Censorship these days: which films and books will not pass uncut in different countries

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

We are used to associating censorship with the distant past. In fact, scandals related to the censorship of books, films and even games are happening all the time these days. If thirty years ago freedom was the universal deity, now the world has a new goddess - security. Some cases of censorship can be considered truly unexpected.

Cartoons are no longer for little ones

Thinking about censorship in old cartoons, one usually thinks of black characters cut from classic tapes - because of their chauvinistic and stereotypical portrayal. So, for example, in "Tom and Jerry" was cut or repainted, depending on the episode, Mom, Tom's mistress. First, she is now white, because a plump black woman is too stereotypical. Secondly, it is not needed at all. Many other scenes in Tom and Jerry have been cut out, which derisively use stereotypical images of black or Native Americans, as well as scenes with smoking, so as not to set a bad example for children.

Social networks claim that Soviet cartoons also suffered, so that some of them are now impossible to see on TV channels during the day. For example, "The Bremen Town Musicians" - the lyrics and the plot can be regarded as propaganda of an asocial lifestyle (vagrancy), and TV channels are now trying not to get involved with an ambiguous animation masterpiece. Moreover, there the chieftain sings in a man's voice - is it not a hint of LGBT?

"The Blue Puppy", a cartoon that was considered abstractly anti-racist in the USSR, is now also difficult to see on TV. And for the same reason that they are afraid to show the chieftain with her deep contralto. There is even a known case when a performance based on this children's play was banned from playing at the Ural Variety Theater.

Communicate literally in cinema

Home-made adult films also suffered, but less. Now some rude words are completely drowned out there. Such comedies as "Zhmurki" and "Shirley-Myrli", in the opinion of the audience, have lost much of this. The director of Shirley Myrli, Vladimir Menshov, was saddened to see or, more precisely, to hear the TV version of his film. After all, the vocabulary was selected specifically for the characters and for the moment!

They are constantly drowning out the swear words in Hollywood films that are shown in cinemas in Arab countries. Often times, episodes with such words are simply cut out. The record for change after censorship was set by The Wolf of Wall Street, which cut out forty-five minutes of action - mostly cutting off episodes with the popular American interjection on f.

It's not just words that are cut out of films. In the Russian box office, from the film "Rocketman" they cut out an intimate scene between the hero of the tape Elton John and his manager, and also seriously reduced the episodes with drug use. Journalist Anton Dolin noted that the cut scenes were important for the plot, and Elton John (not cinematic, but real) noted that it was about his search for love, and he was wounded by the attitude to his personal life.

In China, the "Bohemian Rhapsody" was censored in about the same way - they cut out all the episodes by which one can understand the orientation of Freddie Mercury. In general, Chinese censorship has a very strong effect on Hollywood films even at the production stage, because China is a large and tasty market for the film industry. Details and concepts are adjusted for the Chinese, such as changing the Elder's origin in Doctor Strange from Tibetan to Celtic, because the topic of Tibet is banned in China. The film, which is going to be released in China, will not take on actors that China is suspicious of, such as Richard Gere, who spoke out about the liberation of Tibet.

And it is also known that China almost never allows films and cartoons with a mystical component to be released: the ruling party believes that there is nothing to fool the heads of the builders of communism with fairy tales of the supernatural. Exceptions can be made for high-quality tapes, which have some cognitive benefit. So, in China, the saga about Harry Potter was successfully screened - because the films were shot based on the world's recognized masterpieces of children's literature, and the cartoon "Coco's Secret", which has, in addition to artistic merits, ethnographic interest.

Which books will not be censored in Russia?

It is quite expected that teenage books that touch on the LGBT topic at least to the edge will either not be published in Russia (no matter how popular they are already on the European market), or will undergo severe censorship. In the translation of the super popular book "Bedtime Stories for Young Rebels" with women's biographies, one of a hundred fairy tales about a transgirl was cut out. Instead, it was proposed to come up with the hundredth fairy tale on your own. But this is the case when the censorship was agreed, but often the authors find that the books are changed without their consent, and this leads to scandals.

For example, the American writer Victoria Schwab, author of the Shades of Magic book series popular among teenagers, categorically withdrew permission to publish her books, finding that the line of gay teenagers had been seriously curtailed, and said many words about such inconsistent interference in the text. But the biggest scandal happened with an adult book. We are talking about the "Benefactors" of her compatriot Jonathan Littell.

This book has been translated into many languages. One of the translators, working on the Latvian version of the book, decided to get acquainted with how colleagues in Russia and not only coped with the task. The Russian translation astonished him: several paragraphs were cut out in each chapter. Dens Diminsh, that was the name of the translator, contacted the author, and then it turned out that Lyttell himself did not give consent to any notes or improvements to the author's style.

One should not be surprised that the main character's reasoning about gender and sexuality disappeared from the text, since Russia has the glory of a puritanical country and what was cut could be attributed to censorship demands. But the disappearance of some fragments caused frank bewilderment: for example, the vision of his wounded friend disappeared from the delirium of the protagonist. Gone are some of the hero's other hallucinations in this chapter. It seemed to the author especially offensive that when everything was revealed, the publisher and translator refused to apologize. The translator instead gave an interview in Russia in which she said how much better she did the book.

But more often than not, censorship is still associated with political motives: 7 scandalous films of the 21st century that censorship did not want to release.