DESTRICTED Not Restricted to Sex Shops in Britain
"In purpose and effect, this work is plainly a serious consideration of sex and pornography as aspects of the human experience. We think that there are no grounds for depriving adults of the ability to decide themselves whether they want to see it."
That’s Sir Quentin Thomas, head of the British Board of Film Classification, explaining why the Board allowed the Anglo-American production Destricted to be shown outside British sex shops. Destricted is a compilation of erotic short films directed by Marina Abramovic, Matthew Barney, Marco Brambilla, Larry Clark, Gaspar Noé, Richard Prince, and Sam Taylor Wood.
The Tate Modern Museum will be screening Destricted in September. As quoted in Life Style Extra, a spokesperson for the museum stated that the film "highlights controversial issues about the representation of sexuality in art, opening up for debate the question of whether art can be disguised as pornography, or vice versa, and leaving the viewer free to choose his or her own line through these intersections of art and sexuality."
Source for the Thomas quote: United Press International, via Monsters and Critics
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Sexuality is one thing that humankind will forever struggle with because of the aversion to nature that people have seemed to have developed over the centuries. Humankind thinks that the way people look, think, smell, etc. are wrong for reasons they never really explain. Sex being the ultimate expression of the human body has taken on the role of being one of the most vulgar aspects of our nature because it is all about the body and because of the learned discomfort with the physical. Sex even though it “really”isn’t will always be “controversial.” Bjork has a song called Human Behavior where she sings that there is “absolutley no logic to human behavior.” Sort of a shame that a girl who celebrates Halloween everday of her life is more in tune with reality than the rest of us, but maybe Halloween everyday isn’t such a bad thing. I have to go find my swan.
Marcus,
There were people in Britain – some sort of anti-screen-sex “family” group – that complained about the British Board rating for “Destricted.”
For those people, the worst thing that on-screen sex can achieve is to arouse film audiences. If that happens, wars will break out, famine and pestilence will destroy crops, tsunamis will ravage coastal areas, and a meteor will collide with the Earth.
Oh, yes, there’s also global warming. Think of all that heat in movie theaters, getting trapped by greenhouse gasses and quite possibly destroying the planet’s ozone layer. Come to think of it, perhaps the screen-sex police do have a laudable mission.
Think of all that heat in movie theaters, getting trapped by greenhouse gasses and quite possibly destroying the planet’s ozone layer