Still from the Miklos Jancso film Round-Up. Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive
a href="http://www.1968.org.uk/cinema.html">last week's series of discussions and screenings at the Barbican, culminating in an audience debate with the Polish and Hungarian masters Agnieszka Holland and Istvan Szabó. Unfortunately, the overwhelming sentiment of the discussion was one of general distrust for human nature and a cynical outlook for western cinema.
The focus was Poland's much venerated intellectual and director Wojciech Marczewski and his film Escape from the "Liberty" Cinema. Using dark satire, Marczewski skilfully uses humour to dissect the machinery of film censorship in Soviet Poland. We are led on the anxiety-provoking and reflexive tale of an ex-poet and literary critic (Janusz Gajosa) whilst he attempts to come to terms with the implications of his job as a high-ranking cultural censor. Marczewski's film reaffirms the idea that despite the relentless pressures of censorship on Eastern European cinema, any form of suppression can be over come with, in Szabo's words, "a poetry of images and individual courage".
However, what was most interesting was the fiery debate the film provoked. The focus diverted away from the Soviet era to contemporary western notions of censorship, namely self-censorship and the cultural hegemony we ourselves are arguably complicit in. The audience was confronted with the fact that Britain itself had unashamedly censored its theatre up until the Theatre Act of 1968. This Act repealed the government's long-held right to archive and censor plays, a right it had held since the mid 1700s in a bid to control political criticism.
With the mirror firmly turned back at contemporary film audiences, Holland argued that "money and stupidity are far more useful tools of censorship in contemporary western cinema than the censorship of words and images in the Soviet era". Holland also went on to half-jokingly argue that "perhaps we as humans crave censorship, a fictional prison and order [...] Humans are essentially quite stupid". What was confirmed was the continuing importance of dialogue and the recognition that western audiences are no more free than the Soviet satellite states of the 1980s.
This provoked the obvious questions in me: how are British audiences censored? Also, in light of the recent elections of Boris Johnson and of Gianni Alemanno as Mayor of Rome, what effect, if any, does culture play in this regression? Surely some form of censorship must exist to have provoked the ignorance of the pro-Mussolini roars of "Duce! Duce! Duce!" last week? Hopefully this doesn't signal a gradual increase in ignorance regarding Italy's proud neo-realist past.
In another screening of revolutionary cinema in the spirit of 1968, the Barbican treated an audience to a wonderful and rare 35mm print of Miklos Jancso's film The Round-Up. It lived up to its reputation as an unrestrained and distressing observation of the limitations of human nature. Amid a sprawling dystopian Austro-Hungarian landscape, Jansco gets to the heart of humanity. So-called freedom fighters are reduced to selfish beggars in the interests of self-preservation, all individuals are bound by death, survival becomes an extension of punishment, and gradually Abu Ghraib feels closer.
