Family values

No change there, then – a decade or so ago a trailer intended for American cinemas had to be re-edited because it had the temerity to show a revealing portion of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling for a second or two.

Similarly, I don’t believe A Room with a View, whose bathing scene is one of the best examples of obviously non-sexual nudity I can think of (and was duly rated PG or equivalent practically everywhere else in the Western world) was ever formally passed by the Motion Picture Association of America – it ended up being shown unrated, presumably suffering the same financial penalties re distribution and advertising as any other commercial release that doesn’t play by the MPAA’s rules.

I didn’t understand until I realised that in the US most people never see this type of pre-19th century art full of (gasp) naked graces and (shock) cupids!

Rob, yes they do, but most people don’t go to museums, and most people do watch television.

Tangentially, I don’t think old-master titties and willies are actually more virtuous than live or downmarket ones. But that’s another argument.

Vance, please make it, as there aren’t any good arguments happening here.

West Europeans feel superior to the US. Dog bites man. Sun rises. Expected also to set later on today. (Except in near-polar areas where, oh what’s the point.)

And my source for this story was … Lance Knobel.

And Lance’s nationality is ….?

Give it a rest Doug!

“I don’t think old-master titties and willies are actually more virtuous than live or downmarket ones. But that’s another argument.”

Perhaps fortunately, the U. S. Supreme Court doesn’t agree with you . . .

Does anyone else remember Private Eye’s demonstration of how to decode the message “THE DAILY MAIL IS PISS-POOR” contained in the Book of Revelation?

Mr Merrill [afe 2 July] doesn’t like football, the Tour de France or the Olympic Games, but is amused by bicycle stealing elks. And is ‘dog bites man’ about West Europeans finding the red state US hegemony risible. Don’t confine that to West Europe, Doug.

Mencken, Merrill. “No one ever went broke underestimating…etc.” As proved this November.

No one in a glass house should throw a stone, but it is probable that the elk does not believe in ‘creationism’ and whatever else is ‘touch screen’ in Diebold land.

Get used to it, Mr Merrill, you have nearly four more years of being a laughing stock.

That’s politics.

I think the director should honor the distributors’ request to erase the offending bits, but not their request to pretend no such bits were in the original. Let him pixellate Cupid’s tackle like the faces of car-thieves in reality cop shows, and the distributors’ moral panic will be fully addressed.

As for the embarrassment of having everyone know they did it, they shouldn’t feel embarrassed; are they ashamed of their own morals?

Meanwhile, over at the Times, Michael Powell has stepped into the fray.

Where’s the Spirit of Justice?

ARC

“Tangentially, I don’t think old-master titties and willies are actually more virtuous than live or downmarket ones. But that’s another argument.”
…vince maverick

There is a non-trivial (and not so tangential) question as to why Veronese showed the willy. To simply say that Europeans are or were more comfortable with non-sexual nudity is to oversimplify a very complex subject. One can imagine the reaction to Henry the Eighth or Elisabeth Regina disrobing while holding court. I suspect old masters and Victorians were engaging in a light licentiousness, that I heartily approve and share.

I speak as one heartbroken over reading in the paper this morning that Mike Nichols cut Natalie Portman’s nude scene from Closer.

There’s a very telling sentence near the end of the Michael Powell op-ed in today’s NY Times:

Berating citizens who believe in values and reasonable limits is insulting and polarizing and distracts from the legitimate issues of this policy debate.

Seems to me that the obvious response is:

“Suggesting that citizens who disagree with you about government regulation of ‘indecency’ are utterly devoid of ‘values’ is even more insulting and polarizing.”

Gonna be a looooonnnng four years…

The funnier bit from the FT story is this:

“Funding was delayed until about a week before shooting was finished, in part because banks required a document to be circulated and signed among 17 groups of lawyers certifying that the writer – William Shakespeare – and his descendants had no lien on the picture.”

It’s related to the bit cited above. This is all about lawyers and CYA. Heaven forbid one rely on commonsense: Shakespeare is in the public domain, and the FCC isn’t concerned about 16th century frescoes. But someone insisted on demonstrating his cleverness and thus revealed his foolishness.

In a suburb near Boston, a householder had the effrontery to place a cast of Michelangelo’s David in their front yard where children could see it. Indignant letters flooded into the town newspaper and eventually the statue was removed.

Thank goodness things got interesting, and all it took was a little excessive snark. Chris B and/or Lance K, are you really geniunely surprised that philistines are making decisions about movie backgrounds on a CYA basis? Surprised that there are philistines among the decision-makers in that business? Surprised that they are making ignorant decisions?

I thought all three were head-smackingly obvious, which is why I rolled my eyes here in the comments.

(By the way, for anyone who wants to chime in on the inherently superior European way of doing things, I can only suggest prolonged exposure to Bavarian television.)

Paul L, I’m not sure where you got the value judgements from my July afoe post. I like soccer, the Tour de Lance, er, France, and the Olympics, but happened to think that the conjunction of the three was likely to prove a distraction from political issues. Does anyone remember any important European political issues from this summer? Me neither.

On the other hand, I am indeed amused by bicycle-stealing elk, amd much more by falling moose, and disappearing handball teams. Europe is a funny place, which should count as progress somewhere.

Also Paul L, I’m just not sure that someone writing from Australia really wants to start a pissing match about relative national contributions to world culture. Call me crazy.

Rob, I’m not defending the action. I’m saying that this sort of thing is so utterly commonplace that surprise about it could only be feigned, and thus intended to mock. Maybe Chris and/or Lance really were surprised. I learn something new every day.

Michael, you seem to be saying that a provocative poster is less provocative if it alludes to a high-class work of art. I don’t think this makes much sense.

Check out this interesting page of excerpts on the Venus of Urbino — starting with Mark Twain.

Michael, you seem to be saying that a provocative poster is less provocative if it alludes to a high-class work of art. I don’t think this makes much sense.

It makes perfect sense to me. Only a couple of days ago, Marcel Duchamp’s famous urinal appeared on the front page of at least one British broadsheet newspaper. Since I immediately recognised it as the Duchamp, I knew that the attached article would be about modern art, not about sanitation, and never considered for a second that I was supposed to “read” the image as merely that of a urinal.

(In fact, it’s just occurred to me that a picture of a different urinal might have achieved something closer to Duchamp’s original intentions – because that particular one has so definitively become an objet d’art, its original shock value has completely dissipated)

So that’s one example of a provocative image that’s become much less so as a result of its cultural associations – and so it is with the Underground posters, provided you recognise the allusion. To the uninitiated the Gothic poster is merely an image of a misshapen dwarf about to commit an unspeakable act upon the body of a sleeping woman. But to anyone familiar with the source, it triggers off associations with the culture that produced not only Fuseli but also Byron, Shelley, Mary Shelley and Frankenstein, the subjects of the film – and this information overload serves to dissipate any shock value that the image might otherwise possess, so it becomes less provocative.

But this only works if you’re familiar with the source and its historical and cultural background. Ken Russell obviously was, as would have been much of his target audience. But ordinary Tube travellers who had no intention of seeing the film and who knew nothing about minor nineteenth-century British artists would have read something quite different – which is why I can accept London Underground’s argument in favour of banning the poster.

But on the other hand, is there really anyone out there who doesn’t know that naked cherubs are a common feature in the history of Western art? The Gothic poster was at least sexually suggestive – but who seriously thinks the same is true of the Veronese painting? (I might change my mind if I saw the actual image, but I somehow doubt it – and Michael Radford’s reaction suggests that his surprise was genuine).

Of course I don’t pretend to understand at all why censors find a joyously consensual vanilla love scene between a happily married couple a cause for more restrictions than a violent murder.

In the case of the late James Ferman, who controlled British film censorship between 1975 and 1998, he didn’t – he was constantly trying to relax restrictions on consensual sex (even if unsimulated), at least partly because he wanted to persuade his fellow European censors to get tougher on violence.

Unfortunately, he kept running up against the police, Customs and the Home Office – and rumour has it that his departure, although billed as “retirement”, wasn’t entirely voluntary, since his decision to pass a number of films that were unarguably hardcore porn (i.e. there was no possibility of mounting a defence on aesthetic or contextual grounds, as had been the case with other censorship milestones such as Nagisa Oshima’s In the Realm of the Senses or explicit but authentic sex education videos) shortly after the Blair government was first elected in 1997 was followed by his relatively sudden departure from office.

Ironically, only three years later the British Board of Film Classification was forced to relax its guidelines on consensual sex after losing a judicial review, thus achieving by fiat the situation Ferman was trying to reach voluntarily.

Give it a rest Doug!

No, it’s you who need the rest, Chris. There isn’t any point about this puerile post save the one Doug explained.

Thanks for reminding me why Crooked Timber isn’t worth logging onto anymore.

Dan, I’m not arguing that kids should be ‘protected’ from Shakespeare, I’m sorry if it came across like that.

I greatly enjoyed “The Merchant of Venice” at school, but then we discussed and acted it out. I don’t think it’s suitable for young children (say under 10 or 12), not that they’d want to see it, really.

My point was of a general “there’s a tree, but this is the wood” sort. I don’t believe in censorship, just that the victory for Antonio at the end is far more objectionable to me than something in the background which you clearly have to be looking for. So the people getting upset are doing so for the wrong reason and missing the ‘elephant in the room’ or whatever the phrase is.

There’s something I’m not clear on. Is “paint-boxing out” something a digital effect, or does it mean literally painting over the frescos?

In this case, the former – given that the alternative would be to reassemble the cast, reconstruct the set (sans contentious painting) and reshoot the scene!

Mind you, this was indeed done back in 1945, when the visibility of Margaret Lockwood’s cleavage in The Wicked Lady proved too much for the film’s US distributor, and potential American receipts from what was the biggest domestic hit of the year (still the tenth biggest hit in British screen history if measured by seat occupation as opposed to cash revenues) were such that it was deemed worth some major reshoots.

Michael wrote…one example of a provocative image that’s become much less so as a result of its cultural associations – and so it is with the Underground posters, provided you recognise the allusion.

I don’t think it’s necessary to recognize the allusion or the painting to be insulated from the shock value. The painting technique itself (or the old-fashioned urinal) will probably be enough to make your average viewer think: “Oh, that’s art.” Benjamin’s concept of old technology’s aura, and all that.

A lot of the images from older paintings would cross across quite differently to the average viewer if they were represented in high-definition digital prints.

The US person who wanted the fresco whited out didn’t recognize it as a painting. I think that’s the more interesting detail here. The letter-writer understood the naked boy as an element in film rather than as a painting, and judged the image by cinematographic rather than painterly standards.

Okay, sorry, I’ll stop.

More Mencken, Merrill,(from the antipodean glass house) courtesy of the excellent James Wolcott.

“The average theologian…disseminates his blather, not innocently, like a philosopher, but maliciously, like a politician. In a well-organized world he would be on the stone-pile, but in the world as it exists we are asked to listen to him, not only politely, but even reverently, with our mouths open.”

Substitute political scientist,seer, for theologian, or thin skinned, ‘septic’ abroad, if you will.

On soccer, we agree. Though one notes only US women can play to any standard.

On the Tour De Lance: hhmmm, the Marion Jones of cycling?

On the Olympics, do a per capita, congratulate New Zealand, and emigrate. Zudders are very civilized, as well as athletic, and their environ is remarkably beautiful.

On movies: decades ago, one wrote a piece about Culver City lighting plans A, B & C, in reference to Americans abroad finding the reality of Europe alarmingly contra to what they had ‘learned’ on domestic television. The experienced German was not like the ‘reel’ German. Orange alert.

Glad you ‘picked’ on Peter Faiman for his ‘Crocodile Dundee’. He also helmed the Olympic Games opening ceremony in 2000. (And succeeded me for the Australian Labor Party campaign launch, in turn to be succeeded by Baz Luhrmann.)

So I have grounds for agreeing with you about ZDF Mainz

On snark: first refuge etc. But try to revive TMFTML.

On the substantive point: 52% of you are a laughing stock. For four more years.
Live with it. Especially abroad. We have no choice, but to laugh. (Albeit pissing ourselves about your imperious incompetence.) And must attempt to circumvent.

Good luck with your drug company and copyright hegemonics.

And if anyone wants reference to the antipodean glass house less dated than Doug’s 1986 citation,Quiggin is excellent for general trends, and crikey.com.au is a daily tonic.

We are every bit as silly as Doug’s lot, but our collective noun would not be “an arrogance of…”

Crtics of the USA ‘lurk’ everywhere, Doug, in the free world. “First we take Brentwood, then…Eatsward roll the wagons. Liberate the blue cities.” Orange alert.

Nominate the ‘Elk’ for 2008. S/he could hardly be worse.

Doug, entirely sufficient. I watched a number of their matches and recall that they went poignantly close to going further.
The US soccer team is up to standard.

It is the national government and the exercise of its assumed imperium that is not.

As a diversion, until 2008, may I commend Australian Rules football to you.

There is a team in Berlin, called, of course, ‘The Crocodiles’. They assert that they recently beat Poland.

The on field ‘sledging’ (Australian for ‘trash talk’) would have been fascinating.

Thanks, Paul. For reasons that are unlikely to become clear again at the moment, Aussie rules was my high school fencing team’s second sport. Great fun even, or perhaps especially, when I broke my nose in a sideline play.

FWIW, people from Berlin often assert to have recently beaten Poland. The result doesn’t always stick, and I find it’s best to wait a while.