Alexander Walker – film critic for the LES

An important figure in our study of Film regulation in the UK – Walker was behind moves to ban “Crash” and had a hatred of “The Devils” which led him to being assaulted by its director – Ken Russell.

Obituary from The Guardian

Alexander Walker
Outstanding and outspoken film critic and writer

Derek Malcolm
The Guardian, Wednesday 16 July 2003 12.23 BST

Alexander Walker, who has died suddenly aged 73, was the most professional film critic I have met. He reviewed for the London Evening Standard for more than 43 years, was one of the most widely known critics in the country and won the British Press Award’s critic of the year prize three times.
He was the complete antithesis of the old journalistic adage that you don’t ask a critic to write a story because they will probably make a hash of it. Walker never made a hash of it, and could turn his hand to a great deal more than simple reviewing. Yet he never lost his enthusiasm for his main task – to tell us, in no uncertain terms, what films to see and what to miss.

To say that he was often controversial would be putting it mildly. He could annoy and provoke like few others. And this capacity, sometimes quite bilious, made it all the more wondrous for a filmmaker who, having been severely hauled over the coals, was then heaped with generous praise for his next movie.

One of Walker’s most obvious characteristics was that you never knew which way he would go. Surprise was often a key element in his reviews. He resolutely refused to sit on the fence, and staleness, caused by watching stream upon stream of bad movies as well as good ones, never set in. His prose was as polished and as fresh at the end as when he started.

Raised in Portadown, Northern Ireland, Walker attended the local grammar school, then studied at Queen’s University, Belfast, the College of Europe in Bruges, and the University of Michigan, where he also lectured in political philosophy for two years from 1952. He got his first break on the Birmingham Gazette, as features editor from 1954 to 1956, before moving to the Birmingham Post as leader writer and film critic, and then to the Standard in 1960.

There, Lord Beaverbrook took issue with his favourable review of Harold Lloyd’s World Of Comedy, to which the press baron had taken his long-term companion, Lady Dunn. They had walked out and wanted Alex to explain himself. He retaliated thus: “Dear Lord Beaverbrook, I am sorry you and Lady Dunn did not enjoy Harold Lloyd’s World Of Comedy. For me, in future, high buildings will hold an additional hazard.”

Those who didn’t know Walker, except from his work, were sometimes terrified of this always immaculate figure, or at least of ruffling his feathers. When his blood was up, he could be a formidable adversary, as the British Film Academy, then the British Film Institute, where he was a governor from 1989 to 1995, and finally the Film Council, knew.

He could chew up his opponents like a dog with a particularly delicious bone. He gave no quarter and did not expect any. But once you got to know the man, his kindness and extreme politesse came through strongly. He was also a most entertaining dinner companion, telling stories superbly and offering a range of mimicry that would have been useful for any comedian. He lived alone in Maida Vale, in an immaculate flat, which, he told me, he always cleaned himself. He was, in some ways, a slightly sad figure who, though he had many friends, seemed to live almost totally through his work.

Walker’s achievement lay as much in his biographical studies and books about the British film industry as in his weekly pieces – he had a shrewd understanding of both the film business and what made those in it tick. Hollywood, England: The British Film Industry In The Sixties (1974) was particularly outstanding, and his biographies of Peter Sellers (1981) and Elizabeth Taylor (1990), and books on Greta Garbo (1980), Marlene Dietrich (1984), Bette Davis (1986), Joan Crawford (1983) and others were a model of their kind.

Altogether, Walker wrote 20 books, including an appreciation of Stanley Kubrick’s work (1971) – he was one of the very few critics that reclusive director ever let near him – and was in the middle of another one when he died.

He called one of them It’s Only A Movie, Ingrid (1988), after the remark Alfred Hitchcock made to Ingrid Bergman when she cut up rough during shooting. But there was no “only” about Alex’s attitude to movies. He never ceased to enthuse about the good ones, and whack the bad ones with all his might. Whether you liked what he said or not, he was an outstandingly readable critic and a first-class journalist.

Peter Bradshaw writes: The death of the brilliant, pugnacious and prolific Alex Walker deprives us of a living folk memory of movies and movie culture. I knew him first when I joined the Standard in 1989, but it was only when I became film critic at the Guardian 10 years later that I felt his glittering, ancient mariner-like eye on me in earnest.

The first thing about him was his extraordinary voice: it was partly Portadown, but had been softened along the way with a twist of something else, a kind of unlocatably sing-song note, perhaps from his travels in North America – partly Canadian? I suspect that like many who owed their careers to Lord Beaverbrook, Alex had picked up a hint of the baron’s stately drawl.

He was always impeccably turned out – always a suit and tie, when the rest of us slobs slumped around the screening rooms in jeans – though he favoured a raffish cravat, brilliant white slacks and a huge pair of aviator-style sunglasses when on the Croisette at Cannes. When he spoke to me directly, it was often with the air of a headmaster about to rebuke a lively sixth-former who had been encouraged by other teachers to address the staff by their first names.

Alex was a great quarreller. But he was always funny, stimulating, passionately concerned with the cinema. My first Guardian piece was a review of Notting Hill, in which I noted the absence of black characters. When the article came out, I was in the Standard offices and Alex appeared in front of me. “Peter,” he said gravely, “I see that, like Sir William Macpherson, you have convicted the film Notting Hill of institutional racism. But let me tell you this.” He came closer. “There were no Arabs in Casablanca!” And with that, he was gone.

· Alexander Walker, film critic, born March 22 1930; died July 15 2003

From the Film4 website…

The news of the death of Alexander Walker – arch film critic for the London ‘Evening Standard’ – came as something of a shock not only for his friends, but also for those of us who were proud to be his adversaries. One of the most outspoken and eccentric critics of his generation, Walker was given to lambasting and excoriating the very films which I consider a reason to keep going back to the cinema. If you’ve ever watched any of my ‘Extreme Cinema’ introductions, you’ll probably have noticed how regularly his name came up in leading the charge against the kind of films we choose to celebrate here on FilmFour.A few examples: In the late 90s, Walker’s Cannes report headlined “A Movie Beyond The Bounds of Depravity” lit the fuse which sparked the campaign to ban David Cronenberg’s Crash, one of the greatest films of the last 25 years, and a stunning work of art all round. A year or so later, Walker called for the police to investigate screenings of Miike Takashi’s mind-boggling Audition (my favourite film of that year, and a real wake-up call for the moribund Western horror genre), and questioned the legality of the censors’ decision to pass it without cuts. More recently, he spat bile and derision upon the makers of Irréversible (the most sustained and accomplished exploitation movie since The Last House On The Left), and claimed that the BBFC had “betrayed” the British public for passing it for exhibition. Oh, and he hated Marc Evan’s brilliant Resurrection Man too…Inevitably, Walker’s high profile campaigns against films that I love led to public spats between us – often in the letters page of ‘Sight and Sound’ magazine, where his responses to my responses to his responses to films like Crash and Irréversible were always entertainingly feisty. They were also both proud and forthright – he most recently took me to task, for example, for failing to credit him personally with a blistering attack upon the morality of movies like Baise-Moi in the ‘Evening Standard’. As far as Alex was concerned, the words which I had quoted scornfully were his and he was proud of them (He also suggested that I had not quoted him fully enough, and enclosed the text of the relevant surrounding material which he asked to be published – just for the record.) Considering how little we agreed with each other about movies and censorship, it may surprise some to learn that Alexander Walker and I were on entirely civil terms in person. Indeed, since his involvement in my 2002 documentary about Ken Russell’s dark masterpiece The Devils (a film which Walker hated with a passion) I like to think that we had become politely acquainted. For those who missed ‘Hell on Earth: The Desecration and Resurrection of The Devils’, Walker was included because of an infamous and long-standing feud which erupted between him and Russell after the two clashed on a BBC arts programme back in the early 70s. Having declared The Devils to be little more than exploitative filth, Walker found himself physically assaulted live on air by Russell, who struck him over the head with a rolled up copy of the ‘Evening Standard’, a paper which Walker later claimed “may have contained an iron bar, for all anyone knew.” A scandal ensued with legal action being threatened and questions asked in the House – a fuss not dissimilar to that which Walker would later whip up around Crash. Since Russell and Walker never patched up their differences over The Devils, and knowing that Russell is a personal friend of mine, it is to Walker’s immense credit that when I asked him to appear in ‘Hell on Earth’ (which he knew would be broadly in favour of The Devils) he agreed without hesitation. When asked to voice his heartfelt objections to The Devils on camera, he did so with all the passion and vigour that he had mustered 30 years earlier. Once again, with clarity and precision, Walker explained to me why the film was nothing more than “the masturbation fantasies of a Catholic schoolboy” and why Russell was completely wrong-headed in his scripting and direction of this “hysterical” nonsense. He talked calmly and frankly (and with good humour) about the “on-air attack” while still fiercely defending the opinions which had so enraged Russell. After which, we shook hands, agreed to disagree on the subject of The Devils (and Crash, and Irréversible, and Baise-Moi etc etc) and went our respective ways.Now that he is gone, Alexander Walker leaves something of a hole in the shrinking world of British film criticism. In an age in which proper film critics are increasingly being usurped by bozo ‘presenters’ and celebrity ‘talking heads’ who know nothing of film history (and often haven’t even bothered to watch the fucking films in question) we can ill afford to lose anyone who takes their job seriously and who is willing to stand up for their personal opinions – however controversial. No matter how much I disagreed with Walker’s views on cinema, no-one could ever doubt his integrity and honesty – he said what he believed, and he was always willing to defend his views in public. Plus, he knew cinema inside out, and was able to contextualise his often cantankerous opinions within an extensive awareness of film history which few of today’s high profile film commentators could match.

Like chief censor James Ferman, who’s passing left me baffled and bewildered, Alexander Walker was a significant figure in my own development as a film critic – someone against whose opinions I could rail with enthusiasm, and whom I think I secretly believed to be indestructible. It’s a cliché to say it, but he will be sorely missed – not least by me. After all, who else is out there now to provoke the kind of serious debate about cinema which Walker’s outpourings inevitably prompted?

In short, it’s a bloody shame that he’s gone, and anyone who loves cinema (extreme or otherwise) should mourn his passing.

Mark Kermode (thanks Kieron)

Crash – The Daily Mail response

CRASHING OUT
It is now four years since the considerable crisis that pervaded British cinema politics finally juddered to a halt as David Cronenberg‟s Crash (1996) was released at last to the screens, uncut as an „18‟. The controversy lasted exactly a year. In June 1996, Alexander Walker published his condemnation of the film in the London Evening Standard.i Following a longish pause, the Daily Mail – from the same publishing stable – took up the cause, albeit much more crudely, and mounted a steadily intensifying campaign to block the film‟s release. Repeated front-page banner headlines combined with attempts to use MPs and other political figures as opinion conduits, approaches to every local authority in the country seeking action against the film, led on to journalists door-stepping individual examiners from the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC). Although in the end their campaign failed, the toxins they implanted were mightily effective. Crash did very badly when released. In many places, multiplexes booked the film, probably hoping that the controversy would have stimulated a perverse wish to see it. When the opposite happened, the Mail claimed a kind of victory. The British public, about whose vulnerability they had been panicking for a year, suddenly proved to have the „commonsense‟ necessary to reject the film.
In late 1996, with two colleagues, I won an ESRC grant to study the campaign, how it was organised discursively, how it impacted on audiences‟ expectations and, once they saw the film, in what different ways people responded to it. The main findings of our research are being published this autumn.ii I want here to reflect on some uncomfortable questions the research
raises for film studies itself, and not least for the role of a journal such as Screen.
Our research showed that the Mail was able to dominate almost entirely the manner in which the film was debated. The terms of reference which the Mail established (even more, in fact, than Walker‟s own) drove the film‟s defenders to answer in its terms, to their considerable weakening. How did this happen? Largely, I am arguing, because there were too few voices willing to bring to the film other ways of talking about it, other clear and comprehensible lines of understanding. A small number of media academics (most notably Julian Petley) spoke up during the controversy … a very small number. But unless I am very mistaken, there was not one specifically film academic among them. Why? Where were we all? The sheer overwhelming silence is so striking – it surely invites consideration of the public position of film theory and research.
It is an irony that the last twenty five years have seen film studies in the UK largely dominated by a claim that film analysis is inextricably political. To analyse films is to bring to light, variously, ideological formations or spectatorial positionings with cultural, social and political resonances. Films embody culturally significant representations. To analyse films is to explore forces functioning to form cultural identities. Make your choice among these, it hardly matters – all these are bids for the wider political significance of film studies. Yet faced with a real political controversy lasting a full year, it seems we had nothing to contribute. How do we explain this?
Of course many explanations are possible. It might simply have been nervousness and unease at speaking out in public – although film studies itself generally disallows personalised explanations of this kind. It might have been a
belief that the crisis would soon blow over, or that the BBFC would surely come out right in the end – a tough one, that, given the depth of suspicion of „institutions‟ in our field. It might have been a case of „over-specialisation‟, a sense that (as one colleague honestly put it to me) this isn‟t „my kind of film, my area of film studies‟. It might of course be unease at the film, at its particular cinematic examination of sexuality. Any or all of these may be true. But I am most interested in another and more disturbing possibility – that film studies was disabled from speaking on the issue because its dominant conceptualisations effectively collude with the position taken by the Daily Mail.
What was the Mail‟s argumentative framework? That films are a particularly powerful form of culture because they are so visual. This makes cinematic display of sexuality particularly dangerous because it can bypass our rational veneer. That the emotional arousal, or „heat‟, this generates is dangerous just because it is „hot‟, arousal – and the effort put by defenders in the UK to prove how „cool‟ the film was, thus reveals its discursive dependence. That this means that there will be some – vulnerable, immature, partly-formed – who will be especially vulnerable to the „messages‟ contained in what the film shows. We don‟t need ever to find such people – we are entitled to impute their possible existence and draw word-cartoons of them. That this will work if these viewers are led to identify with these degraded characters. That „we‟, the educated, the well-informed, the ones with insight, cannot shirk our duties to display what we can see but they cannot: the messages which subvert; the subtexts which influence even as they are not seen. In various ways, and with inputs from some „experts‟, the Mail argued all these – or, interestingly, in the case of the dangers of the „heat‟ of films did not need ever to argue it explicitly, yet the film‟s defenders „knew‟ to deny it by asserting Crash‟s coolness, its
iciness. If semiotics can teach us anything, it is to detect the force of unstated yet acknowledged discursive meanings.
Now, bowdlerising just a little, what are the current presumptions of much film studies? That films are primarily visual exercises – hence all the talk of „point of view‟, of spectatorship, or the problems of visual pleasure, and so on? A vast diet of film analysis has presumed that our visual relationship to films simultaneously positions us and enmeshes us. It is this belief which grounds the supposed persuasiveness of films, their capacity to engage our „identities‟, to act as mirrors (again the „looking‟ involved) back to our forming selves. It is through such mechanisms that the symbolic formations of films, their subtexts, their „messages‟ are conveyed to those primal parts of our minds which operate behind and below the „rational‟ levels. The term most used for this process of engagement and entrapment? „Identification‟. And even from time to time comes the acknowledgement that the only „safe‟ films, those which will engender critical reflection and distance, are those which refuse identification, remain „cool‟, deny pleasure. The match, to me, is very striking. How did this all work with Crash?
Screen published five articles on Crash during and after the controversy. One was essentially a descriptive recounting of the controversy.iii The others were pretty typical examples of „film analysis‟. That is, they set about searching for a meaning and significance in the film, deploying for this purpose sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit concepts and methods.iv Two of them did note in passing that there was indeed a controversy – but that was all. Film analysis has other priorities. These were: to use the special expertise of film analytics to prise out the subtexts, and perhaps even to „name‟ who might be influenced – and thus to judge the film. Whatever the differences from the Mail in other
respects, in one crucial respect at least there was real commonality: in the will to operate with untested „figures of the audience‟, to claim the power to know how audiences must respond to the film because the analyst – who has not of course responded in this way at all – nonetheless has the power to impute these responses to those who will not be allowed to speak for themselves.
In a controversy piece, with a word-limit, I can only partly demonstrate my case. I have chosen just one of the four analyses to illustrate my point. Fred Botting & Scott Wilson deconstruct Crash mercilessly. As they put it: „Crash combines the stylized ennui of a seventies German urban alienation film with the grainy, low-tech, humourless repetition of a seventies German porn film.‟ This scorning of the film should, one might suppose, lead to its dismissal – a film this poor surely can‟t merit much attention? Its distinguishing feature must surely be its failure to signify very much at all. Not so: Crash‟s very poverty made it part of a (Foucauldian) nightmare. Its cold address to sex thus signalled a disciplinary regime – put the plebs off their sex, so that they learn to police themselves: „the increasing juridical, governmental and corporate concern […] with unauthorized incursions into the “personal space” of employees (particularly sexual harassment) has, in common with Crash, the close identification of work and jouissance and an interest in intensifying sex, and the social activities around it, as something that may seriously damage your health – or psyche.‟ Here the sexual alienation becomes symptomatic, a marker of a desire to control and snuff out presumably otherwise resistant desires.
How did they know this? What warranted this move? The concept that does the work for them is, no surprise, the concept of „identification‟. Yet the concept is used quite weirdly. Here is the first main use: „Elias Koteas’s
performance of Vaughan as the dangerously charismatic, virile American is so excessive […] as to successfully hint at the deficiency that determines his obsession. Far from being the intoxicating, sinister figure he appears to be for Helen Remington and the Ballards, he merely evokes incredulity, and fails to provide the point of identification that could enliven his project for a cinema audience.‟ So, the „audience‟ is here „known‟. „They‟ will fail to identify. But in that case we are back with the paradox: if it fails to provide such a point of identification, and „identification‟ is understood to be the means by which signification is „transferred‟ from text to audience, how on earth can it achieve meaningfulness?
The answer lies in a further stage of imputation: the audience who „fail to identify‟ are thus left walking around with their needs for identification left unfulfilled. The vessels were not left empty, but rather seething. „As scar-screens, the empty units of visual identification (“characters” is too strong a word) are marked by the traces of an unspeakable automotive jouissance unavailable to a human culture determined by the restricted economy of the pleasure principle. […] Without any privileged place of identification, the film is plotted along a chain of scars signifying the displacement of the fetish from its “original” location as the substitute for maternal lack, to a fetishistic repetition and universalization of lack: all figures are all-too-obviously castrated.‟
The logic of this complaint fascinates me. The Mail and its sympathisers saw the problem in Crash as its potential generation of „heat‟: arousal in some people somewhere of a combination of „perverse‟ sexual arousal and excitement at car crashes. In response, the film‟s defenders argued that the film was „too cool‟ to arouse, to evoke the kinds of „identification‟ that could enable this.v Now along come film analysts turning the failure to produce
„identification‟ into another species of harm. The common threads? That untested notion of „identification‟, which hangs on in there within film studies as a hardly-considered, never-tested bogus necessity.vi And those imputations about some never-identified, never-researched – indeed, just never asked – „audience‟ – who are never the analysts, who have risen above such vulnerability, and thus speak from a pastoral position.
So what is this „figure of the audience‟? Cinema-goers may have thought they go to see Crash for all kinds of reasons (to check out the latest Cronenberg film, to find out what the fuss was all about, to make their own minds up, to see if it could help exorcise memories of an actual car crash, and so on – these are among the many real reasons we encountered in our research). But according to this reading, what actually drives the encounter with the film is a search for „identification‟. Having gone with deep needs requiring attention, what they got instead was „castrated‟ characters, fetishistic fantasies, and frustrated desires. Actual audiences may have told us that they became richly engaged, that they found the film thrilling, inspiring, liberating; but film theory knows better.
Of course there are differences between the Mail and film academia. These are easy to point to. But they should not conceal from us the similarities, both in concepts deployed and, in the end, judgements arrived at. And the disturbing silence of film academics in this most important controversy is my strongest justification for issuing this challenge. One of the most important findings, perhaps, of our research into the Crash controversy was about the ways in which within the UK there is an unspoken but powerfully operative set of assumptions about the proper functions of film. British filmic culture is built around a very narrow image of what films are allowed to do, and Crash clashed
head-on with that image. It is sad to find film academia complicit – and unaware of its complicity – in that narrowness.
Martin Barker
University of Wales, Aberystwyth
i Alexander Walker, „A movie beyond the bounds of depravity‟, Evening Standard, 3 June 1996.
ii Martin Barker, Jane Arthurs & Ramaswami Harindranath, The Crash Controversy: Film Censorship and Audience Reception, (London: Wallflower Press, 2001).
iii Annette Kuhn, „Crash and film censorship‟, Screen, vol. 40:4, no. (Winter 1999), pp. 446-51. The strange thing, though, is how disconnected this essay is from Kuhn‟s previous, superb work on the discursive formations of film censorship, in her Cinema, Censorship, and Sexuality, 1909-1925, (London: Routledge, 1988).
iv Barbara Creed, „Anal wounds, metal kisses‟, Screen, vol. 39, no. 2 (Summer 1998), pp. 175-9; Michael Grant, „Crimes of the future‟, Screen, vol. 39, no. 2 (Summer 1998), pp. 180-5; Scott Wilson & Fred Botting, „Automatic lover‟, Screen, vol. 39, no. 2 (Summer 1998), pp. 186-92; and Marq Smith, „Wound envy‟, Screen, vol. 40, no. 2 (Summer 1999), pp. 193-202.
v See, for instance, Lord Birkett, „President‟s Introduction‟, Annual Report, London: BBFC 1996/7; Alastair Dalton, „Crashing bore is all talk, no action‟, The Scotsman, 20 March 1997; and Lesley Dick, „Review of Crash’, Sight & Sound, June 1997, p.34.
vi The unwillingness of most film scholars to test or even critically examine the claims implicit in the concept of „identification‟ is really striking. The most important work on this within film studies is undoubtedly Jackie Stacey‟s (Star Gazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female Spectatorship, (London: Routledge, 1993) – but even Stacey resists abandoning the term, even after she has effectively demolished its unity and explanatory power. Murray Smith has recently tackled the concept from the point of view of cognitive film theory (see his Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion and the Cinema, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), but strangely appears to see no need to submit a series of claims about „audiences‟ to the test of actual audiences

Crash – The Last Gasp of Outrage?

The Last Gasp of Outrage?
Paddie Collyer
Up until the last quarter of the twentieth century, film censorship
operated at an intersection of interests: the film industry, national
government, local government, the press and public opinion.
National government provided the necessary legislation, while local
government licensing departments, guided by British Board of Film
Censorship/Classification (BBFC) certificates, interpreted the law
according to local circumstances by granting exhibition licences to
cinemas while also applying local censorship/classification as they
deemed appropriate. The press, both national and local, formed part
of the matrix, acting as the voice of public opinion, or so they claimed.
The effect of certain press campaigns, usually expressing outrage at
allegedly over-liberal censorship decisions made by the BBFC, did
not always bring about the desired results, namely to bring the Board
to heel and remove some of its powers. Gradually, as the result of
legislative changes, the British Board of Film Classification became
more autonomous and grew to almost monolithic proportions, in spite
of pressure from certain newspapers. Its consistent resistance to these
pressures during the rule of James Ferman as Director strengthened its
position. Notable cases1 towards the end of the century were The Last
Temptation of Christ (1988), Natural Born Killers (1994), Michael Collins
(1996)2 and David Cronenberg’s Crash (1996), which last is the subject
of this paper.
The press campaign against Crash in 1996 was unusual because it
represented a campaign waged by only two newspapers, the Evening
Standard and the Daily Mail (both owned by Associated Newspapers).
And although there have been a few more recent campaigns of a lesser
nature, it is also, to date, the last of its kind. The campaign bears closer
examination, particularly with regard to the way in which it was used
politically by the two papers, and the way in which the Board reacted
to it. Petley (1997b), Kermode and Petley (1997), Kuhn (1999) and
Barker et al. (2001) have all discussed the newspaper campaign and
the political manoeuvring which characterised the pre-classification
period (which coincided with the final months before the General
Election of 1997) but no one has given an insight into the events which
took place at the BBFC itself as it prepared to deal with the certification
of the film. The following narrative attempts to fill that gap.
The campaign by the Mail and Standard clearly had two aims (apart,
of course, from the banning of Crash itself). First, it was intended to
bring about the clipping of the wings of the BBFC. And second, it
aimed to turn Crash into a weapon in its pro-Tory propaganda war
in the run-up to the 1997 general election. The year 1996 was that
during which the ‘family values’ famously advocated by the then Prime
Minister, John Major, had been thrown into disarray by revelations
of the extra-marital affairs of certain senior Tories. In the hands
of the Mail and Standard the film became a means of reasserting
the precarious ‘family values’ seen to be slipping away from the
government in this crucial pre-election period.
What excited attention in the first place was an article written in
the Evening Standard, 3 June 1996, by its film critic Alexander Walker
who had seen the film at Cannes (where it had been awarded the
Grand Jury Prize) and described it as ‘beyond the bounds of depravity’.
Derek Malcolm had in fact reviewed the film two weeks earlier in the
Guardian on 18 May, the day after the screening, but had not been
particularly excited by it. The film follows the experiences of a group
of people seeking sexual satisfaction through the excitement that neardeath
events bring them, predominantly by involving themselves in
real or simulated car crashes. It is unclear quite why Walker decided to
wait for two weeks to give his own derogatory account but the ensuing
controversy may have had an adverse effect on distributors because
none adopted the film until Columbia Tri-Star decided to do so some
months later. As a result of the articles appearing in the Mail and
Standard in the wake of Walker’s diatribe, Julian Petley wrote to the
Press Complaints Commission on 13 June complaining about their
numerous inaccuracies (BBFC file on Crash). This was the first recorded
accusation that there was a concerted campaign by both newspapers
against the film.
By early October the BBFC had the film in its possession and it was
viewed first by three examiners and the Director, James Ferman; a few
days later it was viewed by the Deputy Director, Margaret Ford and
another senior examiner. On 17 October the President of the Board,
Lord Harewood, and a second examining team viewed the film. While
this close examination of the film was taking place, the Board had
other preoccupations. Michael Howard, the then Home Secretary, had
demanded that the Board submit a report on screen violence to the
Home Office by 6 December. In the light of the political attention now
turned on the Board, Ferman decided to delay release of the film.3
On 9 November 1996 the film was screened at the London Film
Festival under a special licence granted by Westminster City Council.
Reports in the Mail on the day of the screening quoted Heritage
Secretary Virginia Bottomley, who had not seen the film, as saying
that it should be banned and that no local authority should allow it
to be screened. The same day’s Telegraph also reported her comments
and an additional article by Nigel Reynolds also called for a ban. The
Crash issue was thus rapidly becoming a political one, and the Mail in
particular did its usual best to equate the Conservatives with morality
and Labour with immorality.
The process of classification at the BBFC
Westminster City Council instructed its solicitor to send a letter to
the Board (BBFC file on Crash, 21 November 1996) stating that it
had serious concerns with the content. These involved three scenes
in the film: the first included the line that ‘car crashes are fertilising
and not destructive’, the second was a sex scene involving a woman
wearing callipers, and the third was the final, post-crash sex scene. The
council’s licensing sub-committee was reluctant to allow the showing of
the film while those scenes were included and had made a decision
to prohibit it in Westminster. The council appealed to the BBFC
to consider the three scenes in question. Attached to the solicitor’s
letter was a full report from the sub-committee. This stated that,
under normal licensing conditions, a film may not encourage or incite
crime, lead to disorder, stir up hatred, promote sexual humiliation
or degradation, deprave or corrupt, or be grossly indecent and so
outrage standards of public decency. The report also noted that the
film had provoked controversy and considerable media coverage, and
that a number of complaints (unspecified) had been received from the
general public.
James Robertson4 records that, from his research into the personal
papers of James Ferman, the decision had already been made to allow
the film’s release, uncut with an 18 certificate, at the time of the
London Film Festival screening. However, Ferman announced to the
Independent on Sunday, 10 November, that, in all, 22 examiners would
see the film, implying that a decision on classification had not yet been
taken. From 11 to 13 December the remaining twelve examiners who
had not seen the film filed their reports.
The examiners’ reports
The examiners were obviously aware of the controversy surrounding
the film, in particular the reactions to it by the Mail, Standard and
Westminster City Council. It was presumably because of this furore
that the film was screened before so many examiners (normally a film
would be examined by two). There follows a representative selection of
examiners’ comments (all of which can be found in the BBFC file on
Crash). It is worth pointing out that many of the comments made were
similar to one another.
The feelings which pervade most of the reports were summed up
clearly by one examiner who stated:
Assuming that the vast majority of adults are sufficiently charged with
a measure of intelligence, I cannot see that this film should give
us any cause for concern. Its world and the individuals occupying it
are too far removed from everyday experience for anyone to find a
real identification . . . hence I cannot see a sudden deluge of kamikaze
motorists taking to the road as a result of having seen it – human nature
does not operate as simply as that.
Several other examiners concurred, one noting that ‘I cannot believe
that it has any capacity to harm, although it will certainly repel some
viewers’ and another that ‘it will revolt, sadden, depress and probably
exhilarate but I do not think it will corrupt’.
Another examiner argued that the cuts demanded by the council
were ‘ludicrous’. More specifically, they pointed out that the line about
car crashes being fertilising ‘is one of the few lines which makes some
of the ideas of the piece transparent and cutting it would simply excise
one of the film’s raison d’etre, and its cultural hypothesis’. To cut the
sex scene with the woman in callipers would, in their view, damage
the ‘serious treatment of a provocative theme. To cut here would
emasculate this theme and ironically make it safer for those interested
in risk behaviour. For most people this will be a shocking concept, but
the viewer has been following the path of perversion throughout and
needs to be taken to this conclusion.’ Referring to the final scene, which
some had accused of having necrophile overtones, the examiner states
that the objection to it ‘rests on a misunderstanding of the ending – she
[Catherine] is not hurt and wishes she was. Sex here is an affirmation of
life as well as a reaction to the kick of trauma.’ The reaction of another
examiner to Westminster’s demands was: ‘Why not cut sex scenes with
anyone who is not of Aryan beauty, the cutting of a line of dialogue is
purely the censorship of ideas and the woman ain’t dead at the end.’
A further examiner commented:
It’s distant, detached, hypnotic in its rhythms and clinically observant.
It’s dark, slow moving, repetitive, narratively thin. James Spader
occupies iconic role of the impotent voyeur as in Sex, Lies and
Videotape . . . Look further and you discover endless meanings about
identity and sexuality, grazing theories about the symbolic and the
construction of the monstrous feminine, about the consumer culture
of personal development that finds its most extreme manifestations
in body modification, about the boredom of the twentieth century.
Such richness of meaning makes it unthinkable that we don’t pass this
film . . . Controversy has taken film away from art house audience into the
wider domain . . . one reason the film becomes more difficult to defend,
not because it is intrinsically obscene, but because it is complex and
difficult to summarise in a defence to counter the sound bites of the
moral outrage generated by the central theme of perversion . . . Anyone
looking for easy pleasure and explicit thrills will be sorely disappointed:
the most common reaction will be that of the vast majority of examiners
– that it is boring and cold.
And indeed, some of the negative audience reactions discussed
in Barker et al. (2001) do suggest that these stem precisely from
disappointment at not being presented with the orgy of ‘sex ‘n’ wrecks’
which the more lurid reporting of the film seemed to promise.
Yet another examiner discussed their own experience of a car crash
and the fact that they found that they had to keep going back to the
scene of the crash in order to exorcise the experience in some way:
Crash is an intelligent film which encourages us to understand
ourselves better. Surely this is the ultimate purpose of art. The current
controversy . . . is in my view based on political opportunism of a few
journalists and politicians and is unrelated to the film itself.
However, the examiner whose judgement was to be proved the most
premonitory and percipient was the one who observed that:
It will be interesting to see what happens when the film is finally given its
certificate. What this feature will undoubtedly do is create an enormous
storm of protest most of which will be directed at us. I hope we are well
prepared and ready to dig in for a very long night.
As the controversy in the press continued, Ferman still delayed his
decision to certificate the film. He now sought advice from a range of
specialists in order to be seen to be making an informed decision. What
follows are extracts from the reports commissioned from the clinical
psychiatrist Dr Paul Britton (who was also a consultant in forensic
psychology), a QC and a group of disabled media specialists and
broadcasters. Ferman wished to place the psychiatrist’s report before
John Nutty QC to inform his decision but Britton went away on holiday
and the report was not forthcoming until mid-February.5
The clinical psychiatrist’s report
Britton, who had viewed the film on 23 January 1997, made no attempt
to analyse it, restricting his comments to observations and remarks
of a fairly straightforward nature. In his report (in the BBFC file
on Crash) he attempted to provide psychoanalytical comments, but
in doing so removed the depictions he described from any narrative
context. His somewhat detached report focused primarily on fetishism
and sado-masochism, finding at its conclusion that neither was actually
represented in Cronenberg’s film. Nor did he find that the film was
conveying sexual depravity, one of the major concerns of Westminster
City Council and of Walker’s original article in the Standard. Indeed,
he found that there was no desire and no passion portrayed by the
characters. This reaction actually chimed with that of Jean Baudrillard
(1994: 119) who, when commenting on J. G. Ballard’s book on which
the film was based, refers to a chromatic world and a metallic intensity
devoid of sensuality. And doubtless one of the most problematic
aspects of the film (like the book) is for many that it does indeed
offer no judgement and leaves the audience/reader to draw their own
conclusions, a point stressed by some of the examiners at the Board, as
noted above.
Commenting on film-making techniques, he stated that there was
‘high impact due to close-ups – tends to make viewers participants
rather than observers’, and then went on to discuss the possible effects
on the audience:
Effect on psychologically mature and intact adults is likely to vary from
disquiet, to reflection to sexual stimulation depending on the particular
moment in the film. This is likely to be accompanied by feelings of
distaste for many. They will realise that the disabled are positively
represented and compare this with the corresponding lack of emotion
in the main characters. They will either be angered or passive about this.
The impact of moral vacuum of the main characters could affect viewers
whose own moral/philosophical systems have not yet matured – might
experience disquiet, reflection and sexual stimulation. It would have
been unusual for this group to be affected significantly.
He continued:
An audience of generally antisocial persons already disposed to
vandalism will also experience disquiet, sexual stimulation and
reflection. They are likely to read a general anti-authority ‘natural man
against the community’ message into the film because that interpretation
will fit their pre-existing value system. It may enhance any distortion. No
reason to expect the film to introduce distortion. In this small group
of psychologically vulnerable deviant or disturbed people effects would
be long lasting but not necessarily seen as overt behaviour but would
certainly have internal, psychological consequences. Some members
of this group could be expected to identify so strongly with these
leading characters as to attempt to model important aspects of their
own future behaviour upon them, a much larger proportion of this
group would not necessarily be inclined to do so, but would nevertheless
have their self image, personal value systems and ways of anticipating
normal interpersonal behaviour in the direction of incorporating those
modelled.
A further inevitable consequence for this group would be that from
time to time someone would wish to attribute causal significance to the
film for the antisocial behaviour of themselves or of others, when in fact
the behaviour in question would have occurred anyway. (Ibid.)
Interestingly, the audience research on Crash conducted by Barker
et al. (2001) confirms the first part of the psychiatrist’s predictions.
They found a large number of respondents were ‘unsettled’ by the
film and that even if they found it to be ‘sexually arousing’, this
‘double reaction’ posed a problem for audience analysis because
there existed no tools for evaluating it. This, they argued, revealed
a significant gap in their research, and indeed in audience research in
general.
Britton’s views were to become the subject of comment in the
Daily Mail when he complained to the newspaper that Ferman had
misrepresented them in the BBFC press release issued at the time of
the film’s eventual certification. However, comparison of his comments
above with those quoted in the press release of 18 March 2007 show
no discrepancies, with the exception of his reference to ‘anti-social’
people. On 23 March, Britton was quoted by the Mail as stating that
the film was wall-to-wall pornography and should never have been
released. Ferman later wrote to Britton in order to clarify the latter’s
views in the light of these apparent discrepancies, but Britton did not
reply in writing.
Because Walker had made accusations of depravity through the
pages of the Evening Standard, and even though these were not
supported by Britton’s report, Ferman decided to consult a QC over
whether the film could be subject to prosecution under the Obscene
Publications Act 1959. This action emphasises the role played by the
BBFC in defending members of the film industry from prosecution, a
role which Ferman took extremely seriously. The Board itself could also
become extremely vulnerable should a film which it had certificated be
prosecuted, particularly if, as in this case, the Board, as well as the film,
had been under attack by the press. Ferman announced his intentions
to the weekly meeting on 18 December. During the following week the
QC viewed the film and submitted his findings.
John Nutty QC’s report
In his report, Nutty found that the film did not romanticise, glamorise
or encourage sexual deviancy and did not encourage the activity. For
him it examined the subject clinically and intensely, but the film did
not engage the audience emotionally or intellectually. He quoted the
comments of one examiner who said that the director regards the
human body not as a sacrosanct container for the human spirit but
as the site of an infinite number of experiments in which the corporeal
frame might be invaded, penetrated or rearranged and the effect on
the individual is noted with clinical detachment (BBFC file on Crash).
Nutty felt that there were many films more violent which had not
attracted attention and noted that there was no violent sex in the
film, only lustful sex. In a section concerned with the law he explored
the Obscene Publications Act of 1959 and cited many cases with
which Crash could be compared. Noting that the words ‘deprave and
corrupt’ in the Act were problematic and made it difficult to apply, he
pointed out that no definition of this phrase had ever been offered by
Parliament, and that no guidelines on this matter were available. In his
view, the film was on the borderline of obscenity because it dealt with
‘depraved sexual perversion’, but Nutty concluded that the Director of
Public Prosecutions would not prosecute the film-makers.
The final decision
The examiners’ reports, and the conclusions reached by Britton and
Nutty, gave Ferman the general picture which he was seeking before
issuing the film uncut with an 18 certificate. He had also investigated
the views of a potentially vulnerable audience, namely the disabled,
with the help of Paul Darke, a disabled media specialist. Dark showed
the film to a disabled audience who, although they did not like it, did
not feel that it should be banned.
Ferman’s press release of 18 March announcing the film’s
classification was published on the same day that John Major dissolved
Parliament in preparation for a general election on 1 May. It was of
course greeted by another tirade from the Mail and the Standard which
included personal attacks on Ferman and his staff. At the same time
Westminster City Council announced that it would ban the film in the
borough’s cinemas.
Epilogue
The film was released in June 1997, just after New Labour’s landslide
victory the previous month, and the Mail and Standard campaign
gradually died down. To coincide with the release of the film, Sight and
Sound ran an article detailing the history of the campaign (Kermode
and Petley (1997)). In August, the magazine published an extensive
letter of complaint about the article from Walker in which, however, he
signally failed to identify any inaccuracies in it. He did, however point
out that Sight and Sound was not exactly a disinterested party in this
affair as it was published by the BFI whose chairman Jeremy Thomas
was the executive producer of Crash. He could also have noted, but
didn’t, that the London Film Festival, at which the hated Crash had
been screened, was sponsored by the Standard. In the September issue
Kermode replied (briefly) and Petley (at some length), and the latter
also wrote a piece in the British Journalism Review (1997b) in which
he gave a critical account of how his complaints about the Associated
articles had been dealt with by the Press Complaints Commission.
Walker in turn replied in the following issue (1998). And there, finally,
the matter rested, the eventual release of the film on video and DVD
eliciting no negative comment.
Since James Ferman’s retirement and, sadly, his death, much has
changed at the Board. During his time as Director, the Board had
grown in strength and, in spite of all the press attacks, including
the final massive campaign conducted by Associated Newspapers,
legislation served only to strengthen the Board’s powers and not to
weaken them. Commenting on my doctoral thesis on the BBFC, Craig
Lapper, then Head of Policy at the Board, stated: 6
We would like to think that the BBFC’s published guidelines protect us
now from the occasional silly accusations that have arisen in the past.
These allow us to demonstrate clearly that a decision has been made
according to standards set by the public themselves (and the law), rather
than as a result of bowing to commercial, media or political interests.
(2004)
On the five years from 1999 to 2004 he observed:
Controversy about the Board’s work – and about individual films – has
died away to a large extent. Certainly, we have received no concerted
attacks of the sort endured by Mr Ferman in his final years. Partly this is
because we now have published – and more importantly, publicly tested,
guidelines. But it seems also that the public are generally more sceptical
and phlegmatic now about the latest ‘controversy’ to hit the screens.
Perhaps people are becoming more literate about the hidden media
agendas and are inclined to take scare stories about films with a pinch
of salt. (Ibid.)
Certainly the Mail and Standard seem to have learned a lesson from
the Crash affair, in which they found themselves unusually isolated.
However, newspapers have discovered new targets in the shape of the
Internet and video games, as well as rediscovering old ones such as the
DVD of S.S. Experiment Camp (1976), so it may be that the last gasp of
outrage is still to be uttered.
Notes
1. The classification of all of these films is dealt with in depth in my PhD thesis
The Impact of National and Local Forces on the Development of the British Board of Film
Censors/Classification.
2. For more on the attempted censorship of this film see Greenslade (2000).
3. James C. Robertson generously allowed me access to a section of his monograph
(unpublished at the time of writing) on James Ferman, based on Ferman’s personal
papers.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Craig Lapper, e-mail to the author, May 2004, in response to her PhD research on
the BBFC.
References
Barker, Martin, Arthurs, Jane and Harindranath, Ramaswami (2001), The Crash
Controversy: Censorship Campaigns and Film Reception, London: Wallflower Press.
Baudrillard, Jean (1994), Simulacra and Simulation, Ann Arbor, MI: University of
Michigan Press.
Greenslade, Roy (2000), ‘Editors as censors: the British press and films about Ireland’,
Journal of Popular British Cinema, 3, pp. 77–92.
Kermode, Mark (1997), ‘ “Crash’’ course 1’, Sight and Sound, September, p. 84.
Kermode, Mark and Petley, Julian (1997), ‘Road rage’, Sight and Sound, June, pp. 16–18.
Kuhn, Annette (1999) ‘Crash and film censorship in the UK’, Screen, 40: 4, pp. 446–50.
Petley, Julian (1997a), ‘ “Crash’’ course 2’, Sight and Sound, September, p. 84.
97
Paddie Collyer
Petley, Julian (1997b), ‘No redress from the PCC’, British Journalism Review, 8: 4,
pp. 66–73.
Walker, Alexander (1997), ‘Teaching tolerance’, Sight and Sound, August, p. 64.
Walker, Alexander (1998), ‘Walker and Petley on CRASH course’, British Journalism
Review, 9: 1, pp. 41–4.
Paddie Collyer studied for an MA in Film at the Polytechnic of Central London (now
the University of Westminster) while continuing with her job as Head of Media Studies
in a large college of further education. She studied for a PhD at Southampton Institute
(now Southampton Solent University). Now retired, she writes about film and works
with young people who have speech and language difficulties.

Crash and Regulation

The .Crash Controversy (courtesy of the BFI)

Between 1996 and 1997, Crash (Canada, 1996, d. David Cronenberg), based on J.G.Ballard’s celebrated novel, became the focal point of one of the most hysterical furores that British film censorship had seen to date.

Although it had generated some controversy when premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May 1996, it was not until the first British screening at the London Film Festival in November that the film became a tabloid cause celebre, with the Daily Mail and Evening Standard in particular attacking it on a regular basis, often on the front page.

The row would become a political issue when National Heritage Secretary Virginia Bottomley urged local authorities to refuse to screen the film, and Westminster Council took the unprecedented step of threatening to ban it unless specific cuts were made, notably a sex scene involving a disabled woman.

This, coupled with Daily Mail critic Christopher Tookey’s injudicious use of the phrase “sex with cripples”, drew the disabled lobby into the fray, though they seemed more offended by comments by the council and the newspaper than by anything in the film.

The BBFC, after a long delay, passed it uncut in March 1997, after which Westminster duly banned the film, with other local authorities following suit. However, Camden and Kensington & Chelsea were happy to accept the BBFC’s decision, enabling distributors Columbia TriStar to open the film in the West End. It was subsequently passed uncut for video and DVD release and screened on Channel Four in 2002.

The Crash controversy was significant for the way it publicly revealed the often conflicting structures of British film regulation, and the supremacy of local government over the BBFC and national government, neither of whom had any real powers when it came to preventing the release of a film.

Michael Brooke