In 1969 Australian government censors claimed a Swedish film playing at the Sydney film festival included an actual sex scene involving a heavily pregnant woman. The film could only play, they said, if the offending copulation were deleted. But the scene in question involved no sex whatsoever. The censors apparently couldn’t distinguish between an embrace and penetrative sex – and weren’t prepared to admit they were wrong.
This wasn’t the first time the Australian government had tried to cut scenes from films showing in Australian cinemas – they had been secretly banning films and slicing out scenes as they came through customs for years. But the uproar over this particular film became the catalyst for reforming the censorship laws at the dawn of the 1970s.
The film critic David Stratton, at the time at the helm of the Sydney film festival, played an enormous role in championing this change, and fundamentally altered how we view movies in this country. Long before bringing foreign films with sexy scenes to SBS – and lovingly bickering with Margaret Pomeranz on a weekly basis – David changed our eye. He changed what we saw in this country.
In 2014 I made a short film with Stratton, called Smut Hounds, about the Swedish film furore. While making that film I found a huge audiovisual archive of all the clips sliced out of cinema in the period 1958 to 1971. Some were stray frames, other clips were full scenes and sequences that had been totally redacted before the films were released in Australian cinemas.
It would be nearly 2,000 clips, tens of thousands of papers, and two years before I would figure out what to do with it.
The project began optimistically – I figured I would liberate this archive so audiences could revel in seeing what had been denied. A celebration of democracy, a celebration of cinema. How playful, how irreverent and how cathartic it could be. But after months on end watching this collection, I found I was wearily dragging myself into work. It was a grind, a chore, a commitment to make a film I wished I’d never started.
The censor’s act of cutting a scene from a film strips it of context and its story. It does not matter if it is a good or bad film, an important or forgettable film; the act of cutting a scene, dislocating action from story, is violent. To my surprise, watching these redacted scenes didn’t feel liberating – it felt suffocating.
It was initially chaotic – almost meaningless stimulus on loop. But then I started to identify the patterns, the repetition, the tropes and I found something deeply disturbing. These stray fragments were screaming an unexpected message – and it wasn’t about government censorship. I was drowning in an archive of a dominating, violent gaze: a male gaze. And I hated it.
When I started this work there was no #MeToo, no #TimesUp, no #OscarsSoWhite movement; no pussy-grabbing US president, no Harvey Weinstein in handcuffs. Just as the world was reckoning and transforming, I found my feminism in watching this archive of old film clippings: a flick of a knife, a casual slap, a naughty striptease, men punching, kicking and hurting other people. Scene after scene after scene. A single clip is innocuous but seen on repeat it is visceral, and uncomfortable.
Censorship in the 1960s was about a handful of bureaucrats prescribing an illusive and contested “community standard”. But in creating this archive, what the censors accidentally created was a distilled catalogue of the destructive patriarchal imaginary.
So, in 2018, with the government out of the way, what do we believe as a collective? What do we like to be entertained by? Are terrorised women and toxic men all that excite us as eager voyeurs?
My film is not about the female gaze – this archive could not be redeemed or restored in that way. Neither the violence of censorship, nor the violence of these film-makers, could be made right through its re-presentation. But I wanted us to sit in the trouble of what this archive means, and how this history speaks to us today. I am a female film-maker exploiting the male gaze – [CENSORED] makes this male gaze so visible, so difficult, that it can no longer merely wash over us.
As I prepare to screen the film for the first time, there has been a furore at Cannes about the dearth of female directors in the history of the festival, and the uproar of the violence of Lars Von Trier’s latest film, The House that Jack Built. It all speaks to a cultural shift surrounding who makes film and how our stories are told on screen.
I hope my film will complicate how we feel about censorship, what we define as censorship, and how we feel about cinema. In creating [CENSORED], I wanted to create space for understanding the problems of our spectatorship; to use this archive to make us better, more discerning viewers.
Forty-nine years after David Stratton fought the government censors, I am trying to follow his lead: trying to change what we see and how we see it.
• [CENSORED] will premiere at Sydney film festival on 11 June
