
for British television, Peter Watkins’s The War Game
(1965), was banned from being shown on the BBC
following government intervention. Made to mark the
twentieth anniversary of the dropping of the bomb on
Hiroshima, this drama-documentary depicting the horrors of a nuclear attack on Britain was withdrawn, as the government said it contained ‘‘inaccuracies.’’ The struggle to have this important political film seen by the
public began with a limited theatrical release at
London’s National Film Theatre in 1966. With an ‘‘X’’
certificate and cinema chains refusing to exhibit the film,
its national release was mainly through church and community halls, where it was booked as an educational
screening by groups opposed to nuclear weapons such
as CND and the Quakers. Despite The War Game’s
winning of an Academy Award for Best Documentary
in 1967, the BBC refused to lift its ban on the film until
1985.
Historically, the BBFC had refused to classify political films, waiting until 1954 to grant an ‘‘X’’ certificate
to Sergei Eisenstein’s 1925 film, Bronenosets Potyomkin
(Battleship Potemkin). It had banned the film in 1926
famously declaring that cinema ‘‘is no place for politics.’’
The recently introduced ‘‘X’’ certificate was designed
to allow many of the foreign films of directors such as
Akira Kurosawa, Ingmar Bergman, and Michelangelo
Antonioni to be passed uncut. The censor was now
prepared to view this new world cinema as art cinema,
to take into account the film’s artistic intentions and the
maturity of its probable audience. The view of the BBFC
was that a foreign film shown only in art cinemas and by
a smaller audience was ‘‘less likely to produce criticism.’’
Such a view allowed Vittorio De Sica’s La Ciociara (Two
Women, 1960), with its depiction of a double rape, to be
passed uncut, though when the film went on general
release and was shown to a wider audience, the scene
was removed.
As an extreme example of controlled distribution,
Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971)—a film
that had been banned in the Canadian provinces of
Alberta and Nova Scotia, among other places—had been
passed uncut by the BBFC but was unavailable for
screening or broadcast in the United Kingdom for more
than twenty-five years, after Kubrick requested that
Warner Bros. withdraw all prints from circulation.
British newspapers had begun reporting cases of copycat
acts of violence, in which juveniles were apparently
inspired by the content of the film; it was rumoured that
Kubrick began receiving death threats, and in 1973 the
film was withdrawn. Its removal was heavily enforced by
lawyers, which resulted in the successful prosecution of
the Scala, a cinema that dared to present a screening in
1992, and an injunction (later lifted) on British television’s Channel 4 to prevent it from showing twelve
extracts from the film in 1993. The film was released
again in the United Kingdom only following Kubrick’s
death in 1999.
The cult that grew around A Clockwork Orange made
the poster for the film an iconic image. Other posters and
advertising material for films have been denied exposure,
and though replacement images are found, the cultural
impact of the movie is adjusted. In the United Kingdom,
one of the most powerful poster-regulating authorities is
London Transport, which owns the advertising sites on
the underground and key billboards on its aboveground
properties. In 1959 it banned a poster for a double bill of
The Alligator People and Return of the Fly, for fear that it
would frighten children who would be in central London
in large numbers for Christmas shopping; in 1989 it
removed part of a poster for Peter Jackson’s film Bad
Taste, which featured an alien with its middle finger
raised, that was deemed offensive; and in 1994 it filled
in a gap in the split skirt of Demi Moore displayed in the
advertising for Disclosure, which it considered erotically
charged.