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- 1 Martine Beugnet, “A Mediology of cinematic corruption: film, corporeality and productive impurity,” (...)
1As film scholar Martine Beugnet recalls in her article published in the present issue, corruption is intrinsic to cinema on both a moral and a physical plane. As a mass medium, cinema allows for a wide circulation and transmission of contents that may be deemed vectors of corruption for the morality of viewers as regards the values upheld by a nation. However, corruption in film should not be restricted to a moral question as it also denotes an inherent physical phenomenon due to the material basis of the film medium. As Martine Beugnet contends, “the cinema proves a particularly suitable vehicle to set in motion, express, and represent processes of physical alteration or corruption.”1
2This dual implication of corruption as a process that threatens the integrity of the mind as well as the body (the figuration of humans in films as well as the metaphorical body of the film itself) is precisely at the heart of the two British films Berberian Sound Studio (Peter Strickland, 2012) and Censor (Prano Bailey-Bond, 2021). Both films ostensibly deal with the potential dangers of horror movies and the corrupting effects of watching extreme violence. However, the two films address the issue of corruption not so much as a moral question as from a formal point of view. It is no accident that the main characters in Berberian Sound Studio and Censor work within the film industry, which gives the films an overt metafilmic dimension. As such, the issue of corruption is displaced from contextual issues of viewership to the question of figuration itself, as it undermines the representation of the real of the diegetic worlds. In this respect, it is noteworthy that the two films foreground analogue audio-visual technologies that are prone to deterioration and disintegration. Ultimately through the figuration of its medium’s corruptibility, the films are celebrations “of the transgressive and productive power unleashed by forms of corruption that affect film at all levels of its existence and appearance.”2
- 3 The phrase refers to Sir Stephen Tallents’s pamphlet published in 1932 and entitled “The Projection (...)
- 4 In the UK the recurring parliamentary debates on matters cinematographic, their regular media inqui (...)
- 5 In the USA, the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA) was founded in 1922 an (...)
3From its very inception cinema has raised concerns over its impact on the audience. In the United Kingdom as in the United States, many were quick to see in cinema an ideal means to “project the nation,”3 a source of “soft power” towards foreign viewers and of social control to domestic publics, into whom notions of conformity could be hammered.4 On the other hand, cinema was equally deemed to be a potential source of corruption, which led to the establishment of the industry’s self-regulatory organisations and various forms of self-censorship whose history has been well documented.5
4After the first concerns over movie theatres being dens of iniquity, movies themselves were promptly accused of encouraging social evils such as juvenile delinquency, copy-cat violence and criminality, loose morals and promiscuity. As early as the late 1920s doctors, sociologists, judges and social workers expressed fears about the potential corrupting effects of films upon people’s conduct and on children in particular.
- 6 Richard Maltby, “The Spectacle of Criminality,” in Violence and American Cinema, ed. J. David Slocu (...)
- 7 See John Kenneth Muir, Horror Films of the 1990s (Jefferson NC: McFarland. 2011), 338. Another noto (...)
5Despite the lack of clear scientific evidence that would prove that films have any effective deleterious impact, the charge that some kinds of movies, along with other forms of popular culture and leisure, have detrimental effects on the young and uneducated has come up regularly in the public discourse. And once in a while, some notorious criminal cases would hit the headlines and reignite the charge. In the USA, it started as early as the early 1930s with Francis “two gun” Crowley, claiming that “the new sensation of the films” had inspired him to go around “bumping off cops” or 16-year-old William Gamble who shot his 12-year-old playmate as he was acting out a scene from the gangster film The Secret Six.6 More recently, Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers (1994) has repeatedly been blamed for provoking copycat crimes by fans of the film, including a number of high school shootings like the Columbine High School massacre whose killers even code-named their attack "NBK" after Stone’s film’s title.7
- 8 Richards and Robertson, The British Cinema Book, 75.
- 9 Richards and Robertson, The British Cinema Book, 76. Other cases are the two spree shootings of Hun (...)
6In the UK, the most notorious cases are related to what has been termed the “video nasties” of the 1980s when the emerging market of the then-unregulated video cassettes led to the circulation of extreme horror films, causing a moral panic fuelled by moral campaigners like Mary Whitehouse, some politicians and the popular press. Although a Video Recordings Act which effectively set up state censorship was voted in 1984 and came into effect in September 1985,8 the popular press would continue to blame popular entertainment and “video nasties” in particular whenever a horrendous crime was committed. This was the case for example during the trial of the murderers of three-year-old James Bulger in 1993, when the press pilloried the British Board of Film Classification for allowing a horror video which was erroneously reported to be linked to the case. 9
7In 1994 new statutory requirements were added within the remit of the BBFC:
- 10 Geoffrey Robertson and Andrew Nicol, Media Law 5th ed. (London: Penguin, 2008), 835. My emphasis.
When considering whether to classify a video, or what classification to give a particular video, the Board thus has to take a three-stage approach: The question must first be whether the video is likely to appeal to children and be seen by a significant number of them. If the answer is ‘yes,’ then the second question is whether the video will harm those children or cause them to behave in a way that harms society because of the video’s treatment of crime, drugs, sex or violence. If the answer again is ‘yes,’ then the factor of risk to children must be given special weight (along with other relevant factors) in determining whether the video should be certified at all, or else given a high age-restriction . . . [This approach] permits the Board to ignore the danger to children where the risk that a significant number will see it is remote, and to consider instead the danger of adult viewers being morally corrupted or being persuaded to emulate anti-social acts.10
- 11 See Barbara Creed’s seminal work The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (Routledge, (...)
8Both Peter Strickland’s Berberian Sound Studio (2012) and Prano Bailey-Bond’s Censor (2021) offer narratives that are perfect mises en abyme of this longstanding concern revolving around the representation of crime, violence and sexuality and its potential impact. In this case it focuses more specifically on the horror genre and its propensity to indulge in graphic violence and in inducing terror at the expense of women.11 In the two films the main protagonists are compelled to watch horror movies repeatedly for professional reasons, which gradually affects their emotional life and mental balance.
- 12 The title of the video Deranged (also known as Deranged: Confessions of a Necrophile) refers to a r (...)
9Censor is set precisely in the middle of the 1980s video nasty crisis and follows Enid who works as a film censor at the newly renamed British Board of Film Classification (BBFC). The film explicitly refers to the public discourse and the repeated media attacks of the time, with Mary Whitehouse proclaiming on TV that “if this film stays in your mind … its presence is corrupting,” news reports about “Britain [being] invaded by a wave of depraved and corrupt horror videos” and inserts of news headlines commenting on “censor’s depraved video nasty habit.” At one point, the press even relates the grisly news story of a murderer in Yorkshire to one specific video depicting a necrophiliac serial killer,12 blaming Enid and one of her colleagues for passing the film. However, because the murderer of this gruesome news item claims he cannot remember what happened, it actually triggers Enid’s psychic downfall as it echoes with an unresolved childhood trauma, namely her own failure to remember what happened when she was with her younger sister on the day she disappeared. Her gnawing guilt leads Enid to become obsessed with one actress specialising in horror films whom she believes to be her missing sister. Enid’s dreary life slowly dissolves into creepy fantasy and all the clichés of archetypal horror genre. Eventually, Enid’s endeavour to save the actress leads her to lose her grip on reality and to commit two particularly gory murders.
- 13 For more on this point see Peter Hutchings, “Putting the Brit into Eurohorror: Exclusions and Excha (...)
- 14 Giallo cinema refers to a wave of Italian horror thrillers that were produced in the mid-1960s and (...)
10Berberian Sound Studio is also a period piece of some sort, set in the 1970s, at a time of flourishing exchanges between British and continental European horror cinema, involving co-production deals but also mutual artistic influences and creative personnel moving across borders.13 It is no coincidence that British actress Suzy Kendall, who featured in some Italian giallo films in the early 1970s,14 is credited as “Special Guest Screamer,” making her casting a direct iconic and historic link with the genre and its period. Indeed, Strickland’s film is set in an Italian post-production studio, the eponymous Berberian Sound Studio. The film plays on cultural clashes, setting Gilderoy (Toby Jones), a mousy, introverted sound engineer from leafy Dorking, England, against Italian exuberance, sly deviousness and blunt misogyny. From the start Gilderoy is depicted as an outsider who has been hired to work on a film called The Equestrian Vortex, which he assumes is in line with the nature documentaries he is used to making, but turns out to be an exploitative horror movie about the revenge of some formerly tortured witches that wreak sadistic havoc in a girls’ boarding school. As Gilderoy has to record the sounds of human torturing, the screams of terror and howls of pain that the actresses strain to produce in the gruelling dubbing sessions, his mental health starts to unravel. At one point he refuses to add realistic sound effects to the graphic torments he can see onscreen, all the more so since these torments look like an extreme distorted reflection of the abusive bullying that is inflicted upon the voice actresses themselves. However, Gilderoy gradually becomes “part of it”, as producer Francesco tells him. At the end of the film, the meek sound engineer is shown mistreating one of the actresses, using screeching audio feedback to obtain a convincing scream of pain, in a scene that evokes the famous Milgram experiment on obedience.
11In both Berberian Sound Studio and Censor, the unassuming protagonists, who are conscientious professionals working in the film industry, fall victims to occupational hazards as the repeated viewing of horror movies makes them lose their grips on reality. Both seem at once appalled yet fascinated by the type of movies they watch as it becomes apparent that the frontier between those films and their lives collapses. However, the two films address the issue of the corrupting effects of watching extreme violence not so much as a moral question as from a formal point of view.
12Indeed, as the protagonists’ minds deteriorate, so do the films’ realistic premises. The two films convey the slow deterioration of their mind until they are eventually engulfed into the film within the film. Both are caught in the beam of projection, Enid on a film set, Gilderoy in the studio facing his own self appearing on a screen. Both end up trapped within the filmic apparatus itself, Enid in the flickering statics of the video while Gilderoy’s image is literally swallowed up by the film stock that consumes itself in decay, before Gilderoy himself disappears altogether. As a consequence, both films seem to collapse from within, as the films within the films contaminate the meta-narratives. This leads the viewers to reconsider the realistic premises of the films and question any degree of reality that would found their representation.
- 15 Marc Augé, Non-lieux, introduction à une anthropologie de la surmodernité (Paris : Seuil, 1992).
13From the start, the main protagonists evolve in very claustrophobic spaces – dark constricted studio booths, dingy low-ceilinged offices, and drab apartment rooms. They are hardly ever filmed outdoors and never in broad daylight. They walk along long corridors that not only typify the nonplaces theorised by Marc Augé,15 transient spaces where the individual remains anonymous and lonely, but also clearly figure the meandering of their minds. They are recurrently filmed surrounded by soft focus, or in extreme close ups, highlighting their isolation and the feeling of unbelonging, trapped inside solipsistic worlds.
14Furthermore, the realist premises are gradually undermined by a series of disruptive effects which play on creating a cinematic space that crosses over different diegetic places and narrative levels.
15Berberian Sound Studio consistently uses sound bridges to create disorientating transitions where a continuous soundtrack accompanies a cut or camera movement from one scene to the next. Gilderoy is thus filmed in the studio sitting in front of the mixing desk, the camera moves slowly behind his back until the screen is black; as the soundtrack goes on, the camera movement resumes in continuity but reveals a Gilderoy now sitting at a table in his apartment listening to a tape. Another instance occurs when he is filmed in his apartment writing home to his mother. Again, the soundtrack bridges over the shift of places across two extreme close shots on Gilderoy’s hand and pen, before a long medium shot reveals Gilderoy back in the studio. Likewise, in Censor, cutting on action merges the films that Enid watches with the metafilm, as when Enid replaces the girl running frantically in the wood and rushes to the toilet, when the camera follows the heroine walking straight ahead into a dazzling light, or when Enid emerges from the statics of the television screen into a corridor.
- 16 Mark Kermode, “In the realm of Censor: Mark Kermode speaks to director Prano Bailey-Bond,” Sight & (...)
16In Censor logical continuity further collapses through the recurring use of cuts or fades to black, that may convey Enid’s dissolving mind but also her failure to remember the traumatic circumstances around her sister’s disappearance when she was young, like so many “black outs.” As film director Prano Bailey-Bond explained “it’s to do with the idea that we self-censor traumatic experiences. Enid can’t exactly remember what happened the day her sister disappeared. And in a way, her job becomes a way of exploring that idea of censoring ourselves. We censor to protect ourselves; and we also censor to protect others from ourselves.”16
- 17 The phrase is also used by Strickland himself, quoted in Violet Lucca, “Interview: Peter Strickland (...)
17In Berberian Sound Studio, the film literally implodes from within, when the celluloid on which Gilderoy’s image is projected consumes itself and reveals footage of a nature documentary about Gilderoy’s native Surrey region that refers to his previous work. Moreover, the whole film folds upon itself, or as Chris Darke puts it, it “gleefully eats its own tail” (Darke 35).17 Just as Gilderoy keeps rewinding on the same sounds, the film’s end comes full circle. The last scene echoes the very beginning of the film when Gilderoy is discovering the film he is going to work on: it reprises the same dialogue and the same gesture of the foley man handing out a piece of crushed watermelon. Likewise, the scene of the film within the film which they have to dub is a scene which has already been recorded but is now recorded with a different voice actress who, just like the other actress, quits after being mistreated. But then, from a diegetic point of view within the temporal loop, this second scene may actually come first. Like Berberian Sound Studio, Censor ends up in a loop, the last shot being a video cassette set in a video tape player, whose title is the very film we have just seen.
- 18 Alison Taylor, “Tangled Worlds – The Natural and Fantastic in Peter Strickland’s Katalin Varga and (...)
- 19 Violet Lucca, “Interview: Peter Strickland”.
18In other terms, the films are being consumed by their own self-reflexivity. Quite significantly, Berberian Sound Studio does not even have any opening credits. The only title sequence that appears in the film is that of The Equestrian Vortex, that is the film within the film, suggesting that the meta narrative is subsumed within the film within the film from the very beginning. We are thus led to question whether the films’ narratives have any degree of diegetic reality at all or if they were just some kinds of “nightmarish ouroboros”18. Peter Strickland summed up this radical doubt when he suggested Gilderoy may not have left his Dorset wood shed after all.19
19The films’ narratives are thus contaminated by pastiche and self-reflexivity, their storyline as well as aesthetics playing overtly with genre tropes.
- 20 Neil McEwan, The Wee Review, 12 September 2012. https://theweereview.com/interview/interview-peter- (...)
- 21 Chris Darke, “Uneasy Listening,” Film Comment (May-June 2013): 35.
- 22 Basia Lewandowska Cummings, “Foley Cow! Berberian Sound Studio Director Peter Strickland Interviewe (...)
- 23 Violet Lucca, “Interview: Peter Strickland”.
- 24 Cummings, “Foley Cow!” ; Jason Anderson, “No Sound Is Innocent: Peter Strickland’s Berberian Sound (...)
20Berberian Sound Studio is obviously a tribute to the giallo genre, in particular to Dario Argento’s Suspiria whose storyline seems a direct inspiration in the film within the film The Equestrian Vortex. Its opening credits also evoke British horror films of the time and especially Michael Reeves’s Witchfinder’s General (1968) which has since become a cult classic. Although Strickland claimed he watched De Palma’s Blow Out (1981) only after making his own movie,20 there is an unmistakable echo in the storyline of a sound engineer who goes through some traumatic professional experience and ends up compromising his own ethics in search of the perfect female scream of terror. Close to De Palma, the reference to Psycho’s (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960) shower scene is also troubling, even though rather facetious, as an extreme close shot of a mouth screaming cuts to another extreme close shot of what looks like a plug hole drowned in red liquid but which proves to be a juice blender full of tomato. But Strickland’s film also crosses generic boundaries in referring to art house cinema, from Bergman’s Persona and its famous shot of disintegrating film strip to Juraj Herz’s scathing dark comedy The Cremator (1968),21 Peter Tscherkassky’s experimental work Outer Space (1999) which deconstructs horror film,22 or the detail-oriented surrealist atmosphere of the Quay brothers with whom Strickland shared director of photography Nic Knowland and producer Keith Griffiths.23 And of course the film abounds with references to music, starting with the title in homage to mezzo-soprano Cathy Berberian and her work with her husband Luciano Berio, a pioneer in electroacoustic music.24
- 25 Ela Bittencourt, “Censor splices cut-throat video nasty violence with smart social commentary,” Sig (...)
21Censor, on the other hand, starts with reminiscences of Atom Egoyan’s The Adjuster (1991) and its female protagonist as a film censor with her own devious use of her professional watching sessions. However, its storyline soon tips over into the clichés of many horror movies, staging young virginal girls lost in a forest at night and drawn as through a malicious spell towards a stranded cabin that hosts a gigantic beast of a man (played by French actor Guillaume Delaunay who is actually 6' 9" tall). It also features a leering producer that Enid stabs in self-defence, thrusting a horror film trophy into his throat, an equally grand-guignol decapitation, and white dresses drenched in blood. As Ela Bittencourt aptly notes, “when Enid projects her inner torment onto the pattern of insidiously fraught male behaviour, she becomes a horror subject par excellence.”25 Enid’s quest for her missing sister does not lead anywhere except in the realm of her fantasy, as she ends up trapped in a jarring parody of a happy ending within a family sit-com. To some extent, Enid’s journey also patently recalls David Cronenberg’s now modern classic Videodrome (1983) with its visual language blending physical reality and media representation. Both narratives share a main protagonist who is transfixed by what they are watching on screens and then engulfed into an alternative underworld of producing or broadcasting, although Censor does not take up the conspiratorial dimension of Cronenberg’s movie.
- 26 For Marc Cerisuelo the metafilm is a genre that deals with cinema through the representation of dif (...)
- 27 Structural film refers to an experimental film movement that appeared in the United States in the 1 (...)
22Just as the films’ storylines dramatise the corrosion of reality by fantasy, both Berberian Sound Studio and Censor seem to be contaminated by intertextual references. The question then is: are these films just clever formal conceits? Clearly the two films belong to the category of metafilms as defined by Marc Cerisuelo, as a genre dealing with film production.26 Both are related to the history of the British film industry and focus on what goes on behind the scenes, here in post-production and pre-distribution. However, Berberian Sound Studio and Censor also clearly celebrate cinema as an impure form of art. As such they are very close in their approach of the different cinematic trades to structural films insofar as they display the breaking up of elements of film-making to focus on its materiality, and more specifically the corruptibility of the film material.27 This is where the films’ treatment of metalepsis departs from Cronenberg’s film: organicity is not defined by the blending between humans and machines but by what constitutes matter itself.
- 28 Neil McEwan, The Wee Review.
- 29 Sam Davies, “Berberian Sound Studio,” Sight & Sound 22, no. 9 (September 2012): 86.
23Setting the films in the 1970s and the 1980s allows the film directors to evoke a pre-digital world of analogical recording of sounds and images. Although shot in digital28, Berberian Sound Studio relishes exploring the world of Foley artists and sound post-production. As Sam Davies from Sight and Sound notes, “It fetishises unashamedly the look, feel and sound of vintage analogue recording gear: valves hum, metal reels revolve, spiderwebs of tea-brown tape loop round the room, recalling those lingering shots of what was then cutting-edge tape technology in other films of the 1970s”29. The whole film is based on the disjunction between sound and image, which undermines cinematic space. Except for its title sequence, no image of the film within the film The Equestrian Vortex is actually shown but images are nonetheless induced through the mere use of sound effects and the close shots of the characters’ faces watching the film.
- 30 Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, trans. Claudia Corbman (Columbia: Columbia University (...)
24One of the paradoxes of the film is to document a job that consists in creating indexical relationships between sounds and images while showing how disconnected the signifiers that are being used can be: from chopped cabbages to squashed watermelons, water sizzling in a frying pan, or leaves torn from radishes, all meant to convey the horror of torturing humans. Sounds thus play a major part in conjuring an off-screen fictional world, freeing Gilderoy’s imagination – and the viewer’s – from grounding interrelationships with the image. As Michel Chion noted about sound in classical film, “Sound suggested the forbidden sight in a much more frightening way than if viewers were to see the spectacle with their own eyes”30.
- 31 Cummings, “Foley Cow!”
25Quite remarkably in Berberian Sound Studio, all the sounds are diegetic, with concrete identified sources that appear on screen.31 The whole paradox is that focusing on the material source of these sounds undermines the film’s regime of figuration, as imaginary off-screen images permeate the onscreen space to contaminate what is seen. Horrendous screams can thus be heard in very mundane places; conversely, the actresses are filmed screaming but with no sound. At the extreme, this disconnection between image and sound results in the collapse of the image itself, through an extreme zoom out to black or its melting from within, revealing yet another level of representation as with Gilderoy’s nature documentary that bursts in the very claustrophobic confines of the studio.
26Quite significantly, the organicity of the sounds is highlighted as the camera lingers over heaps of discarded vegetables left to rot on the studio’s floor, after they have been used for Foley effects to suggest human flesh. Images of decay and putrefaction are thus obvious metaphors for Gilderoy’s deteriorating state of mind but also underscore the transient corruptibility of analogue media formats, whether for sound or images. To a lesser degree, the pervasive effect of an off-screen space that is susceptible to corrupt what is on screen is also at play in Censor as eerie soundtracks permeate mundane surroundings and the camera frequently isolates Enid’s face in close shots, focusing on the effects of watching disturbing spectacles rather than the spectacles themselves.
27Most specifically, Censor uses the trope of degrading videotape as a site of corruption that suggests, as in Berberian Sound Studio, the protagonist’s deteriorating mind and the undermining of representation that mimics the organic corrosion of the medium itself. In the final scene, the characters are thus systematically doubled into degraded and dystopic doppelgängers until television statics invades the screen and eats all figuration away. But as early as the opening credits, the film wittily plays with the potential of disfiguration as it opens on snowy, degraded-VHS versions of classic Film4 and BFI logos. Blending different types of formats, using 35mm and 8mm as well as video,32 the film fully exploits the limits of representation, using jarring blotches of colours, snowy dots, overexposures and monochromes. Displaying the physicality of the filmic matter paradoxically annihilates any figuration. On a diegetic as well as a formal level, tape – and its representation – become a haunted medium and the recorded image “prone to erosion, deterioration and evanescence.”33
- 34 See Mark Fisher, ‘What is Hauntology,’ Film Quarterly 66, no. 1 (2012): 16-24 and Alexandria Daniel (...)
- 35 Ken McLeod, “Hip Hop Holograms,” in Afrofuturism 2.0: The Rise of Astro-Blackness, Reynaldo Anderso (...)
28In Berberian Sound Studio as in Censor the decay of film and video tape creates surreal imagery and some kind of spectral presence. In this respect, it is noteworthy that the music of Berberian Sound Studio was scored by the British band Broadcast who belonged to what was dubbed the Hauntological movement,34 which was a British electronic music trend that developed in the 2000s and which critic Simon Reynolds qualified as a “largely British genre of eerie electronics fixated on ideas of decaying memory and lost futures” (Reynolds) and was characterised by its use of, to quote Ken McLeod, “spectral sounds of old music technology”35.
- 36 In her book Perverse Spectators. The Practices of Film Reception (New York: New York University Pre (...)
29While focusing on specific moments of British film history and the horror film genre, Berberian Sound Studio and Censor actually dramatise the power of suggestion that film can master, self-consciously turning their audience into “perverse spectators,” to use Janet Staiger’s phrase when she refers to audience’s practices of film reception as grounded in particular historical and personal contexts.36 Through elaborate interplay between image and sound and intertextual references, cinematic space is turned into echo chambers which convey the corrosive presence of diegetic off screen and redirects the viewers’ imagination to haunted spaces within the films themselves. These haunted spaces are paradoxically created by celebrating the physicality of film material focusing on analogue technologies of visual and sound recording. Thus, Berberian Sound Studio and Censor foreground their own organic dimension that is prone to transience, deterioration and corruption. In so doing they suggest that film fulfils its full figural potential through its own corruptibility working beyond figuration.
Figure 1 to 4
Censor, Prano Bailey-Bond, 2021
© Magnolia Pictures
Figure 5 to 8
Berberian Sound Studio, Peter Strickland, 2012
© Artificial Eye
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Film and cinema,” White Papers and official reports. Accessed 22 May 2022. https://www.terramedia.co.uk/reference/law/official_british_media_reports_film.htm.
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Notes
Martine Beugnet, “A Mediology of cinematic corruption: film, corporeality and productive impurity,” Film Journal 10
Ibid.
The phrase refers to Sir Stephen Tallents’s pamphlet published in 1932 and entitled “The Projection of England” in which he effectively expounds on the importance of cultural media in international relationships as an instrument of what would be conceptualised as “soft power” (“The Projection of England,” in Public Relations and the Making of Modern Britain: Stephen Tallents and the Birth of a Progressive Media Profession, ed. Anthony Scott (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012).
In the UK the recurring parliamentary debates on matters cinematographic, their regular media inquiries, White Papers and official reports, testify that, from early on, members of government, of the establishment and of the industry have highlighted the key role that cinema plays in the construction and the representation of a “national identity”, understood as the nation’s perception of itself as an “imagined community”, to take up Benedict Anderson’s key concept. For an overview of such reports, see http://www.terramedia.co.uk/law/official_british_media_reports_film.htm, accessed May 22 2020.
In the USA, the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA) was founded in 1922 and renamed the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) in 1945 until September 2019. The MPPDA established guidelines for film content which resulted in the setting up of the Motion Picture Production Code in 1930, also known as the Hays Code. In the UK, the British Board of Film Censors (renamed the British Board of Film Classification in 1985) was founded by the film industry as early as 1912 in response to the 1909 Cinematograph Act which gave local authorities the right to license buildings used as cinemas. While the Act was officially dealing with questions of safety, its wording was loose enough to include censorship of the film contents as well (local authorities still retain this power to date). See for example, Gregory Black, Hollywood Censored : Morality Codes, Catholics, and the Movies (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1996), or Lonard Leff and Jerold Simmons, The Dame in the Kimono : Hollywood, Censorship, and the Production Code (Lexington : University Press of Kentucky, 2001) for the United States; Julian Petley, “Cinema and State,” in All Our Yesterdays, ed. Charles Barr (London: BFI, 1986), 31-46 or Jeffrey Richards, and James C. Robertson, “British Film Censorship,” in The British Cinema Book ed. Robert Murphy (London: BFI, 2009), 67-77 for the United Kingdom.
Richard Maltby, “The Spectacle of Criminality,” in Violence and American Cinema, ed. J. David Slocum (London: Routledge, 2001), 117-118.
See John Kenneth Muir, Horror Films of the 1990s (Jefferson NC: McFarland. 2011), 338. Another notorious case in the USA is the attempted assassination of US president Ronald Reagan in March 1981 by John Hinckley Jr., who wanted to impress actress Jodie Foster.
Richards and Robertson, The British Cinema Book, 75.
Richards and Robertson, The British Cinema Book, 76. Other cases are the two spree shootings of Hungerford in 1987 and Dunblane in 1996; the murder of Suzanne Capper in 1992 and of Les Reed in 1994. See Julian Petley, Film and Video Censorship in Modern Britain (Kindle ed., Edinburgh University Press, 2011), Kindle Locations 1598-1600.
Geoffrey Robertson and Andrew Nicol, Media Law 5th ed. (London: Penguin, 2008), 835. My emphasis.
See Barbara Creed’s seminal work The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 1993) that analyses the overriding negative portrayal of women in horror films and how they are positioned as victims.
The title of the video Deranged (also known as Deranged: Confessions of a Necrophile) refers to a real American-Canadian horror movie made by Alan Ormsby and Jeff Gillen in 1974 that is loosely based on the case of Ed Gein, which has inspired horror classics like Psycho, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and The Silence of the Lambs.
For more on this point see Peter Hutchings, “Putting the Brit into Eurohorror: Exclusions and Exchanges in the History of European Horror Cinema,” Film Studies 15 (Autumn 2016). http://dx.doi.org/10.7227/FS.0001.
Giallo cinema refers to a wave of Italian horror thrillers that were produced in the mid-1960s and 1970s. The term, which means “yellow,” was a reference to the bright yellow book covers of a series of crime fictions. Suzy Kendall appeared in Dario Argento’s The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970), Sergio Martino’s Torso (1973) and Umberto Lenzi’s Spasmo (1974). See Hutchings, “Putting the Brit into Eurohorror,” 62.
Marc Augé, Non-lieux, introduction à une anthropologie de la surmodernité (Paris : Seuil, 1992).
Mark Kermode, “In the realm of Censor: Mark Kermode speaks to director Prano Bailey-Bond,” Sight & Sound, 20 August 2021. https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/features/censor-mark-kermode-prano-bailey-bond.
The phrase is also used by Strickland himself, quoted in Violet Lucca, “Interview: Peter Strickland,” Film Comment, 4 June 2013. https://www.filmcomment.com/blog/interview-peter-strickland-berberian-sound-studio-giallo/.
Alison Taylor, “Tangled Worlds – The Natural and Fantastic in Peter Strickland’s Katalin Varga and Berberian Sound Studio” Senses of Cinema (July 2019), https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2019/the-analogues-of-peter-strickland/tangled-worlds-the-natural-and-fantastic-in-peter-stricklands-katalin-varga-and-berberian-sound-studio/.
Violet Lucca, “Interview: Peter Strickland”.
Neil McEwan, The Wee Review, 12 September 2012. https://theweereview.com/interview/interview-peter-strickland/.
Chris Darke, “Uneasy Listening,” Film Comment (May-June 2013): 35.
Basia Lewandowska Cummings, “Foley Cow! Berberian Sound Studio Director Peter Strickland Interviewed,” The Quietus 31 (August 2012). https://thequietus.com/articles/09874-peter-strickland-interview-berberian-sound-studio.
Violet Lucca, “Interview: Peter Strickland”.
Cummings, “Foley Cow!” ; Jason Anderson, “No Sound Is Innocent: Peter Strickland’s Berberian Sound Studio,” Cinemascope, accessed 20 May 2022, http://cinema-scope.com/cinema-scope-magazine/no-sound-is-innocent-peter-stricklands-berberian-sound-studio/. Strickland himself has a background in electroacoustic music.
Ela Bittencourt, “Censor splices cut-throat video nasty violence with smart social commentary,” Sight and Sound 19 (August 2021). https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/reviews/censor-prano-bailey-bond-video-nasty-violence-social-commentary-niamh-algar.
For Marc Cerisuelo the metafilm is a genre that deals with cinema through the representation of different cinematic trades and offers a critical look at cinematic production. See Hollywood à l'écran. Essai de poétique historique des films : l'exemple des métafilms américains (Paris : Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2000).
Structural film refers to an experimental film movement that appeared in the United States in the 1960s and developed into the structural-materialist films in the United Kingdom in the 1970s. Annette Kuhn and Guy Westwell define structural and structural-materialist film as “dedicated to exploring cognitive and visual aspects of structure, process, and chance through a radically self-reflexive practice of filmmaking. In structural film, content is subservient to the language and physical materials of film; and indeed these may even constitute the entire content of a work.” Annette Kuhn and Guy Westwell, Dictionary of Film Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/acref/9780199587261.001.0001/acref-9780199587261-e-0685,.
Neil McEwan, The Wee Review.
Sam Davies, “Berberian Sound Studio,” Sight & Sound 22, no. 9 (September 2012): 86.
Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, trans. Claudia Corbman (Columbia: Columbia University Press, 1994), 22.
Cummings, “Foley Cow!”
Simon Abrams, “‘Censor’ review”, 11 June 2021, RogerEbert.com, https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/censor-movie-review-2021.
“Throughout 20th and 21st century visual culture, tape has been represented as a haunted medium, prone to erosion, deterioration and evanescence, the recorded image has been equated with the ghostly and haunted (consider Hideo Nakata’s Ringu (1998).” Matthew Melia, “Reading the Scream in Berberian Sound Studio and the films of Peter Strickland,” Frame Cinema Journal, accessed 20 May 2022, http://framescinemajournal.com/article/reading-the-scream-in-berberian-sound-studio-and-the-films-of-peter-strickland/.
See Mark Fisher, ‘What is Hauntology,’ Film Quarterly 66, no. 1 (2012): 16-24 and Alexandria Daniels, “A Study of Hauntology in Berberian Sound Studio,” accessed 20 May 2022, https://talkfilmsociety.com/articles/a-study-of-hauntology-in-berberian-sound-studio.
Ken McLeod, “Hip Hop Holograms,” in Afrofuturism 2.0: The Rise of Astro-Blackness, Reynaldo Anderson and Charles E. Jones eds., 109-124. Lexington, Lexington: Lexington Books, 2015.
In her book Perverse Spectators. The Practices of Film Reception (New York: New York University Press, 2000), Janet Staiger argues that all spectators are more or less “perverse” in that they “use” films in their own way.
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