Between the late 1950s and mid-1970s, British cinema experienced an explosion of X-certificated films. In parallel with an era marked by social, political, and sexual ferment and upheaval, British filmmakers and censors pushed and guarded the permissible limits of violence, horror, revolt, and sexuality on screen. Adult Themes is the first volume entirely devoted to the exploration of British X certificate films across this transformative period, since identified as ‘the long 1960s’. How did the British Board of Film Censors, harried on one side by the censorious and moralistic, and beset on the other by demands for greater artistic freedom, oversee and manage this provocative body of films? How did the freedoms and restrictions of the X certificate hasten, determine, and reshape post-war British cinema into an artistic, exploitational, and unapologetically adult medium?
Contributors to this collection consider these central questions as they take us to swinging parties, on youthful crime sprees, into local council meetings, on police raids of cinemas, and around Soho strip clubs, and introduce us to mass murderers, lesbian vampires, apoplectic protestors, eroticised middle-aged women, and rebellious working-class men. Adult Themes examines both the workings and negotiations of British film censorship, the limits of artistic expression, and a wider culture of X certificate cinema. This is an important volume for students and scholars of British Film History and censorship, Media Studies, the 1960s, and Cultural and Sexuality Studies, while simultaneously an entertaining read for all connoisseurs of British cinema at its most vivid and scandalous.
Edited by:
Anne Etienne (University College Cork Ireland),
Dr. Benjamin Halligan (Director of the Doctoral College,
University of Wolverhampton,
UK),
Christopher Weedman (Middle Tennessee State University,
USA),
Johnny Walker (Northumbria University UK),
Christopher Weedman (Middle Tennessee State University USA)
Imprint: Bloomsbury Academic USA
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions:
Height: 229mm,
Width: 152mm,
Spine: 25mm
Weight: 454g
ISBN: 9781501375279
ISBN 10: 150137527X
Series: Global Exploitation Cinemas
Pages: 264
Publication Date: 18 November 2023
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Primary
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Acknowledgements List of illustrations Introduction: ‘Passed As Only Suitable for Exhibition to Adult Audiences: X’ Anne Etienne (University College Cork, Ireland), Benjamin Halligan (University of Wolverhampton, UK), and Christopher Weedman (Middle Tennessee State University, USA) 1. Green Penguin Films Kim Newman (Independent Scholar) 2. The Commercial Idealism of Controversial Cinema: Raymond Stross and the Censorship of The Flesh Is Weak Christopher Weedman (Middle Tennessee State University, USA) 3. Colour, Realism and the X Certificate: Horrors of the Black Museum and Peeping Tom Sarah Street (University of Bristol, UK) 4. Mediating Desire: Karel Reisz’s Adaptation of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning Simon Lee (Texas State University, USA) 5. Lolita, Censorship, and Controversy: The Archival Remains of the Dispute Between Canon L. J. Collins and Stanley Kubrick James Fenwick (Sheffield Hallam University, UK) 6. Paternalism, Bohemianism, and the X Certificate: The Party’s Over and the Pre-Swinging Set Kevin M. Flanagan (George Mason University, USA) 7. Mediatising Modernity: Femininity in the X-Rated Swinging London Film Moya Luckett (Texas State University, USA) 8. What Are the X-Rated Secrets of the Windmill Girls? Adrian Smith (Independent Scholar) 9. The Potent Sexuality of the Middle-Aged Woman: Alice Aisgill, Karen Stone, Zee Blakeley and Ruby Lucy Bolton (Queen Mary University of London, UK) 10. Censoring Carmilla: Lesbian Vampires in Hammer Horror Claire Henry (Massey University, Aotearoa New Zealand) 11. ‘The horror film to end all horror films’: 10 Rillington Place and the British Board of Film Censors’ Shifting Policy on True Crime TimSnelson (University of East Anglia, UK) 12. Class and Classification: The British Board of Film Censors’ Reception of Horror at the Time of the Festival of Light Benjamin Halligan (University of Wolverhampton, UK) Contributors Index
Anne Etienne is Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Drama at University College Cork, Ireland, and her research focuses on theatre censorship and Arnold Wesker. Benjamin Halligan is the Director of the Doctoral College of the University of Wolverhampton, UK, and his research focuses on film history, music and media, and critical theory. Christopher Weedman is Assistant Professor of English at Middle Tennessee State University, USA, where his research focuses on mid-twentieth century British and American cinema.
Reviews for Adult Themes: British Cinema and the X Certificate in the Long 1960s
Adult Themes offers a full range of fascinating insights into Britain’s film culture across the long 1960s, specifically the deployment of the X certificate as a means of mapping previously uncharted territory in an increasingly permissive social climate. Taking in such varied films as Peeping Tom, The Party’s Over, Secrets of a Windmill Girl, 10 Rillington Place and Zee and Co, made and released during John Trevelyan’s liberalised leadership of the British Board of Film Censors, the twelve chapters (plus a thoughtful editors’ introduction) provide new perspectives on how films of this era responded to, mediated, and sometimes anticipated attitudinal change - or directly challenged the status quo – by means of the new possibilities granted to them by the ‘X’. Highly recommended reading for those interested in British cultural history, the Sixties, censorship and regulation, and the always contested cinematic terrains of sex and violence, crime and horror. * Melanie Williams, Professor of Film and Television Studies, University of East Anglia, UK * I well remember the British X certificate and how I sneaked into my first one -- Circus of Horrors (1960) -- in those distant days of yesteryear. These co-editors and their contributors have performed an indispensable job in covering such a wide area and providing information that will form indispensable reading for generations to come. Well-researched, expertly written in clear and concise ways and attuned to significant issues of culture and history, this will become a definitive work in this area for years to come. * Tony Williams, Professor of Film and Literature, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, USA *
