Communism’s unsung role in a defining period for British film censorship
It’s hard to imagine these days that there might be a movie you wish to see in the UK but can’t because someone has banned it, and that’s because it actually happens very, very rarely.
In fact, the last movie to be banned outright in this country was some 15 years ago, when the British Board of Film Censors (BBFC) decided The Bunny Game had no merit whatsoever.
That hasn’t always been the case however, and although the UK has long been very liberal in what it will and won’t let its citizens watch, there were times before the Second World War when the fear of communism was a very real thing across the western world, and governments were particularly concerned about the potential manipulation of the public by countries like the Soviet Union.
Almost 100 years ago, however, there were still pockets of people who wanted to make their own minds up, who wanted to judge pieces of filmmaking themselves, without worrying about whether or not they might be thinly-disguised pieces of communist propaganda. One such group was The Film Society, a private members’ club which convened in a cinema on Regent’s Street in London in order to watch ‘uncensored’ films.
Launched in 1925, the society members’ push back against authority gathered some ire from the reporting media, describing “women in the most fantastically mannish clothes, and grotesque young men with bare heads and abundant cascades of hair surged out”. Nevertheless, the founders also included celebrities of the day, including The War of the Worlds writer HG Wells and the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw, and the fears of the government were probably well-founded; it was reported that at least half of the paying members were indeed communists.
That would have certainly contributed to the desire to screen films from Soviet Russia that had been seen and enjoyed in Europe, but the local authorities were convinced were nothing more than ‘Red’ messaging. 1925’s Battleship Potemkin was one such example, a silent war epic that has since gone down as one of the finest films ever made, but at the time was banned in the UK for some four years. When the Film Society was finally able to show it, they did so with the film’s director, Sergei Eisenstein, in attendance.
Other films emanating from the socialist republic that caused huge controversy were Vsevolod Pudovkin’s revolutionary drama Mother from 1926 and The End of St Petersburg, both of which were shown at the London site, the second of which caused some consternation at the rumour that the audience had cheered at seeing the words ‘Power to the Soviet’ on the big screen, before hissing the British national anthem.
But it turned out that the battle to allow these films to be seen would have a demonstrable effect on film censorship in the UK further down the line. The society found allies within the palace of Westminster, and one member, an avowed communist called Ivor Montagu, even had a cousin in the cabinet who pushed for more liberal censorship when it came to films.
Things really changed during World War II, when the UK was on the same side as the Soviets against Hitler’s German army, and films like 1943’s propaganda film Mission to Moscow were made to convince the public of a new alliance and understanding. It didn’t last long, however, and once the war was over, agencies were encouraging filmmakers to include anti-Soviet themes to influence cinema goers of the threat from behind the Iron Curtain.
