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SINGAPORE: With Jason hitting the cinemas again with Thursday's "reboot" of Friday the 13th, I’m reminded of one really malevolent villain that can ruin a movie-going experience — and he doesn’t even wear a hockey mask.
I’m talking about the dreaded Slasher — a ghostly presence you don’t really feel until midway through a scene where a couple are getting hot and heavy...
And, whoooah, dude, it cuts to a scene where they’re suddenly fully clothed and sharing a laugh over a delightful cup of tea as if nothing happened.
Who needs big-screen terrors when you’ve got censors with their proverbial bloodied scissors going snip, snip, snip at the movies?
But, as it turned out, it may be a case of us watching too many scary movies.
MONSTERS INC.? NAH...
On a recent “date” to find out more about these ostensibly-reviled creatures who call themselves the Board of Film Censors (BFC), I discovered that Mr Slasher is actually a normal, likeable chap.
At the Media Development Authority’s swanky in-house theatre, I was laughing at all the crude sexual jokes of the recentNC16 flick Role Models along with filmclassifier Dinesh Pasrasurum.
The 28-year-old former graphic designer for MTV Mobile and a graduate in advertising and film from the Queensland University of Technology has, simply put, a job to die for.
For the past two-and-a-half years, his daily routine has basically been this: Go to work, plonk in a DVD, watch a movie. Repeat again and again, until it’s time to go home.
But there’s one thing that makes this dream job a difficult one. Dinesh — along with 15 of his other colleagues — has to decide who gets to watch these movies.
And it’s that bit about settling on movie ratings — which range from G (for general entertainment) to R21 (restricted to those 21 years and above) — that has put them in the line of fire of everyone from irate cineastes who discover they’re literally not getting the complete picture to conservative moralists who kick up a fuss about movies with “questionable” themes.
CENSORS ARE PEOPLE, TOO
It’s a balancing act that is complicated as it is tedious. The MDA gets about 16,000 video titles and 800 films to classify a year.
In other words, everything you see from Yangtze Cinema to GV Plaza to Sinema Old School, from Poh Kim to HMV. The BFC has to watch a great majority of these titles.
And while you don’t really need the entire group to give a stamp of approval for Finding Nemo, in cases dealing with touchy subjects such as race, religion, sex, homosexuality and vicious violence, it seems like there’s an awful lot of bureaucratic consultation going on.
For potentially tricky flicks, the BFC asks the opinions of the Films Consultative Panel, a 60-member group of folks ranging from housewives to lawyers and doctors.
They may also decide to consult certain focus groups or ethnic groups. There’s also a Films Appeal Committee, should a distributor feel unhappy about the rating they end up with.
MR SCISSORHANDS
Speaking of distributors, here’s a lesser-known fact: Certain movie “cuts” (or “edits”, as they call them) you saw (or didn’t, as the case may be) aren’t the BFC’s fault.
Blame the distributors. Explained Dinesh: “It’s the film distributors who have exercised a commercial decision to edit a film for a lower rating.”
That was the case when distributors of Lust, Caution first brought in an extremely toned-down version made for the China market. After the resulting hoopla over the NC16 version, they brought in the full R21 deal.
But there’s a difference between commercial films and ones slated for festivals. Take the case of the on-going Singapore International Film Festival (SIFF). Its history is chockfull of some of the region’s best directors is also dotted with clashes with censors.
This year is no exception. The BFC has banned (or “disallowed”) two films: The Berlin Festival-awarded Shahida, a documentary about female suicide bombers by Natalie Asouline, and the gay coming-of-age story Boy by Filipino Aureaus Solito, whose film The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros was released commercially here.
Four other films garnered an R21 rating with proposed cuts, but because the festival has a (justified) policy of showing only uncut films, organisers have also pulled them.
When asked why they keep programming films that they know may raise the hackles of censors, a spokesperson said quite simply that self-censorship is not part of the festival’s vocabulary.
“Our main priority is to look for the best content possible for the audience. We don’t second-guess because things that one normally won’t think would pass, do. The boundaries of censorship are ever changing.”
SAME SAME BUT DIFFERENT
According to the BFC, only four films (or 0.5 per cent) were banned in Singapore last year. Compared to the United Kingdom rating of 18, the SIFF film Klass was given an NC16.
The Passion of the Christ got an 18 rating both here and in the UK. Milk, however, was rated R21 in Singapore, R (those under 17 require an accompanying parent or adult guardian) in the United States, and only Cert 15 (no one under 15) in the UK.
In a way, you could say censors from whichever country are only as open-minded as the community they serve.
When asked why violence seems to be more acceptable than sexual issues (both hetero and homosexual ones) in movies, Dinesh said: “The cue we’re getting from the community is that in terms of sexuality — or homosexuality, for that matter — the community is very conservative at the moment.
“You could say society’s tolerance for violence and coarse language (is higher). But as society progresses and becomes more relaxed with regards to (the former), so will we.”
In other words, it’s your fault.
- TODAY/yb
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