BY GAELE SOBOT
I've seen two films during which I desperately wanted to walk out of the cinema to escape the assault to my senses: Peter Greenaway's The Baby of Macon (1993) and Larry Clark's Kids (1995).
Greenaway's excesses included murder, disembowelment, dismemberment, a bishop sanctioning the rape of a young woman 206 times by soldiers, and incredibly boring, heavily ritualised settings and style.
Kids was unrelenting in its harsh portrayal of 24 hours in the life of a group of New York adolescents. Amongst the unprotected sex, drugs, degradation of young women, lack of concern for others, homophobia and violence, Jennie (played Chloe Sevigny) discovers that her only sexual encounter has left her HIV-positive. Her ex, the repulsive Telly (Leo Fitzpatrick), races to "de-flower" more virgins.
I hated it because I was hurting and there were no alternatives offered. I was scared, thinking of my own adolescent girls, hating the callous male characters and scared for all adolescents. I just couldn't take it, but like during The Baby of Macon, I went with someone else who did not have the same violent reactions as I did, so I sat through to the end.
Kids has become a "cult classic" — meaning trendy, offbeat, a fad but definitely not mainstream. The Baby of Macon had a very limited run in the US and disappeared without much comment.
Which brings me to the federal Office of Film and Literature Classification's (OFLC) recent refusal of classification to Larry Clark's and Edward Lachman's film Ken Park (2002). Ken Park has screened in many countries. It has opened in Moscow, Austria, Spain and Greece. It is scheduled to open in the US in August. SBS film reviewer Margaret Pomeranz describes it as a "good film", but of course "good" is an opinion and opinions vary. If it is a good film, it will be one good film among many in the world. The convenor of the OFLC's Classification Review Board, Maureen Shelley, even admits Ken Park has "substantial artistic merit".
My point is that it doesn't really matter to the censor if it is a good film or not. Karl Marx, writing as a journalist for the Rheinische Zeitung in 1842 (see < http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1842/free-A HREF="mailto:press/ch05.htm"><press/ch05.htm>), noted that censorship laws aimed at preventing freedom as something objectionable, achieve precisely the opposite: "Censorship makes every forbidden work, whether good or bad, into an extraordinary document, whereas freedom of the press deprives every ... work of an externally imposing effect."
Ken Park is a film that would have been screened at the Sydney Film Festival, and like many other films screened there, some people would have liked it and others would have found it objectionable. It may have achieved release in a few art house cinemas in Australia, without making much of a ripple.
Cinema buffs, film critics and some of the general public would have see it and gone home, debated about it perhaps, and it may have even caused them to think. Now, however, it has hit the mainstream media. It has a sizeable group of angry and some influential people rooting for it, it has received far more attention than it would have if it was allowed to be shown at the festival. It has become an event! Think of all those teenagers heading towards the internet to buy the DVD of Ken Park.
The Freedom to Read Statement, originally issued in May 1953 by the Westchester Conference of the American Library Association and the American Book Publishers Council (see <http://www.odl.state.ok.us/servlibs/l-files/freeread.htm>), stated that: "Most attempts at suppression rest on a denial of the fundamental premise of democracy: that the ordinary citizen, by exercising critical judgment, will accept the good and reject the bad."
In Australia, there are two areas in which those in power feel quite justified to advocate censorship in righteous defiance of this fundamental premise of democracy: national security and the protection of public morals.
I will not discuss national security as that would require a whole article in itself. Suffice it to say that the Australian media has no problem assuming a self-censoring role as guardian of the nation's security. The question I ask, however, is who defines national security and who defines public morals? How are they to be circumscribed?
Shelley, defending the OFLC's stance on the banning of Ken Park, claimed on ABC's Lateline on July 3, "the Australian community has very strong concerns about sex and violence and the depictions of minors. That's reflected in the act and the code and the regulations that we administer. This film clearly fell outside of that system and it was required to be refused classification."
Of course, we all share a horror of the harm being done to children. That is why last month the Family Court ruled that the indefinite detention of children in immigration centres is illegal. But federal immigration minister Philip Ruddock applied for a stay in the ruling. Now that that application has been dismissed, it is likely that an appeal will be made directly to the High Court for a stay on the court's original ruling.
Censorship makes arbitrariness into law. It appears that rather than having the courage and honesty to define what one can or cannot express as an opinion in art, the government acts against opinions it does not like through the agency of the censor. For that reason, the operation of censorship is entrusted not to the courts but to the police. As Maureen Shelley proudly noted on Lateline: "It's our role ... to make the decisions about the films when they come to us and it's the state police's role to enforce that when it's required."
As Marx remarked: "What a difference there is between a judge and a censor! The censor has no law but his superiors. The judge has no superiors but the law. The judge, however, has the duty of interpreting the law, as she/he understands it after conscientious examination, in order to apply it in a particular case. The censor's duty is to understand the law as officially interpreted for him/her in a particular case. The independent judge belongs neither to an individual nor to the government. The dependent censor is a government organ."
So it is that we are free in Australia to watch the contemporary Hollywood action/thriller formula until it is coming out of our ears — conflict, confrontation, chase and vengeance. Negative and distorted images of various groups of people, especially the image of the Arab terrorist are appallingly prevalent. Black Sunday (1977), Wrong is Right (1982), Iron Eagle (1986), True Lies (1994) and Rules of Engagement (2000) to name just a few.
Certain types of violence and aggression have been normalised. Just take a look at the video game by-products that our boy children are lusting after.
Big-budget blockbusters are often racist and exclusive in effect, if not in explicit intention, and favour groups with economic power and discriminate against those without it.
I choose not to go to see this type of movie and I would love it if these films didn't exist, but I don't think banning them is the answer.
Given that cinema functions as part of the social fabric, inseparable from questions of economics, ethics, politics and personal relationships, I see the answer in the development of critical awareness amongst Australian audiences through their exposure to diverse films, independent films, difficult films — films of all kinds.
The Sydney Film Festival and others like it offer these possibilities, even if only once a year. A real democracy based upon participative citizens requires the capacity to read/view all media texts critically. Those texts we agree with and those we don't.
So bring on the films, let us develop our critical awareness and let us choose the good from the bad!
[Gaele Sobot is a writer and filmmaker in Sydney.]
From Green Left Weekly, July 23, 2003.
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