“Play it, Sam,” pleads Ingrid Bergman. “Play As Time Goes By.” Sam complies. “You must remember this . . .” And we do remember it. Casablanca is the ultimate Hollywood classic, a masterpiece of film from the days when bit-part players had charisma and stars were beyond luminous. Everybody knows and loves Casablanca — except the cinemagoers of 1940s Ireland, where the film was banned by the censor. Twice.
The first ban was political. Wartime “propaganda” movies were taboo because they might inform the Irish people, blanketed by emergency legislation, of what was happening in the world. When Casablanca came up for scrutiny again, it was nailed on moral grounds: as Rick and Ilsa, Bogart and Bergman clearly enjoyed a relationship of the nonmarital kind. In the eyes of the 1940s censor, this was enough to qualify as perverted foreign filth. The scissors were employed to remove the offending scenes; what remained wasn’t even the shell of a movie.
The current censor, John Kelleher, grimaces when recounting such stories. Yes, he says, it was a repressive institution that arrogantly assumed it knew what was best. It banned or mutilated movies that now appear innocent, including many that have gone on to achieve classic status.
As with the censorship of books, no allowances were made for artistic quality: filth was filth. Just as writers such as James Joyce, Samuel Beckett and John McGahern had their work banned, so Irish audiences were deprived of the chance to see cinematic artworks by directors such as Eisenstein and Fellini.
“The first 50 years were extraordinarily repressive,” admits Kelleher, who tomorrow delivers a lecture on the changing role of the censor at the West Cork Literary Festival in Bantry. “It was paternalist. You had a new state where the power of the church was extremely strong and the politicians were nervous.”
But everything, it seems, is different now. Literary censorship has all but vanished. Although the office of film censor is still maintained by the state — indeed, it has expanded in recent years to deal with videos and DVDs — it is no longer in the banning business. Under Kelleher, the office has rebranded itself as a consumer service. Its role is to determine what movies are fit for adult viewing and which should come with a warning. “A guide dog rather than a watchdog,” he says. “I think it has changed enormously. The history of censorship mirrors the social history of the country and the major social and cultural changes that have taken place.”
Can an institution that started life under such authoritarian conditions mutate into being a provider of consumer services? Kelleher argues that the framers of the original 1920s legislation left an important loophole by stating that films may be found to be obscene “in the opinion of the censor”. So as opinion changes, the office changes with it.
Yet something of the old paternalism remains. The urge to exercise control is wired into the censor’s DNA. It is far from clear whether one incumbent such as Kelleher, with his liberal instincts, can alter that.
The background of successive film censors tells its own story. The early ones were political appointees with no real knowledge of cinema. This began to change from the 1960s, when Dermot Breen and the television personality Frank Hall had at least some connection to the film business. But Kelleher and his predecessor, Sheamus Smith, were the first censors to have come from a film-making background.
Smith, censor from 1986 to 2003, initiated a more liberal regime. He banned some films, such as Bad Lieutenant, in which a naked Harvey Keitel lets rip with a tormented howl of frothy language while prostrate before a crucifix. His other decisions could appear arbitrary, even contradictory. He lifted the ban on Monty Python’s Life of Brian, only to ban other films by Terry Jones, including Monty Python’s Meaning of Life and the sex comedy Personal Services.
In the 1980s and 1990s, however, sexual content alone was rarely enough to get a film banned. Smith began to follow the Scandinavian model, where violence was seen as potentially more harmful. But some of the old reflexes lingered on: a mixture of sexuality and religion — as seen in The Last Temptation of Christ — was likely to trigger paternalist alarms.
Kelleher, in contrast, does not see himself as being in the business of banning films. It is a weapon he rarely deploys — and so far never against cinema releases, only against the uglier end of the video/DVD trade.
“In one case where I exercised a prohibition,” he says, “it is obvious the people involved were either mentally subnormal, very undereducated, under duress, drugged or all of the above. What’s done to them is sickening because they were being taken advantage of. That degradation is very different to good wholesome shagging.”
The question of where pornography begins is a subjective one and the definition shifts accordingly. Sixty years ago, Casablanca was seen as pornographic. But Kelleher passed the film 9 Songs for adult viewing, despite its extreme sexual explicitness.
This has led to an odd phenomenon in Ireland, with the film censor drawing flak for being unduly lenient. In the case of Bad Santa — where a foul-mouthed drunk masquerades as a department store Santa Claus — trouble was inevitable. Today’s consumers share one feature with the Catholic paternalists of old: a desire to protect the innocence of young children. Kelleher was publicly grilled by Joe Duffy on RTE’s Liveline when a mother took her three-year-old child to the film without noticing it had a 15A cert.
Kelleher could only reiterate that one person’s obscenity is another’s hilarious satire, and that he had done his job by giving the movie an age restriction, subject to parental choice. If a consumer-orientated system is to work, then the onus is on members of the public to inform themselves. They can have no complaint if they fail to do so, no matter how offended they are.
Yet, he insists, he wants to listen to the public. He believes strongly in the virtues of market research, communication and focus groups. Part of his vision for the office of film censor — a name he dislikes and hopes to have changed to something more user-friendly such as film classifier — is openness and transparency.
But the office retains powers that, in modern Ireland, are disturbing. These include control over posters and ancillary materials, as well as the power to give a film a special imprimatur — as happened in 1996 with Michael Collins — because it is deemed historically important.
The fact these powers are almost never used does not dilute their incongruity in a free society. The old Ireland was proud of its restrictive regime: it felt it was doing its duty to God and to the people. In contrast, contemporary Ireland often seems proud of having swung the other way.
At the same time the argument has moved on. Pornography is largely an internet phenomenon and the debate about choice and control has shifted its focus to other media. The office of film censor remains a relic of a bygone era — and one we have subverted to gratify our view of ourselves.
It is hard to deny that the classification system performs a useful service, but the censor’s office, with all its historical baggage, is not necessarily the ideal provider of that service.
Kelleher has certainly transformed the office. “The biggest change is a recognition that people who are 18 are adults, they should be able to make up their own minds,” he says. “Our role would be to advise — a consumer guide.”
If we are really so grown-up, though, maybe it’s time to try living without any film censor; there are other ways of enforcing the restrictions that a sane society needs. Perhaps it is time to make those decisions for ourselves, without needing a government watchdog — or even a guide dog.
