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Controversial Films 2012

Sounds of Cinema Sounds of Cinema
July 8, 2012
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Today’s episode of Sounds of Cinema was the annual Independence Day program in which I celebrate free speech by taking a look at banned, censored, and controversial films. Note that this is not intended to be a complete list of controversial films, just a selection of noteworthy pictures that have rattled the cage. For more information on controversial films, see the links at the bottom. You can also check out the blog post for last year’s episode.

Dirty Harry (1971)
Dir. Don Siegel

Most films that are controversial for their violence usually cause scandal because of copycat murders or because the actions of the villains in the story are more extreme than the audience is willing to accept. Dirty Harry is a bit different. The film features a character that is psychotic, sadistic, has no regard for laws or legal institutions but he is the good guy.  Dirty Harry was released at a time in which violent crime rates in major cities were very high and according to star Clint Eastwood the film was intended to take a stand for victim’s rights. Although Dirty Harry in many ways draws on the traditions of Westerns, in which justice is restored at the barrel of a gun, the film was viewed as a vindication of police state tactics and film critic Pauline Kael called it a fascist work of art.

The Birth of a Nation (1915)
Dir. D.W. Griffith

Birth of a Nation is one of the prime examples of a film that is praiseworthy for its cinematic accomplishments and yet entirely detestable for its content. Based on the novel The Clansmen by Thomas Dixon, Birth of a Nation aims to tell the history of the United States during the Civil War and Reconstruction periods. In the film, African Americans are depicted as stupid and vicious thugs who prey on white women and members of the Ku Klux Klan are cast as noble defenders of justice. At the time of its release in 1915, Birth of Nation caused widespread public outcry and it was condemned by the NAACP. Those objections were vindicated as the KKK used Birth of a Nation as a recruitment tool and saw a brief surge in its membership. Some screenings of Birth of a Nation were disrupted by riots which lead community leaders in several major cities to ban the film. Despite the public outcry, Birth of a Nation was a tremendous box office success. Nearly a century later, Birth of a Nation remains controversial, with art house and academic screenings picketed and protested.

Despite the controversy and ugliness of the film’s racial politics and its blatant disregard for historical facts, Birth of a Nation is one of the most important films in the history of American cinema. Director D.W. Griffith broke new ground in cinematic storytelling with the film’s style and epic scope. Birth of a Nation opened new possibilities for what a motion picture could do and established the visual and storytelling vocabulary for Hollywood’s mega-productions. Its influence can be observed in later films from Lawrence of Arabia to The Lord of the Rings.

Birth of a Nation is also important for business reasons. The investors who funded Birth of a Nation included Louis B. Mayer and Jesse L. Lasky and the film’s success gave those men the financial foundation to form their own studios: Mayer started the company which eventually became MGM and Lasky started the company which eventually became Paramount Pictures. In essence, Birth of a Nation played an important role in laying the groundwork for the studio system and for much of Hollywood. 

The tension between Birth of a Nation’s undeniable cinematic and historical significance and the film’s horrific content is only likely to grow with time. But although the racism of the film is infuriating, the picture is important to preserve and study. Art is often a time capsule of our hopes, values, prejudices, and fears. What Birth of a Nation reveals about our past, both racially and cinematically, is not always comfortable to view but it does provide a way of understanding who we were, where we are, and what we might hope to become.

Precious (2009)
Dir. Lee Daniels

Precious is a film about an African American teenager who enrolls in an alternative school in an effort to turn her life around. The picture is extremely stark with its title character a perpetual victim of her parents. Precious’ mother, played by Mo’Nique, verbally assaults her daughter in every scene they share. Precious is also the victim of incest and she begins the film pregnant by her absentee father. When the film was released, Precious was the catalyst for a media discussion about representations of African Americans in film. Erin Aubry Kaplan of Salon.com described Precious as  “a challenge [to African American audiences] to drop our own emotional armor and embrace a real-life story we have been minimizing for a long time — that of a big, black, sullen-faced, illiterate girl who lives in the depths of the ghetto and in all likelihood will stay there.” However, others saw Precious as reinforcing ugly stereotypes of the African American community. Armond White of The New York Press wrote, “Not since The Birth of a Nation has a mainstream movie demeaned the idea of black American life as much as Precious. Full of brazenly racist clichés (Precious steals and eats an entire bucket of fried chicken), it is a sociological horror show.”

The reaction to Precious was heightened by the simultaneous release of The Blind Side, a much more friendly drama based on the true story of Michael Oher, who was a homeless African American teenager taken in by a well-off white family. The Blind Side also drew a polarized response and was taken by some as pandering and condescending while others saw it as a vindication of kindness and love. The Blind Side was drawn into the discussion about Precious and the two pictures contrasting take on race and differences in tone were construed as competing visions of how race ought to be dealt with in cinema. Incidentally, both Precious and The Blind Side would be nominated for the Best Picture Oscar. Neither would win the top prize (which went to The Hurt Locker) although Sandra Bullock won Best Actress for The Blind Side while Mo’Nique was named Best Supporting Actress for Precious.

Time will tell whether either of these films will shape future conceptions of race in cinema. Precious was more critically lauded while The Blind Side was more financially successful and in Hollywood the latter tends to win out. In retrospect, both the criticisms and the praise of Precious and The Blind Side have some truth to them (although not in equal measure) and perhaps the whole media construed argument between them is a false dilemma.  Hollywood needs to provide us with more compelling and challenging stories about race and at the very least Precious takes the lead on that front.

Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972)
Dir. J. Lee Thompson

The Planet of the Apes series was known for its political subtext. All of the pictures in the original series deal with race and class issues and over the course of the films the visibility of that subtext waxes and wanes. In the fourth picture, Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, the racial metaphors took a bolder and more violent turn. The story takes place in an authoritarian future in which humans have turned apes into slaves. Caesar, a chimpanzee who has acquired the power of speech, leads his fellow simians in a violent revolt. The riot scenes were staged and shot to deliberately recall news footage of the 1965Watts Riots and the original cut of Conquest featured a lot blood and gore. The film is climaxed by Caesar making a triumphant victory speech and in the original version the film ends on a militant call for revolution. When executives at 20th Century Fox screened the film they demanded changes so that it would secure a PG rating and retain the lucrative family audience. Among the changes, Caesar’s final speech was altered in post-production with actor Roddy McDowall recording some additional dialogue that ended the film on a more pacifistic note. The original version of Conquest of the Planet of the Apes has finally been restored for the Blu-ray edition.

Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006)
Dir. Larry Charles

Borat was controversial for a number of reasons including sexual gags, accusations of racism and homophobia, and the use of ambush interviews. Several of the people interviewed or pranked in the picture attempted to sue the filmmakers for defamation, including a group of fraternity brothers who were filmed making sexist and racist comments. Those cases were dismissed.

Much of the outrage over Borat came from Kazakhstan, where the fictional title character is supposed to be from. Kazakhstani officials took great offense to the character and theater chains in the country refused to screen it. Actor Sacha Baron Cohen used the controversy to his advantage and gave a press conference as the Borat character in front of the Kazakhstan embassy in Washington D.C. during an official visit by Kazakhstan’s president. Since the initial controversy, several prominent Kazakhstani writers gave Borat positive reviews and suggested that the film had done more to raise the international profile of the country than anything the government had done.

Six years after the release of the film, Borat continued to pay off comic dividends. At the 2012 Arab Shooting Championship held in Kuwait, the Kazakhstani team won a gold medal and during the award ceremony the tournament organizers unwittingly played the fictional national anthem that runs during the end credits of the film.

Citizen Kane (1941)
Dir. Orson Welles

Citizen Kane tells the life story of a fictional newspaper tycoon who was a thinly veiled and unflattering stand-in for real life newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst. At that time, Hearst was one of the richest people in America and he was the owner of newspapers, magazines, and other media outlets across the country which gave him tremendous political power. He used those assets to his advantage and his papers were the originators of so-called “yellow journalism,” in which exaggerated or fabricated stories were used to smear political enemies. As it became clear that Citizen Kane was really about Hearst, the publisher used his influence to suppress the film through intimidation, blackmail, newspaper smears, and FBI investigations. Hearst successfully pressured theaters to boycott Citizen Kane and ordered his publications to refuse advertising for other RKO productions. The mudslinging worked and when Citizen Kane was released it was both a critical and commercial disaster. The career of director Orson Welles was effectively ruined although Hearst’s efforts to destroy the film validated Citizen Kane’s characterization and the persona of Charles Foster Kane eventually stuck to William Randolph Hearst, permanently coloring his public image as a bitter, vicious, and cynical old man. Several decades later, Citizen Kane recovered its reputation and is now cited as one of the greatest films ever made.

Great White a.k.a. The Last Shark (1981)
Dir. Enzo G. Castellari

Although films may be pulled from circulation for any reason, the decision to pull a film out of availability usually rests with the distributor or copyright holder. Very few films are legally banned in the United States, meaning that it is against the law to commercially distribute or exhibit them. One picture that is legally banned, even today, is the Italian picture Great White, also known as The Last Shark. Originally released in 1981, the film is extraordinarily similar to Jaws and was even titled as a Jaws sequel when it was released in some international markets. When Universal found out about it, the studio successfully got an injunction and prevented Great White from being distributed in North America. The ban remains in place although bootlegs are widely available.

As an interesting post-script, in the mid-1990s a shark film titled Cruel Jaws began circulating. Cruel Jaws was directed by Bruno Mattei, who was sometimes referred to as the Italian Ed Wood for his notoriously cheap productions.  Like Great White, Cruel Jaws was marketed as being a part of Universal’s Jaws series. However, all the shark footage of Cruel Jaws was taken without permission from Jaws, Jaws 2, Jaws 3-D, and Great White. Unsurprisingly, Cruel Jaws has never been officially released in the United States.

Kids (1995)
Dir. Larry Clark

Kids was the debut film of director Larry Clark and it remains his pièce de résistance. The picture follows a group of teenagers on the streets of New York, focusing on a young woman who discovers that she has contracted HIV and a young man who is obsessed with deflowering as many virgins as he can. In the course of a day, the teens and their friends drink alcohol, get high, shoplift, fight, and have unprotected sex. Although it was scripted, Kids is shot in a documentary style with naturalistic performances by actors who were unknown at that time. As a result, Kids has a gritty and realistic feel to it, which makes it all the more uncomfortable to watch. When it was released, Kids divided critics. Film Comment magazine hailed Kids as one of the most important pictures of 1995 while Rita Kempley of the Washington Post said the film was “virtually child pornography.” Kids was given an NC-17 rating by the Motion Picture Association of America and was released to theaters without a rating.

Looking at the film almost two decades later, Kids is flawed it is also a bold and important film. The picture is gritty and uncompromising but it is also a little aimless and it is not clear what the picture has to say about contemporary life that wasn’t already said in movies like Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver or novels like Bret Easton Ellis’ Less Than Zero. Aside from launching the careers of actors Rosario Dawson and Chloë Sevigny, Kids remains important as a period piece; this is a document of a particular place and time for teenage culture but also for movies. Like Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs and Kevin Smith’s Clerks, Larry Clark’s Kids was part of the explosion of independent films that shook up the Hollywood establishment in the 1990s. It’s hard to imagine this film being picked up by a major distributor or even getting made now although the influence of Kids can be seen (although sifted through a corporate colander) in reality television shows like Jersey Shore and movies like Project X.

The People vs. Larry Flynt (1996)
Dir. Milos Forman

The People vs. Larry Flynt is a biopic about the publisher of Hustler magazine, dramatizing the establishment of the publication and Flynt’s legal battles against obscenity charges, culminating in the Supreme Court case Hustler Magazine, Inc. v. Falwell. The film was generally well received by critics and it was recognized by the Hollywood awards circuit, including an Oscar nomination for Woody Harrelson as Best Actor in the title role. Perhaps unsurprisingly, a film about a pornographer got under the skin of some cultural critics but what was curious about the ensuing debate is that it did not really occur between traditional right and left voices. As the debate over the merits of The People vs. Larry Flynt took shape it was really one facet of the American left against another: anti-pornography feminists like the National Organization for Women versus free speech advocates like the American Civil Liberties Union.  The People vs. Larry Flynt was criticized for making a hero out of a pornographer and for minimizing or ignoring Hustler magazine’s actual content; it was argued that the filmmakers made an absent minded defense of free speech with no reference to the content of that speech. Feminist writer Gloria Steinem and Larry Flynt’s estranged daughter Tonya Flynt Vega began a media tour to denounce the film and it was speculated that their protests cost the film at the box office.

Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom (1975)
Dir. Pier Passolini

Although there are a lot of films that are controversial or shocking there are very few that achieve both the revulsion and admiration of Pier Passolini’s Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom. Salò is adapted from Marquis de Sade’s unfinished novel The 120 Days of Sodom, in which a group of clergymen abuse young people in an attempt to work their way through every possible form of sexual debauchery. For the film, Passolini updated the setting to 1940s Fascist Italy, changed the perpetrators from clergy to politicians, and set the action in the town of Salò, which was known as the capital for the fascist government. The film features lots of grotesque imagery including sexual violence, mutilation, and coprophagia.

Film critics continue to debate the merits of Salò. For those who defend it, the rationale most often given is that the film is a parable about capitalism. Director Passolini had been enamored by the leftist and anti-capitalist uprisings of the 1960s and the films he made immediately preceding Salò such as Decameron and The Arabian Nights were partly about the possibility of youth creating a new and better culture. But by the early 1970s Pasolini had begun to despair that the dream was over and that the youth movement had been coopted by consumerist values. The torture of the young people by the fascists of Salò is a metaphor for the triumph of capitalism and the total domination of individuals by political and economic elites. One of the main examples of that is a scene in which a young man defiantly raises a closed fist to the fascists before being executed. But as some of Salò’s detractors point out, the film’s visceral horrors are so overwhelming that it is difficult to get around them and navigate to any underlying thematic point. The themes of Salò will be even more difficult for a non-Italian audience to deduce since they are unlikely to understand it in context or comprehend the references to Italian history.

Salò was named by horror writer Stanley Wiater as the most disturbing film of all time and it is certainly a candidate for that title. The fact that the film is still able to get such a reaction almost forty years after its release is extraordinary given that the Universal Monsters of the 1930s and 40s were regarded as silly by viewers who saw them a generation later, or considering how Freddy Krueger and Jason Voorhees became a joke by the end of the 1980s. Even horror pictures released around the same time as Salò such as The Exorcist and Jaws, aren’t considered nearly as frightening today as they were in 1970s. But Salò has retained its power if only because of its uncompromising nihilism.

Soldier Blue (1970)
Dir. Ralph Nelson

In the late 1960s and throughout the1970s, filmmakers were challenging the accepted boundaries of sexuality and violence with pictures like The Wild Bunch, Last House on the Left, Dirty Harry, and A Clockwork Orange. Soldier Blue is an important footnote in that trend. This revisionist western is a dramatization of the 1864 massacre of Cheyenne Indians at Sand Creek by the United States armed forces and it climaxes with American cavalrymen mutilating, raping, and killing Native Americans, including women and children. In its original uncut form the scene is about as brutal and intense as the opening sequence of Saving Private Ryan.

Soldier Blue was controversial for its violence but the film’s depiction of the Sand Creek massacre took on another layer of meaning for its original viewers. The picture was released during the Vietnam War and critics claimed a connection between the events depicted in the film and the news reports of the My Lai massacre, in which American soldiers indiscriminately slaughtered the population of a Vietnamese village. Whether the filmmakers intended to make a parallel between the two events is unclear. However, the filmmakers’ earnestness has been questioned since Soldier Blue does have a fairly simplistic view of the conflict between the Cheyenne and the American government and the marketing materials emphasized the savagery of the violence, leading some critics to characterize the film as exploitative.

The intended cut of Soldier Blue was rarely seen until recently. The film was originally released in 1970 with an R-rating from the MPAA and it did not perform very at the American box office, although it did play well outside the United States. Soldier Blue was re-released in 1974 with most of the violence eliminated in order to secure a PG classification. The PG cut was the version made available on home video for many years and only recently has the original version been restored.

V for Vendetta (2005)
Dir. James McTeigue

V for Vendetta was an adaptation of Alan Moore’s graphic novel, which features a superhero out to overthrow a tyrannical government while wearing a Guy Fawkes mask. When the film was released, a number of critics and columnists debated the meaning of the film. Most of the debate centered on whether V should be considered a terrorist or a hero, as he kills government officials and destroys government buildings. In one scene, V sends bombs through the subway system and this imagery was doubly sensitive because a year earlier Islamic terrorists had bombed British subway cars.  Although V for Vendetta takes place in a futuristic Great Britain, some U.S. pundits saw the film as anti-American propaganda and a demonization of conservative values. In 2011 V for Vendetta found itself in the news again during the Egyptian demonstrations that brought down the government of Hosni Mubarak. Protesters incorporated the Fawks mask from the film in their signs and other visual media and the slogan from V for Vendetta was adapted into “Remember, remember the 25 of January.” The Fawks mask has since become a favored prop for various protest moments including Anonymous, the hacking group that routinely fights corporations, government agencies, and other institutions. Among their targets have been the Motion Picture Association of American and the Recording Industry Association of America, which lobby for copyright law on behalf of major media companies. Ironically, media giant Time Warner owns the copyright on V for Vendetta, including the Guy Fawks image, and earns royalties on the sales of all licensed masks.

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