The 1967 erotic drama so offensive a Texas cinema was burned to the ground for showing it
Despite the fact that, without sex, none of us would be here, it remains one of the greatest taboos, and Hollywood spent a long time making sure that it wasn’t depicted on screen.
For several decades, the Hays Code outlawed any explicit sex in movies, such that you couldn’t even share a passionate kiss in front of the camera, with traditional values overriding creative expression. With sex out of the (mainstream) picture until the late 1960s, when movies like Blow-Up eventually led to the easing of censorship, eroticism could instead be found in the realm of avant-garde, foreign, and independent cinema.
In 1967, just as Hollywood started to loosen its censorial grip, a Swedish arthouse film emerged that would prove to be highly controversial, reflecting just how sensitive to explicit depictions of sex and nudity many American audiences were.
You’d think that at a time of increased sexual liberation and social progression, there wouldn’t have been such outrage upon the release of I Am Curious (Yellow), but the country, on the whole, was still just as rooted in traditionalism as before, especially in places like Texas, where conservatism has long ruled with an iron fist, its release was never going to go down well. In fact, when it was shown at Heights Theatre, a mysterious act of arson led the cinema to burn to the ground.
The film, directed by Vilgot Sjöman, sees 20-year-old Lena conduct interviews with various subjects as she becomes involved in Sweden’s increasingly liberated political and sexual landscape, desiring to understand the horrors of the world and why people do what they do.
She also engages in a journey of personal sexual discovery, with the film depicting many explicitly erotic scenes, such as kissing and holding a lover’s penis, and there’s plenty of nudity to leave certain viewers disgusted. To many, this was nothing more than pornography, and while there is no unsimulated sex, the mere suggestion of such acts had people in a frenzy, although that didn’t stop the director from making a sequel, I Am Curious (Blue), released the following year.
Still, I Am Curious (Yellow) was banned across many states, with judges ruling the film to be obscene, and police seized reels of film if cinemas tried to show the movie, making it one of the most notorious titles of the decade. Surprisingly, it wasn’t actually banned by the BBFC over in the United Kingdom, although they did cut out eight minutes to make it more ‘suitable’ for viewing.
The incident in Texas remains the most damning example of the film’s controversy, though, with the act clearly reflecting the general dissatisfaction with screening such a movie in public. Evidently, people would go to extreme lengths to express their outrage, although to this day, the arsonist has never been identified.
Following the incident, the theatre was unable to fully recover, and this burning essentially marked the end of the family-run cinema’s existence, which shows you just how powerful movies can be, especially when something erotic, political, and transgressive is at play.
