The Arts: The nature of the State's film-censoring process has been largely secret - until now. Kevin Rockett's new book sheds light on the control culture, writes Hugh Linehan.
'If that plane leaves the ground and you're not with him you'll regret it. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of your life."
Those immortal words, spoken by Bogart to Bergman at the end of Casablanca, never reached Ireland. When the film was released here (three years late, due to wartime restrictions that forbade mention that there was some sort of conflict going on somewhere), this, and any other suggestion that the hero and (married) heroine had actually fallen in love, were excised by the Irish Film Censor.
It's one of the many decisions recorded in Kevin Rockett's magisterial new book, Irish Film Censorship, A Cultural Journey from Silent Cinema to Internet Pornography, which relates the often sorry, sometimes hilarious, sometimes revealing history of the relationship between the Irish State and cinema.
Gone With the Wind, Rear Window, Rashomon, Dr Strangelove. . . these are just some of the films that suffered substantial cuts before reaching Irish cinemagoers. "I tried to focus on the ones that people know, which is why Casablanca is on the cover," says Rockett, a lecturer in film studies at Trinity College Dublin who has written or edited several key books on cinema and Ireland, including The Irish Filmography and Neil Jordan: Exploring Boundaries. "Because there were so many, that otherwise you could go on and on and on."
Many films were banned outright, but it's the detail of the cutting process that has up to now been kept secret, a secrecy that Rockett has been fighting against for more than 15 years. Chapter two, which deals with Dublin Corporation's efforts to censor films in the years prior to the foundation of the State, was written as his PhD thesis in 1989. But his plans to continue the story into successive decades were stymied by the Department of Justice, which refused to grant access to the records of the Film Censor's office.
"I was determined not to write the book until the records were released," says Rockett. "I have letters from different ministers for justice down the years, denying access, the reason given being that these formed part of a confidential commercial contract with the film distributors. This for records dating back to the 1920s and 1930s! Of course, they just didn't want anyone to know about it. They were afraid of being ridiculed.
When the Freedom of Information Act came into being, Rockett wrote to the then censor, Sheamus Smith, to enquire whether it applied to his office. "Of course, it didn't apply retrospectively," he says. "But Sheamus then took it upon himself in 1998 to release 127 volumes of the records. Sheamus and John [Kelleher, the current Censor] have now let me see all the records, right up to the present day, in their offices."
While it covers the issue of censorship before independence, the book mainly relates to the structures set up in the 1923 Censorship of Films Act, one of the first pieces of significant legislation to be passed by the new state, and still the basis of film censorship and classification in Ireland. The Act established the office of Film Censor, along with an appeal board, a system that continues today.
Some of the contributions to the Dáil debate on the passing of the Act offer a chilling insight into the prevailing climate. William Magennis, a Cumann na nGaedheal TD, as well as professor of metaphysics at UCD, opined that: "Purity of mind and sanity of outlook upon life were long ago regarded as characteristic of our people. The loose views and the vile lowering of values that belong to other races and other peoples were being forced upon our people through the popularity of the cinematograph."
Professor Magennis went on to become the first chairman of the Film Censorship Appeal Board. But the dominant figure for the first 20 years of Irish State censorship was the Censor himself, James Montgomery. "Montogomery was a very sophisticated man, and was one of the most forthcoming of all the Censors in the records," says Rockett.
He was also deeply conservative and highly alert to the particular dangers posed by the silver screen.
"I am not trying to say that the morality of the stage is superior to that of the 'talkies', but it must be remembered that the stage attracts a sophisticated adult audience and that the following of a play calls for the exercise of thought," Montgomery wrote in his annual report to the minister for justice in 1931. "We have thus the anomaly of a sophisticated and limited audience for comparatively reticent productions, and a more highly sophisticated entertainment offered indiscriminately by the Cinema to the unsophisticated masses."
Cinema, therefore, was triply dangerous - it bypassed the "exercise of thought", appealing instead to the senses (and possibly the sensual); it was not reticent; and (a vital point) it appealed to "the unsophisticated masses".
"It wasn't just the content," says Rockett. "It was the medium itself. He might perhaps have been happier to have banned cinema entirely, if that had been possible. There was a serious problem with visual culture, and the question was: how do you contain this?
"It wasn't just what was happening on screen. It's only now that film theory is beginning to recognise the importance of the audience experience: the buildings themselves; the dangerous implications of Mediterranean pleasues; the plush carpets; the central heating. People lived in horrible cold-water flats, and here they were sitting in these places, in the dark, beside strangers. It was just about the only unsupervised space for adolescents and young adults, where young couples could hold hands."
In the 1930s, some bishops complained that the glamour and luxury seen on cinema screens was encouraging Irish people to emigrate. They may well have been right, and who could blame them?
"People talked about the traditional Dublin cinema queue as a symbol of how much Irish people loved films," says Rockett. "But the reason for the queue was that they were all lining up for the cheap seats. You could walk straight in and purchase one of the more expensive tickets. The average income of a Dublin working-class family was two-thirds that of its British counterpart. The number of visits per head of population per year was 22 in Dublin. In Glasgow, it was 35."
Although the films that arrived on Irish shores had usually already passed the scrutiny of strict examiners in the US and Britain (especially once the Hays Code was introduced in the early 1930s), Montgomery and his successors had plenty of work to do. Certain subjects were taboo - divorce and infidelity in particular. But anything that suggested that women might enjoy freedom outside the home, or that nightclubs were a good thing, or that a Catholic priest might not be as pure as the driven snow got the chop.
But, by the mid-1950s, the films coming in to the Censor's office were beginning to change. Under increasing pressure from television, Hollywood was slowly becoming more daring in the treatment of taboo subjects. The emergence of the teenager as an economically autonomous and commercially valuable target market saw the rise of new icons such as Elvis Presley, whose gyrations in such films as Jailhouse Rock caused all sorts of problems with the censor. At the same time, a new wave of art films was coming out of Italy, France and Sweden. Irish journalists, who had been remarkably quiescent about censorship up until the late 1950s, began to criticise the system.
However, change was very slow in coming. The preferred policy was to issue only general certificates. As a result, a huge number of films were either banned or hacked to pieces. Rockett believes that this was a deliberate policy pursued by Peter Berry, the powerful civil servant who effectively ruled the Department of Justice for many years.
"The new censors went in for their pep talkwhen they were appointed - but it was never written down," he says. "They prevented the censor releasing films on limited certs. The films which were causing a lot of trouble at that time were from the British New Wave - films like Room at the Top and Saturday Night, Sunday Morning. Fergus Linehan at The Irish Times and Des Hickey at the Sunday Independent were arguing that it was absurd that such films could not be shown to an adult audience."
But the dogmas remained in place for quite some time. Responding to a motion at the Fianna Fáil Ard Fheis in 1959 on the grading of films, Sean Lemass was unequivocal. "We regard these regulations as being in exactly the same category as other regulations which prevent the sale of putrid meat or contaminated milk."
As minister for justice in the early 1960s, Charles Haughey set his face against any change in the system, and it was not until the arrival of Brian Lenihan in the job that things started to shift. Lenihan effectively replaced the entire Appeal Board (many of whose members had been in place for decades), and the new appointees introduced age-based certificates and began to reverse some of the bans and cuts of conservative censor Christopher Macken.
It would be wrong, though, to believe the system changed completely or quickly - throughout the 1960s, 1970s and into the 1980s, many films were still banned, and scenes were deleted from such well-known films as Blow-Up, The Graduate and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.
Despite the shifting moral climate of the period, and campaigns by journalists such as Ciaran Carty at the Sunday Independent against censorship, it was not until the appointment of Sheamus Smith as censor in 1986 that there was a decisive change. Smith announced that, despite his job title, he saw himself as a classifier rather than a censor of films, and that he did not wish to cut any director's work. Smith has now been succeeded by John Kelleher, who has recently launched a website to inform the public of film classifications, and has introduced a reduced fee for certifying films on limited release. It's the latter initiative that has probably given rise to the recent furore over Michael Winterbottom's sexually eplicit Nine Songs; previously, such a film would probably only have been shown under a club system at venues such as the IFI.
"All this debate around Nine Songs is completely spurious," believes Rockett, whose book also examines such phenomena as the "video nasty" scare of the early 1980s, which led to new legislation covering video classification, and more recent concerns over paedophile pornography on the internet. Ultimately, he believes, any attempt at censorship is doomed to failure in the age of the download.
"It's a waste of time trying. What it is now is a consumer guide, providing information on the website or on video boxes. The most fraught area now is about where you position the State vis-a-vis what a family can or cannot do in privacy. And we need be teaching primary school children about media and visual culture. Kids need to be armed with that when coming to a film."
* Film Censorship: A Cultural Journey from Silent Cinema to Internet Pornography is published by Four Courts Press.
