Show Notes
Lloyd Meadhbh explains Northern Ireland’s special censorship sauce to Aoife. There’s cross-border agreement, even more censors than usual and a bit of flogging.
Films: Ulster the Garden of Eden (1930), tourist authority of NI
Frankenstein (1931, dir James Whale)
Ourselves Alone (1936, dir Brian Desmond Hurst, Walter Summers) Released in the US as Rivers of Unrest https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0028071/
The Informer (1935, dir John Ford)
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More from Censored
In our last (for now) episode, we chat to John Kelleher who was appointed Irish film censor in 2003. When he left in 2009, the Irish Film Censor's Office had been renamed the Irish Film Classification Office, a reform that reflected how it had become, as John says 'more guide dog than guard dog'.
Censors have been replaced by classifiers, opaque silence by annual reports. We read recent annual reports from the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) and the Irish Film Classification Office (IFCO) to see how those offices work in a digital media age, and to see what the (complaining) public thinks of their role.
This remarkable neo-noir, directed by Abel Ferrara, has never been certified by the Irish Film Classification Office (the new name for the censor’s office). Aoife and Lloyd Meadhbh are joined by author Rob Doyle to discuss how Abel Ferrara and Zoe Lund, with backgrounds in porno sleaze, made a sincere film about redemption, and forgiveness.
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One of Martin Scorsese’s favourite films and guess what? We agree, it’s brilliant. Contemporary audiences detested it, preferring to ignore why they derived pleasure from realistic, filmed torture and terror. This film has everything from Freudianism to a Hitchcock doppelganger. Cuts made by censors might be lost forever but it still shocks and gives us a perfect amount of ick.