That IMDB list is ridiculous. I’m not familiar with the 1908 films, but https://courseware.vt.edu/users/nmking/sub/PCPrince.html+%22night+riders%22+1908+movie&hl=en&ie=UTF-8]this site (cached on Google) says they were censored in 1909 – they’re a couple of violent, criminal-glorifying westerns, and apparently pretty shocking in the day, but they are not banned NOW, they are merely not shown – hell, I don’t know if any prints exist. The rest, similarly, have not been banned, they are merely never shown because their owners find them embarrassing.
@#*&$! That should be http://216.239.51.100/search?q=cache:jqlZvF1rpLoJ:https://courseware.vt.edu/users/nmking/sub/PCPrince.html+night+riders+movie+1908&hl=en&ie=UTF-8
Sigh. Forgive me, but I’m going to make one of those “anti-thesis” Dope posts. There is a banned movie, which supposedly cannot be shown in the US. I don’t remember a thing about it, really, but I’m posting all the various details I can remember in hopes that someone knows what the hell I’m talking about. Within the past five years, there’s been a movie that folks had questions about the reality of a death sequence. The filmmakers were interviewed (they were brothers or very close friends and this was one of their first movies), they said that the death scene was fake. However, the interviewer in the article brought up some film, which dealt with life in a tribal village and was shot some time in the 1970s, that had a death sequence which was said to resemble the one in the film that the filmmakers had made. The filmmakers said that they had seen the film when they were outside of the US and that they didn’t believe there was anyway the scene could have been faked.
Sadly, that’s all I remember, other than the filmmakers were pretty crappy and I never wanted to see any of their films. Admittedly, it all could have been hype that was made up for their film, but I don’t know.
Wow. I saw it as a kid when it was on the Movie Channel.
That item in the Internet Movie Database about The Tin Drum is either inaccurate or outdated. According to this CNN item from 1999,
From 1967 to 1992 the documentary feature Titicut Follies (1967), filmed at the State Prison for the Criminally Insane, in Bridgewater, Massachusetts, was withdrawn from distribution, and was available only to medical researchers, after the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled that it was a violation of the privacy of the inmates depicted.
Todd Haynes’ first feature, Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1987), in which the life of the singer is acted out by Barbie dolls, has been withdrawn from circulation after Richard Carpenter sued for unauthorized use of Carpenters songs.
Lots of movies are held up because of swqueamishness on the part of copyright holders. I can’t seem to find an uncut version of Mr. Mike’s Mondo Video or a non-bootleg version of the 90s, low-budget Fantastic Four.
In one of his books (I think it was Bad Taste), John Waters recounts how he had to jump through a bunch of hoops to get a Maryland Censor Stamp on his print of Pink Flamingos so he could show it at some college circa 1970. You can say we don’t have outright censorship in the States, but you’d have to hedge that with an asterisk and some footnotes.
I don’t think so. I rented it once.
Cannibal Holocaust (1979)
I don’t know if this is the one you’re thinking of. But the reviewer relates that the film-makers had to prove in an Italian court that certain scenes were fake.
“The Salt of the Earth”(1954) was banned in the US during the McCarthy era.
I have no memory of it, but it apparently was quite a flap at the time. Several individuals associated with the film refused to cooperate with the House Committe on Unamerican Activites and were held in contept of Congress.
Please quote the specific portion of law that set out a NATIONWIDE ban on the movie. In the USA, unlike in fascist countries, there is no central government board that reviews incoming films and bans those it doesn’t like.
And specifically how is this a “ban”?
If You Love this Planet, a Canadian documentary of a talk by Australian antinuclear activist Helen Caldicott, was actually banned in the United States during the Reagan administration because she sharply criticized U.S. government policies. Shameful, absolutely shameful. I watched a special screening of a smuggled copy of the film at the University of Denver, I think it was in 1984, when I happened to be there.
Helen Caldicott founded Physicians for Social Responsibility to oppose the nuclear arms buildup during the Reagan administration. It won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985. Her film If You Love this Planet won a 1983 Academy Award.
While maybe not outright banned by law some movies get pulled form theaters due to public pressure. One I remember from growing-up was I Spit on Your Grave.
No, but we have the MPAA rating Board, which pretty much works the same way.
And it’s a private organization, so not subject to First Amendment restrictions (which only apply to the govt). And it’s membership is kept secret. And they won’t generally give out much info on why they gave the rating.
But it certainly functions just like a fascist central censorship board, since the rating they give can effectively restrict a movie. Most theatre chains won’t show movies with certain ratings. And ratings lead to restrictions on times & places shown, which can make it very hard for a movie to be financially successful if it gets a ‘bad’ rating. And making them lose money is a good way to censor the production of similar movies in the future, here in our capitalist economy.
Finally, the MPAA board seems to be quite a bit out of touch with the public – some movie directors have said that they seem to be a bunch of old ladies from Orange County. Several award-winning Directors & Producers have complained about this board.
Some biases of this board have been noted:
- sex with one person will nearly always get the movie a PG rating or higher; but you can kill several people and still have a lower rating.
- a gay kiss will always give you an R rating, straight kisses are allowed even in G movies.
Frankly, I wonder if a government central censorship board might not be better – at least then you could appeal their decisions in a court of law!
Regarding hard-core porn, I’m surprised nobody’s mentioned all the Traci Lords films that were made back in the 70s/early 80s. When it came out that she was underage, the porn industry FREAKED and immediately pulled them off the market, and instituted VERY strict rules about verifying the ages of sexual players. The documentary did say that ALL of her movies (not sure how many there were) made when she was underage, are absolutely banned by U.S. law.
I’m not aware if any movies were ever made in the 70’s that featured hard-core child pornography. I’ve heard rumors, here and there, but Google failed me when I went looking for a list. (I was also a bit paranoid typing “child pornography movies” into Google :eek: – Big Brother Is Watching, after all!!)
As for mainstream movies, I can’t find the “banned in the USA” IDMB list right now, but from what I remember it concerned mostly ones that were “pulled from the market” due to controversy (i.e. “Manchurian Candidate”) or could not find a distributor (i.e. “Lolita”, which did show up on Showtime and did have a brief theatrical run, several years after Polanski made it. Heh, Polanski needs to keep away from those little girls…)
Big Daddy had a gay kiss and was rated PG-13.
I know for a fact that IMDB has another list of movies banned in the USA, its got a big list of every single rating, all of them were hyperlinked and sorted by country, and for the life of me I can’t find it, all I remember is that alot of them(the banned movies) were in different languages, and one was called Indian Fetish Cult, I’m going to go look again .)
Found it! Not that it does anyone any good now that I’ve looked it over, but, it gives me peace of mind:
http://us.imdb.com/Sections/Certificates/types_all
It seems that there are a lot of movies that simply don’t come up listed for US, so they must’ve never been released and turns out that it was the same list of banned movies for the US, and I just look like an idiot. Either way, you can try checking out whats banned elsewhere, or maybe I can just stop trying to justify it, either way, theres a moderately difficult to find page on IMDB, as far as that goes, and its pretty interesting… to me.
Sounds like it. Not something I’d want to see, anyway.