Films with religious themes frequently run into problems with film censors as well as with the wider public. This talk will draw on a number of films with religious preoccupations to explore how controversial representations and depictions of Christianity create problems for film classifiers. Using material from the archives of the British Board of Film Classification, films including The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), Visions of Ecstasy (1989) Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979) and of course, The Devils (1971) will be used to explore the relationship between content and controversy and illustrate how the BBFC struggled to classify these religious films without falling foul of laws pertaining to blasphemous libel.
This talk will be given by Dr Sian Barber, a lecturer in Film at Queen’s University Belfast. She has published on British cinema and cinema-going, as well as on film censorship, regulation and the work of the British Board of Film Classification. She is the author of Censoring the Seventies: the BBFC and the Decade that Taste Forgot (2012) and The British Film Industry in the 1970s: Capital, Culture and Creativity (2013). She is currently working on a study guide entitled Using Film as a Source which is due to be published in late 2014.
The screening of The Devils will take place after the talk, tickets for the film must be bought separately.