Once a week for a decade there was a strange pilgrimage from England to Holland, more specifically to a certain cinema in Amsterdam. Stanley Kubrick's “A Clockwork Orange” was regularly shown there at night. The film could not be seen in England, where it was made and played, because the director had blocked it from public screenings, himself subsequently horrified by the impact of its graphic scenes of violence. Now another famous director has “censored” one of his films: Wim Wenders’ “False Movement”, made in 1975, will only be shown in a cropped version in the future. It's a decision he made under considerable public pressure. And it's a decision that could set a precedent for how we treat works of art in the future.
Wim Wenders sat in the front row at an event organized by the German Film Academy. He didn't speak, but he wasn't supposed to, his specific "case" wasn't supposed to be heard again, the evening was under the general heading "Are we allowed to change films?" A legal expert in the packed hall rightly remarked that “we” – i.e. the public – had no right to change films; only the rights holders, i.e. the director, producer or distributor, were allowed to do so.
The question is almost as old as cinema itself; Exactly 100 years ago, in the summer of 1926, Sergei Eisenstein's “Battleship Potemkin” was supposed to hit German cinemas, a Soviet silent film that propagated the revolution. The German distributor “defused” it with significant cuts - all scenes in which officers are thrown overboard by rebellious sailors were missing - and received approval from the censorship authority.
There is no longer a censorship authority in the Federal Republic; it has been replaced by the FSK (Voluntary Self-Regulation) of the film industry, which issues age ratings. There are films that are only available for ages 18 and over, and there are films that are not labeled at all and can only be shown publicly by the distributor to adults at their own legal risk; Uwe Boll's vigilante thriller “Citizen Vigilante” was recently only given an age 18 rating on its third attempt.
Now there are the official channels - “False Movement” was released 50 years ago without any problems for ages 12 and up - but today the unofficial ones are increasingly also having a say, i.e. public opinion, which is largely articulated via social media. Nastassja Kinski, who appeared bare-breasted for two minutes in “False Movement,” has been asking Wenders to remove this scene for years; the director turned a deaf ear until the matter became a public issue. The justice policy journalist Ronen Steinke argued on the podium at the Film Academy that there could even be a legal right to removal, since Kinski was only 13 years old at the time of filming, i.e. a minor; In addition, today there is something like a “social expectation”, in other words: the zeitgeist.
The director Jutta Brückner - pioneer of feminist films in the 1970s - countered on the podium with a socio-political justification ("Nudity stood for the liberation of women back then") and one inherent in the film: "Nastassja Kinski and Hanna Schygulla stood for two different role models in 'False Movement', the sex object and the emancipated woman, and if you remove one of the two, the film is no longer understandable."
It is also questionable whether the images in question can even be retrieved. The Wenders Foundation ensures that only the cut version will be shown on the platforms, but the scenes are still available on thousands of DVDs on private shelves. The original version is also preserved in film archives and can be viewed there.
However, there is now also an awareness of the problem in archives. Heleen Gerritsen, head of the Deutsche Kinemathek, reported on a code of ethics of the international film archives that demands loyalty to the works stored, but also responsibility to the people shown in them. There were internal debates in the run-up to Berlinale retrospectives as to whether sexually charged films such as “Basic Instinct” and “The Last Tango in Paris” should be shown there. They were not shown; “Tango” was also canceled at the Paris Cinémathèque after protests - but was shown at the same time in the Frankfurt Film Museum cinema.
A representative of the Defa Foundation reported on a GDR film in which a young girl was seen naked in the shower; These ten seconds were deleted from the online version, but are still present in the normal rental version. In last year's Berlinale retrospective of German genre films from the 1970s, Ulli Lommel's "The Tenderness of Wolves" was shown, in which the then 15-year-old Christoph Eichhorn was seen naked; The debate can therefore neither be reduced to a female-male dualism nor to cries of “censorship!” Almost every controversial film is a special case, and “Wrong Movement” is one of them, because here the director and actress are both still alive and were able to reach an agreement.
The film and media scientist Lisa Gotto wanted to know from the panel how often films should be changed if they no longer consider their presentation of issues of gender, sexism or anti-Semitism to be acceptable. The disturbing is also part of the film's legacy: "How are we supposed to understand our history if we subsequently remove everything controversial? We have to develop the ability to live with historical impositions."
The great film critic Frieda Grafe once called the colorization of films “desecration of corpses”. In the audience discussion, a visitor pointed out that we should not believe that our present represents the end of history. What excites people today did not affect anyone 50 years ago, and no one knows what the future will say about it in 20 or 50 years. The British writer and art critic John Berger called such states of excitement “present chauvinism”. The cinema library does not have to start searching its historical holdings for incorrect scenes. As Heleen Gerritsen remarked dryly, she also had far too few staff for this.
