How many cops does it take to turn off a DVD? Twenty years ago, Sydney police raided Balmain town hall to do exactly that – ending up in a standoff with revered film critic Margaret Pomeranz.
It was to a chorus of boos that two New South Wales law enforcement officers strode across the stage on 3 July 2003, as the opening credits rolled on Larry Clark’s banned picture Ken Park. The film, which had been refused classification in Australia because of its graphic sexual content, was being screened in protest by Pomeranz. The police superintendent shook her hand and explained they’d come to apprehend it.
“It was all a bit of a farce, really,” Pomeranz remembers. “They turned it off and I turned it on again and they turned it off, and I went, ‘bugger it’, and turned it on again.” Officers retaliated by cutting power to the building – before realising this meant they couldn’t eject the DVD. Patrons who’d come for Larry Clark wound up watching an Abbott and Costello routine.
I spoke to Pomeranz while researching my book on Australia’s history of censorship on screen. This country, I found, has form in utilising fairly tyrannical tools – from household raids to dangled prison sentences to the literal vandalism of imported film prints – to quash artistic expression. Usually it’s been the Australian Classification Board responding to pressure from conservative and regressive fringe groups, such as the Good Film League in the 1920s, Fred Nile’s NSW Festival of Light in the 1970s, and the Salt Shakers of the 2000s (a fundamentalist Christian group who decried marriage equality and advocated for conversion “therapy”). It’s groups like these who compelled Australian censors to ban early features such as 1917 Aussie flick Remorse, a Story of The Red Plague, about a country boy who catches syphilis in the big city (Adelaide); as well as later exploitation shockers The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, A Serbian Film and The Human Centipede 2.
Sometimes the Aussie censors simply balked at a bit of indecency – they deleted a shot of cleavage from 1960’s La Dolce Vita, for instance, and the dialogue “tell him to get stuffed” from 1966’s Blow-Up. Jean-Luc Godard’s defining masterpiece Breathless from 1960 wishes it was so lucky: it was banned entirely in Australia for its “immorality”.
As former director of the Sydney film festival, David Stratton would often find himself in stoushes with the Australian Classification Board. This included a notorious showdown over 1969’s I Love, You Love, which had the gall to feature a sex scene with a woman who was seven months pregnant … Or did it?
“Look, you hadn’t seen too many films before with a very pregnant woman, naked, and a man in an embrace,” Stratton says of that time. “But you don’t actually see anything, really. You don’t see her genitals or his genitals. And they don’t seem to be moving either.”
Although it had been shown in more than 20 other countries at the time, and although the film’s director insisted the characters were simply kissing in bed, Australia’s then customs minister Malcolm Scott took issue with the scene – leading to, among other things, the summoning of a gynaecologist to explain to Australia’s press and politicians that penetration would be logistically impossible based on the arrangement of the actors. But the pollies still wanted the scene cut – so Stratton pulled the film from the festival.
The issue of Australian censorship and inconsistent classification isn’t simply a dusty old scandal from history. Theatrical distributors lightly self-censored recent titles including Crazy Rich Asians and even Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile, to win more lenient classifications for their releases. For Barbie director Greta Gerwig’s earlier film Lady Bird, distributor Universal pre-emptively edited out Saoirse Ronan saying “cunt”– only to get slapped with an MA15+ rating anyway, for a glimpse of static penis in a copy of Playgirl. (The shot of the male pin-up model was subsequently cut for the Australian release and the rating got stepped back to M.) And in April this year, Universal deleted some ultra-violence from the Nicolas-Cage-as-Dracula comedy Renfield to downgrade its R18+ rating to a more palatable MA15+. Australians may pride ourselves on being easygoing and hard to offend, but in 2023 we’re still not always seeing the films that were actually made.
In a recent twist, the Australian Classification Board has become an unlikely bedfellow in the fight against prudishness. In 2016, the Australian government allowed Netflix to classify their own movies due to the sheer volume the online streamer was submitting to the Australian Classification Board. This unintentionally resulted in a shift towards more squeamish American standards: M-rated queer Oscar-winner Moonlight was suddenly reclassified MA15+, and the gory-but-still-merely-MA15+ Halloween jumped up to an R rating.
Former Australian Classification Board director Margaret Anderson described this trend as risky: “You are destroying the Australian public’s awareness and knowledge and confidence in its own classification system.” Netflix, for instance, flagged Steven Soderbergh’s High Flying Bird for nudity. “Netflix classifies manboobs as nudity!” Anderson exclaims.
In 2020, the Australian Classification Board formally submitted their concerns with Netflix’s tool, writing that it had “irrevocably shifted the Australian classification standard away from Australian cultural mores, to those operative in North America … where the American tolerance [for language, sex and nudity in particular] is less than the allowance made by Australian consumers.” The tabled report sat on a shelf for three years until it was released by the Albanese government in March.
Pomeranz and her Watch on Censorship group knew the risks when they attempted their screening of Ken Park in 2003. “You’re facing up to a year in prison and a fine of $25,000,” she says. “The implications for going ahead with that were actually quite serious.” She was let off the hook, but Ken Park was not so lucky. It remains banned in Australia, having been deemed by the Classification Board to “deal with matters of sex and violence in such a way that they offend against the standards of morality, decency and propriety generally accepted by reasonable adults”.
Pomeranz remembers: “It gave me great pleasure – and I don’t suppose I should say this – to pick up a copy overseas and bring it back illegally.”
Book of the Banned by Simon Miraudo is out now
