Exploiting local controversy: regional British censorship of Last Tango in Paris (1972)

Abstract

This article explores local authority responses to the cinematic release of Last Tango in Paris in Britain. Using a range of archival material from the BBFC, the National Archives and the Public Records Office of Northern Ireland it offers a detailed, comparative case study of three different locations; Belfast, Newport and Oxford. It argues that comparing local censorship decisions with the national decisions of the BBFC offer little in the way of regional nuance. In order to effectively understand the workings of local censorship a deeper understanding of local discourses is needed as well as acknowledgement of broader pressure group activity and its impact on the local picture, such as that of the National Festival of Light.The recent surge of renewed interest in film censorship, due in part to the opening up of the British Board of Film Classification's archives, has led to increased understanding of the workings of the BBFC and expanded debates about permission and taboo and the historical regulation of moving image in Britain. 1 Exploring their own archives allows for a more nuanced picture of the BBFC as an organization to emerge: specifically it indicates the BBFC's decisionmaking process and responses to particular films, as well as their desire to engage with its audiences and stakeholders. However, the ways in which 2 decisions about film censorship played out in different regions is harder to explore, as the local picture is often far more specific to the local area.Local debates about film and cinema need to be understood within the framework of power relationships and censorship, suggested by Annette Kuhn, but also acknowledge that regionality and local discourses are a crucial way of understanding responses to film and cinema. 2 As work undertaken on historical cinema-going has indicated, responses to cinema are shaped by class, taste and location. Sue Harper's work on the Regent cinema in 1930s Portsmouth focuses on the financial records of this specific cinema and explores how the data can be used to indicate patterns of taste within cinema-going concluding that this particular cinema catered to the needs of a 'lower middle-class taste community.' 3 However, Harper also cautions against typifying the findings; she instead draws attention to the exceptional nature of the evidence stating 'in order to get the full picture of Portsmouth's film going habits, we would need comparable admissions figures for all the cinemas and these do not exist.' 4 Therefore the Regent cinema and its films are indicative of particular local tastes, but they in no way represent the tastes of the city and community as a whole and the full local picture is far more complex.Precisely the same arguments can be applied to explorations of film controversy in local areas. Watch committee minutes which detail the decisions made by councils on contentious films can be an exciting and revealing source of information. Similarly council minutes, letters from members of the public, and policy documents produced by councilors all o...

The Shared History of Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971) and Ken Russell’s The Devils (1971)

“…8 Drawing on council minutes, policy documents and other council documentation and correspondence, Barber persuasively argues for the crucial importance of such comparative analysis to local film censorship studies in order to consider the particular cultural and social-economic dynamics, preoccupations and networks of power and interaction that inform and shape local film censorship in different regional areas of the UK. 40 Hence, the decisions to not exhibit films were ultimately made on a micro level, by local councils often under pressure from powerful conservative pressure groups. This is something that Kubrick seems to have been aware of and had taken into consideration.…”