Italy Ends Government Film Censorship, Scrapping 107-Year-Old Law

LOS ANGELES—After 107 years of film censorship in Italy, that country has finally abolished its law that gave the government the power to ban movies, or order them to be edited, on “moral” as well as on religious and political grounds, according to a report by Variety. The censorship law in recent years had been largely ignored, making its repeal last week largely symbolic. But over the past century thousands of movies, many of them featuring sexually explicit material, have been censored by the Italian government. Perhaps the most famous was Italian Director Bernardo Betolucci’s controversial 1972 film Last Tango in Paris which in the United States garnered Academy Award nominations for the director and the film’s star, Marlon Brando. But in Italy, the film was banned before it was released and all but a few prints of the movie were destroyed. Such acknowledged cinema classics as Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, and Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’avventura were also subjected to censorship under the law enacted in 1914. According to the online censorship archive Cine Censura, the advent of “hardcore” porn in the early 1970s brought new complications for Italy’s censors, resulting in more banned films, and adult filmmakers presented “fraudulent” copies of their movies to the censorship authorities, or screening the films without obtaining government clearance at all. In all, according to a survey by Cine Censura, nearly 35,000 feature films have been subject to some form of government censorship in Italy since 1944, after the fall of Benito Mussolini’s fascist government which had ruled the country since 1922. The Italian government since 1944 has banned 274 Italian films, 130 American movies and 321 more films produced in other countries.  But all of that ended last week when Italian Culture Minister Dario Franceschini announced that the century-old law had been officially scrapped. “Film censorship has been abolished,” Franceschini announced in a statement, as quoted by The Guardian newspaper. “The system of controls and interventions that still allow the state to intervene in the freedom of artists has been definitively ended.” Under Italy’s new system, preventing a film from being released, or forcing filmmakers to make unwanted cuts to their work will no longer be allowed. Instead, movie producers will classify their own films according to age groupings, such as “over 14,” “over 18” and so on. The creators’ own decisions will then need to be ratified by a new, 49-member commission of film industry experts.  “It’s a form of self-regulation. We are mature enough,” director Pupi Avati told The Guardian. Avati’s 1976 film Bordella — a satirical comedy about a brothel for women — was subjected to government censorship in his home country. According to Variety, the last major censorship case in Italy occurred win 1998, when the film Toto Who LIved Twice by directors Daniele Ciprì and Franco Maresco caused an uproar due to its inclusion of “zoophilia, rape, sodomy and religious references.” The controversy over the film and its censorship ultimately laid the groundwork for last week’s abolition of Italy’s censorship law, 23 years later. Photo By Clay Gilliland / Wikimedia Commons