Show Notes
A prolific novelist and memoirist, Ethel Mannin cleverly smuggled lots of controversial ideas into this best-selling autobiography. Freud’s influence on Mannin is clear at various points in the book because she is deeply interested in childhood as a political and cultural idea. Her chapters on schooling are very focused on telling readers about the vulnerability of children to scolding, humiliation and physical violence. She told her school teacher that her flag was the red flag – an incendiary statement if ever there was one. Fancy supporting the show? Do so here https://www.patreon.com/censoredpod Or buy stickers here: https://censoredpod.bigcartel.com/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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Censors have been replaced by classifiers, opaque silence by annual reports.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.
In Sam Peckinpah’s film, standard Western tropes – outlaws, heroes, beautiful landscape – are used to interrogate an exhausted genre. He knows spectacular gunfights are problematic but did the cut version shown in Ireland convey Peckinpah’s intent?
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.