A SERBIAN FILM RAPE SCENES FULL

Today, that kind of comment would hopefully provoke the kind of howls of incredulity not heard since Danny Dyer suggested in Zoo magazine that a jilted reader should вЂcut his exвЂ™s face so that no-one will want herвЂ™. The description of the rape scene offered in Newsweek gives some idea of how Neanderthal the gender politics of the time could be: вЂA masterful piece of erotic cinema, a flawless acting out of the female fantasy of absolute violationвЂ™ is how Paul Zimmerman referred to it. And the truth is that, while many critics found the violence of the siege scene repugnant, the filmвЂ™s sexual violence did not create much of a stir at the time, except amongst a few more enlightened critics (mostly women). Oddly enough, after some initial consultation on a rough cut, Straw Dogs was granted an вЂXвЂ™ (the equivalent of an вЂ™18вЂ™) without further edits. The residents slowly turn on them as sexual jealousy and latent violence explode in a rape scene and, at the filmвЂ™s climax, a farmhouse siege that leaves six dead. In PeckinpahвЂ™s film, an American peacenik academic (David Sumner, played by Dustin Hoffman) and his young British wife (Amy, Susan George) return to her home village. ItвЂ™s a long way from there to here, but one could argue that it is Straw Dogs that provides the compass and the roadmap. But what is that policy? How has it been formulated, and how is it put into practice in the offices of the BBFC at Soho Square? And what are the deeper implications for contemporary filmmakers and audiences?

The BBFCвЂ™s concerns were with the sexual violence of the film, and some very particular moments which the examiners felt contravened their policy on such scenes. However, neither of these scenes was cut. This may not come as a great surprise when we learn that the film includes the sight of a man's throat being torn out in close up, and of another being killed by having a prosthetic erect penis forced into his empty eye socket. Human Centipede 2 (first banned and then passed at вЂ18вЂ™ after significant cuts) is an example of a breed of extreme film-making that is today causing the British Board of Film Classification (as it was renamed in 1984) no end of trouble: the remake of I Spit On Your Grave and A Serbian Film were both cut last year, the latter having more than four minutes of footage removed.

A SERBIAN FILM RAPE SCENES FULL

Earlier this year, the BBFC examiners were presented with The Human Centipede 2: Full Sequence, in which a man, having sewn together a chain of people mouth to anus, anally rapes the last one in line with barbed wire wrapped around his penis. Back then, on an August day in 1971, Murphy and Straw Dogs producer Dan Melnick could be found poring over a movieola as the American tried to convince Murphy that what he was seeing in the filmвЂ™s second rape was not sodomy but rear entry (he made his case, and saved the film from far more savage cuts as a consequence).

For many critics, and many cinemagoers at the time, it seemed as if the floodgates had opened for a tidal wave of explicit sex and violence, and there were loud calls for the newly-appointed BBFC Secretary Stephen Murphy to, as we would say now, вЂconsider his positionвЂ™: Fergus Cashin wrote a column for The Sun demanding, вЂWhy CanвЂ™t I Take My Family to the Pictures?вЂ™, and accused Murphy of launching an attack on public standards of decency.ДЇorty years on we have a cultural landscape that would make both Fergus Cashin and Stephen Murphy throw up their hands in horror and disbelief. 1971 was a watershed year for the British Board of Film Censors: Ken RussellвЂ™s The Devils hit the examiners squarely between the eyes, quickly followed by Sam PeckinpahвЂ™s Cornish Western Straw Dogs and Stanley KubrickвЂ™s A Clockwork Orange вЂ“ the former rural, passionate and earthy, the latter urban, icy and clinical.

A serbian film rape scenes