Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Dedication
- Introduction
- Part I Censorious Rigmarole and Legalistic Overkill
- Part II After the Deluge
- 4 ‘The Tenor of the Times’: An Interview With James Ferman
- 5 ‘Reading Society Aright’: Five Years after the Video Recordings Act
- 6 The Video Image
- Part III Nineties Nightmares
- Part IV New Millennium, New Beginning?
- Appendix: The DPP List of ‘Video Nasties’
- Bibliography
- Index
5 - ‘Reading Society Aright’: Five Years after the Video Recordings Act
from Part II - After the Deluge
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Dedication
- Introduction
- Part I Censorious Rigmarole and Legalistic Overkill
- Part II After the Deluge
- 4 ‘The Tenor of the Times’: An Interview With James Ferman
- 5 ‘Reading Society Aright’: Five Years after the Video Recordings Act
- 6 The Video Image
- Part III Nineties Nightmares
- Part IV New Millennium, New Beginning?
- Appendix: The DPP List of ‘Video Nasties’
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
What bothers the Board the most these days? A look at the BBFC Annual Report for 1988 is most revealing. Not surprisingly perhaps, violence features high on the list, and Rambo III, which was cut by some two minutes for the cinema and lost even more on video, is singled out for particular attention. The report notes its ‘alleged potential for encouraging anti-social violence on the streets of Britain’, and continues:
It was the moments of military death-dealing in Rambo III which seemed likely to inspire dreams of emulation, and many brief cuts were required by the Board in bloodshed and the glamorisation of military weaponry, particularly the ‘Rambo knife’ which was already being sold in Britain to teenagers whose lifestyle owed little to military discipline.
In terms of films cut, ‘more than twenty needed cuts in violence or glamorisation of weaponry or criminal techniques, nine of these involving violence to women in a sexual context. Six films were cut because of real violence to animals, which is illegal under British law’ (namely the Cinematograph Films (Animals) Act 1937).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Film and Video Censorship in Modern Britain , pp. 63 - 70Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2011