Why does the censor's office never publish its reasons for banning films? And will this policy change with the appointment of John Kelleher as official censor of films?, asks Hugh Linehan
The appointment of John Kelleher to succeed Sheamus Smith as the ninth Official Censor of Films in the history of the State marks a watershed in one way, at least. This is the first time in 80 years that the position has been publicly advertised and that a structured interview process has taken place. With his years of experience in independent film production and in RTÉ, Kelleher seems to fit very much into the same mould as his predecessor. But leaks to the media following the appointment have indicated that all is not sweetness and light within the Censor's offices on Harcourt Terrace.
The assistant censor, Audrey Conlon, withdrew her application for the position shortly before Kelleher's appointment. Some newspapers have carried extensive and apparently well-informed articles about Conlon's excellent qualifications for the job (although it should be pointed out that she herself was appointed by a previous Minister for Justice, without any public advertisement).
When Smith steps down next April, it will be almost two years after his due retirement date. Well-informed sources blame the delay on a stalemate at the Cabinet table between Minister for Finance Charlie McCreevy and former Minister for Justice, John O'Donoghue. More than three years ago, in August 1999, O'Donoghue announced plans to publish a consultation document before the end of the year on "the whole apparatus of censorship including that of films, videos and CD-ROMs." We are still waiting for that document, but the Minister did find time, on his last day in office, to appoint his Kerry Fianna Fáil colleague, former Senator Tom Fitzgerald, as a part-time assistant censor. The appointment process seems to be far more interesting to our politicians than the introduction of an accountable, appropriate certification system for film and video audiences in this country.
On the surface, it may appear that the system is working satisfactorily as it is. The bad old days of blanket censorship are over, after all. Sheamus Smith has frequently expressed his desire to be seen as a certifier of films, rather than a censor. The word "censor" not only has echoes of an earlier, less enlightened age; it also implies that the holder of the position spends his time hacking lumps out of films, or worse, banning them altogether. Smith, to his credit, has preferred to do neither. He has always made clear his respect for the right of a film's director to edit his film as he sees fit. He has also been reluctant to prevent a film being seen.
Technically, the Irish Film Censor does not "ban" a film; he simply refuses it a certificate for exhibition in this State. Smith has only exercised this right seven times during his tenure - some of his predecessors rejected that number of films in a month.
It is not Sheamus Smith's fault that successive ministers for justice have failed to amend the antiquated 1923 Censorship of Films Act to take account of the vast technological, cultural and social changes of the last 80 years (the only significant initiative has been the inclusion of video titles at the end of the 1980s). But absurdities abound in the legislation. For example, a film distribution company is breaking the law if it provides for publication a publicity still from a film which has not yet been certified. But such material, mostly disseminated these days over the Internet, is used all the time by every newspaper in the country, including this one.
Equally, stills from films which will never be certified (for example, the excellent Morvern Callar, shown recently at the IFC) are used all the time. Such films are shown through the "club" system, a nominal smokescreen which enables festivals and arthouse cinemas to avoid the prohibitive costs of having their films certified. It's an Irish solution to an Irish problem, and one which suits most of the people most of the time, but it is essentially based on a lie - that venues such as the IFC are not open to the general public. One might reasonably ask why it is that the real club system which most Irish people use to watch films - through video rental clubs - is subject to the censor while cinema clubs are not.
Most of the time, the parties involved are happy to go along with this charade, but occasionally it erupts into the open. In 1995, for example, the IFC announced that it planned to show Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers three times a day for an entire month under the club system.
The film had already been refused a certificate by the Censor, and it was generally perceived that the IFC was cocking a snook at that decision. Accounts vary, but it is clear that pressure was brought to bear on the IFC by the Department of Justice, that the question of the legitimacy of the venue's bar licence was raised (at a time when the building was experiencing severe financial difficulties) and that the IFC finally backed down and withdrew the film.
The club system is now being applied more widely than ever before. Earlier this year, following a complaint from a member of the public about an exhibition of video work by the US artist Paul McCarthy at the Butler Gallery in Kilkenny, the Garda informed the gallery that the exhibition was subject to the 1923 Act.
Following consultation with the Censor's Office, the gallery instituted its own version of the club system, requiring visitors to sign a book at the door. In theory, any art gallery showing audiovisual work in this country should now be doing the same thing, or else submitting the work for certification
This is bad law, and it brings the Censor's Office and the certification system into disrepute. (It should be noted, that the issue of obscenity is covered by entirely different legislation from the 1923 Act, which is purely concerned with the commercial exhibition of films.)
One reason why Sheamus Smith has been able to refuse certificates to so few films is that he hasn't needed to see them. In the UK, by contrast, controversies regularly erupt over particular films, and over whether the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) will grant them a certificate in an uncut form.
These tend not to be the unabashedly pornographic films (which have their own certification system and distribution circuit), but confrontational works by auteur film-makers. The most recent example, Gaspar Noé's Irreversible, was passed uncut three weeks ago by the BBFC. The film features extremely graphic and explicit footage of a violent rape, and the BBFC explained at some length why it had arrived at its decision. No such controversy is likely in Ireland - Irreversible, like Noe's previous, also controversial film Seul Contre Tous (I Stand Alone) is highly unlikely to be presented for certification. Instead, it is safe to predict, it will be screened at the IFC and (possibly) Cork's Kino under the "club" system.
What is the club system? It has no status in law, yet it goes back as far as the 1930s, when a small and relatively select band of people recognised that the new medium of cinema was an art form in its own right, and that masters of that art such as Eisenstein and Pudovkin deserved to be seen and appreciated.
The State, in its turn, was willing to turn a blind eye to their activities as long as such Bolshevik propaganda didn't find its way into commercial cinemas. That distinction between "film as art", which could be made accessible to the middle-class intelligentsia, and "film as entertainment", a potentially dangerous influence on the masses, persists to this day.
If, as Smith suggests, the functionof his office is now one of classification rather than censorship, that is a major and welcome change. But that change has happened through his own initiative rather than through any legislative re-definition. Many people, especially those with a vested commercial interest in the certification process, may argue that there's no harm in that: we would be waiting a very long time for the Dáil or successive ministers for justice to address this issue.
But if that is the case, who then gets to define progress? Irish film distribution and exhibition is a lucrative business which goes back to before the foundation of the State. To this day, the great majority of film distribution companies in Ireland are "regional" offices of UK companies, which themselves are owned by vast multi-media conglomerates such as Sony, TimeWarner/AoL and NewsCorp. Their prime objective, not unreasonably, has been to ensure the steady, uninterrupted flow of their product to the small but relatively lucrative market which is the Republic. In recent years, their main concern has been with the certification of their films. If a high-school teen comedy receives an 18 cert because it has too many semen jokes, they may protest, and that protest will be considered by an Appeals Board.
This process is financed by the distribution companies themselves, which pay a fee for certification based on the duration of the film. As a result, smaller, less mainstream films are discriminated against, since the fee takes no account of how many prints of the film will circulate in the country - the charge for the new James Bond film will be much the same, say, as for Pedro Almodóvar's Talk to Her, a rare non-English-language commercial release. It's a system which favours the strong over the weak, which encourages the marginalisation of non-Hollywood films, and which suits the major distributors, In fact, the Censor's Office is entirely financed by these revenues, and the key relationship in the certification process is between the Censor and a small number of powerful, commercial companies.
This may go some way towards explaining the disgraceful lack of accountability and openness in the entire process. There is no obligation on the Film Censor to explain the reasoning behind any decision to the public.
On whose behalf is the Censor's Office being run? It hasn't even occurred to anyone in Harcourt Terrace to set up a website, which the public in general and parents in particular could access for more detailed classification information on films on release. Perhaps it is felt that such a site would offer embarrassingly slim pickings, since the Censor refuses to give any information on his decisions.
In an era when every other State and semi-State body appears to have a lavish website replete with mission statements, contact addresses and detailed descriptions of its functions, the Censor's Office, operating as the interface between the people of this country on the one hand and the most powerful and manipulative representatives of the global information industry on the other, sees no need for such a service. Compare and contrast with our neighbours in the UK, where the BBFC provides detailed explanations of all its decisions, and makes that information immediately available on its website.
Sheamus Smith has declared that the 1923 Act is "vague enough in its guidelines to allow censorship or classification to progress with the times". On the evidence available to us, he is wrong. An unaccountable antedeluvian system bedevilled by political patronage and legislative paralysis is not what the filmgoers of this country deserve. It's time for the current Minister for Justice to dust off that 1999 consultation document (if it ever existed) and look at it again.
