JULY 31 — Last weekend, I saw a television talk show discussing the limits of decency on local films. The past few months have seen quite a few controversies about someone going naked in this film or someone else going half naked in another one. Unbelievable, right? It’s a good time to be alive for local film lovers, isn’t it?
While I admit to having watched this local horror movie called “Mantra” because of all the naked/half-naked hoopla surrounding it, I still don’t buy the usual “we did it for art” argument that most people use to justify these things. Personally I think it’s more of a marketing gimmick than anything else, but to each his or her own, right? Like it or not, sex does sell, even in Malaysia.
It’s common knowledge to both filmmakers and filmgoers that censorship in general is mainly a hassle. Filmmakers complain that it stifles their creative juices. It limits the kind of stories that they can tell and the kind of things that they can put in their films. And sometimes it even gets to a point that a film loses its truthfulness in order to stay within the limits of censorship for local films.
While I do agree that censorship can do these things to you, I also happen to think that it can fuel your creative juices in a different way. You just have to be extra creative to get around or bend the rules.
In an ideal world there should not be any restrictions whatsoever with regards to an artist’s freedom of expression. But just because there are restrictions in place, it doesn’t mean that the only films we’ll be capable of making are garbage, right? There are countless examples out there of countries with similar, if not worse, restrictions and censorship that can still produce high quality films that can connect with people the world over.
Iran is an obvious example, especially in the 90s, with festival favourites like “The Taste Of Cherry”, “The White Balloon”, “Gabbeh” and many others. There were even international crowd pleasers like “Children Of Heaven” (which was even remade in Singapore as “Homerun”). China during the 80s also saw some festival hits and crowd pleasers like “Raise The Red Lantern” and “Farewell, My Concubine”, despite the restrictions placed as a result of their Cultural Revolution.
The biggest price of censorship though, in my honest opinion, is how it basically tips the balance in favour of DVD pirates. Most of the time, films that get released in Malaysia not only get censored, but they are censored in such a way that sometimes the films that we finally get to see don’t even make much sense because of all the cutting.
Sentences don’t make sense anymore because the F word gets cut out instead of bleeped or silenced, which means that the words before or after the offending word gets lost as well. And if there are two or three of those words in a sentence (which is quite normal nowadays, because that’s just the way people talk), then good luck trying to understand what’s being said.
Action sequences get muddled because the violence has to be cut out. So in the end you sometimes don’t even see who did what to whom.
These might seem like little things, but they can really annoy the hell out of people. Especially after they’ve paid good money to loosen up and enjoy themselves in the cinema after a hard day’s or week’s work. Try convincing them to cough up even more money to buy the original DVD for these films that have been cut up and slashed like that. I’d really like to see you try.
A normal pirated DVD will cost you around RM4 to RM10 each, depending on where you live (I envy you Penangites). And you can watch that DVD as many times as you want. And it is uncensored, which means it won’t be annoying (assuming you didn’t buy a copy taped in a cinema, with people’s heads and laughter and breathing added into the picture that is). A normal movie ticket costs between RM7 (for early birds) to RM13 each. And there’s always a risk that the movie will be butchered and therefore annoying.
An original DVD for the usual Hollywood picture will cost you between RM40-RM70 (depending on the company releasing it), with the added risk that it’ll be butchered and therefore annoying, and also that the DVD might be bare bones (meaning without any of those Special Features usually available in the US versions).
An ardent film fan/collector might still stick to buying original DVDs if the prices are a little closer to the pirated ones, because nothing beats the feeling of owning the real thing. But just to illustrate how decisive censorship can be — even if original DVDs cost only RM15 or RM20, if they’re still of the butchered up and annoying kind, then the pirates will still win the war. So maybe now it’s time to stop thinking about winning battles and start thinking about how to win that war instead.
* The views expressed here are the personal opinion of the columnist.
