Film makers Andrew Gallimore and Lydia Monin told David Hennessy about their new film In The Opinion of the Censor which comes to Irish Film Festival London this month.
The documentary In The Opinion of the Censor is part of the programme for the upcoming Irish Film Festival London.
The film tells the story of the Censorship of Films Act 1923 and how one term in that statute has allowed consecutive holders of the role of Film Censor to reflect the prevailing values of Irish society over the last 100 years.
The Act declared that all films publicly distributed in Ireland must be viewed by the Censor of the day, who was given the power to ban or cut them if ‘in the opinion of the Censor’ they were indecent, obscene, blasphemous or contrary to public morality.
The documentary illustrates how each consecutive Censor applied the phrase to subjectively determine their decisions, and in doing so, play a part in charting the social, political and cultural evolution of the State.
Censorship in the first five or six decades was primarily concerned with banning and cutting films. The first Film Censor James Montgomery banned 1,700 movies during his seventeen years in office.
However, classification has now replaced censorship on the basis that in a mature society adults should be free to decide for themselves what they can watch, and the role of IFCO today (formally renamed in 2008) is to provide age-related classification and consumer guidance for the public and for parents in particular.
In the authored documentary, John Kelleher, Ireland’s last Censor, tells the story using specific movies to illustrate the themes, including Gone With the Wind, Casablanca, On the Waterfront, The Graduate, Monty Python’s Life of Brian, The Last Temptation of Christ, Natural Born Killers, Bad Santa and Nine Songs.
Co- directors Andrew Gallimore and Lydia Monin sat down to chat about the film with The Irish World.
What first moved you to make this film?
Andrew: “John Kelleher is one of the first people I met when I moved to Dublin back in 1998 or 1999 so in many ways this took about 25 years almost to get off the ground.
“Obviously John is so close to this story having been the censor himself and we finally got to make it.
“He had a lecture that he’d written and we just sat down and just tried to figure out a way of essentially turning his lecture into a feature doc and that’s how it all started.”
Lydia: “Andrew and I have worked on a lot of history documentaries in the past and history’s been my area and researching archives especially has been something I’ve done quite a lot of.
“So for this film, I did spend a lot of time in the National Archives going through the censor records.
“That was really interesting.
“And there were a few other areas that I just had the luxury of time to go and find out more about Arthur Matheson, the first parliamentary draftsman who wasn’t a particularly well known figure.
“So I was quite heavily involved on the research side.”
Andrew: “I think the timing of this is an issue as well because, having ended the decade of centenaries in Ireland, and God knows we did our share of docs on anything from the rising through to the Civil War, not a huge amount had been done in terms of the archiving of what had happened in the first years of independence.
“So this was very much a story of what we did with our freedom when we won it.
“The timing was right to make this film because this is one of the first pieces of legislation they passed as soon as they won independence and the fact that they trained their sights on cinema was just a really interesting idea.”
It seems the office reflected the times they were living in, do you see it as a reflection of society?
Andrew: “I think that was almost the most interesting debate in the edit suite.
“I think the idea was, Did the work of the censor reflect the way Irish society was changing or were they actually more in the vanguard? Was the way that Ireland consumed popular culture more of a contributor towards social change or were they reflecting social change?
“I think the jury’s still out.
“I hope our movie gives both sides of the coin.
“Somebody uses the phrase ‘voluntary theocracy’.
“I think it’s a key phrase because whether you think that the censor reflects societal change or whether we think that the censor, certainly in the case of John Kelleher, is actually part of societal change one thing is for sure, there was no societal kickback to this.
“When these censorship rules and regulations came in, this was hugely supported by the public.
“There was no sense this was a population at large being suppressed.
“This was seen as a good thing so this isn’t some sort of Soviet state whereby you had a downtrodden population trying to fight against this.
“This was accepted as being a good thing.”
Lydia: “When it comes to the role of women, I think the censor was particularly keen to cut out and censor things that could give women ideas about divorce or drinking too much or having an affair.
“The woman’s place was obviously in the home.
“There were no female censors, they were all men so they were certainly either reflecting that attitude and looking out for things like that that they wouldn’t really want women to be absorbing.”
I was surprised by some of the films like Gone with the Wind and Casablanca- bona fide classics- and how they were cut, were there surprises for you along the journey?
Andrew: “For me I think the big surprise was that if you think about the time, the fact that Ireland had just won her independence from Britain, I kind of was expecting a lot of- not anti-British cutting as such but I certainly expected that to be the dominant area that they would go for.
“But there’s a really fantastic quote from (James) Montgomery, who was the first censor, who says that his concern was ‘not the Anglicisation of Ireland but the Los Angelesation of Ireland’, so it was the fact that they very much saw the Americans and Hollywood as being the big ‘other’, the big thing to keep out from Irish shores and I suppose it’s the extent to which they went to do that.
“But the World War Two stuff and the censorship and trying to retain neutrality, some of the cuts that were made then were pretty mad.”
Reflecting Ireland’s neutrality, war films were cut to not show either side winning or losing a battle.
Lydia: “The public tended to agree with it at the start.
“Ulysses was banned for a very long time.
“The censor’s notebooks actually were, I think, one of the more interesting parts of the archive.
“They were literally watching and just scribbling notes and with Ulysses, the segregation question mark. Some other countries did actually decide that segregation was the way to go.
“I suppose that change did come about, obviously over time.”
Andrew: “Casablanca.
“Of course, ‘We’ll always have Paris’.
“No, the Irish audience didn’t because Paris had been cut out.”
Paris was removed from Casablanca because they didn’t want to depict an affair but you have to wonder why they did not just ban it as opposed to cutting it so it’s story is nonsense..
Lydia: “It would have been more controversial if they banned it.
“Perhaps they were just releasing it with cuts to hope to get away with it.
“Perhaps they would have had more flak if they banned too many films outright.”
Andrew: “Casablanca is fascinating because it says so much on all sorts of levels.
“I mean, to begin with, it’s banned because it’s seen as breaching Ireland’s neutrality because its seen as being too anti-German during the war.
“And then after the war, it gets resubmitted and then it’s the fact that there’s this illicit affair that has to be cut out of it and then renders the movie meaningless.
“So yeah, maybe the Neutrality Act should have just saved Casablanca from the Irish public.”
Gone With the Wind, another classic, was seen as showing women in an overtly sexual way as tame it is to us now..
Andrew: “Yeah, the women thing is the thread that goes through everything really.
“The last two or three big movies really that we consider, Life of Brian is obviously a religious issue and then you have Natural Born Killers which was the last big kind of banning in Ireland which was done on the grounds of violence.
“I suppose that’s interesting as well.
“There was that closing of the arc with Natural Born Killers, which was banned by Sheamus Smith who took a particular personal stand on this.
“He really did, and still does, have the absolute courage of his convictions that violence is pretty much cinema’s biggest problem.
“And yet when you look at some of the early movies which were banned for seemingly kind of very mild sexual reasons, some of them are really violent.
“Maybe it’s to do with the fact that they were violent times.
“This was a country that had just come out of a very, very violent decade of revolution and maybe people’s tolerance for violence was just higher, but I just found it fascinating that towards the end of the story of censorship, somebody takes a stand against violent movies whereas people are being shot and blown apart everywhere in the early days but you couldn’t show a female leg from the knee down.”
Lydia: “It’s a bit strange that you’re watching these old films and you tend to forget that some of them actually are quite brutally violent and some of that passed, so it was interesting.”
John Kelleher had to appear on a chat show to defend one censorship decision..
“He gives Nine Songs a certificate which is an extremely explicit movie.
“He gives that a certificate before it’s actually certified in the UK.
“All hell breaks loose because of that decision.
“He’s carted in front of Pat Kenny on the Late Late Show and he gets dragged in front of a national audience to explain himself.
“But what was fascinating for us about that particular clip was that it was almost a farewell to censorship.
“You knew at that point, even though it was still on the statute books, realistically Nine Songs meant that the age of censorship in Ireland was over.”
The film does not really deal with things like A Clockwork Orange (although a clip of it does feature near the end) of The Exorcist which I’m sure were banned in Ireland but were also banned everywhere and so films like that are not what the film is exploring, is it?
Andrew: “You had these imaginative, mainly Dublin based cinema owners who really welcomed a good banning because by the time somebody could go around and do anything about it, the cinemas were packed to the rafters.
“Because there was a threat of a movie being banned, you guaranteed to sell the house out.”
Controversy sells, that’s always been the case..
Andrew: “When they were debating this stuff in the Dail, they were careful because they were basically saying, ‘I don’t really want to name this movie because everybody will want to go and see it’.
“There’s no doubt that the TDS that passed this were virtually entirely male but I think they genuinely believed this.
“These were proper, devout Catholics who really believed that they were doing the right thing.
“I don’t think there was any hypocrisy here.
“These were genuine guys, a lot of them very bright, who genuinely believed that they were doing the right thing, that society as a whole needed to be protected.
“I hope one of the things that does come across is the fact that cinema in those days was so new and it’s a little bit like today. We’re scared of things like AI and previously the internet.
“Whenever there’s a period of radical technological change, people are naturally fearful so if you combine this very natural fear of the new with this desire to create this holy island that everybody fought for and spilt blood for, it’s completely understandable why they went the way they did.”
Was there anything that surprised you about the uproar about particular films?
Andrew: “There’s a particular moment of genius from Sheamus Smith in terms of The Last Temptation of Christ because Sheamus, despite the fact that I just mentioned that he was very much anti-violence, was really Ireland’s first secular film censor and so was never going to ban The Last Temptation on the grounds of blasphemy.
“But his solution to this was some sort of separate form of self-censorship where he basically said, ‘Listen, I’ll give you the certificate. That’s fine. You can show it but on condition that the doors close at the beginning of the movie’.
“And of course all the salacious stuff is right at the end of that film so his plan was to make people sit through this unbelievably, pretty boring movie right to get to the to the end, and nobody went.
“That was the ultimate bit of censorship: Nobody went to see Last Temptation because it was just too boring.”
Were there any films banned that you agree should have been banned?
Andrew: “I’m against all sorts of banning.
“I’m in the John Kelleher camp that essentially the main problem was a technical one that Montgomery, the first censor, essentially treated everybody, however old they were, as the same entity so a six year old was no different to a 26 year old, the movie was either fit to be shown or it wasn’t.
“I suppose the new thinking that John brought into the job was that adults should make up their own minds.
“You can’t legislate against what adults can and cannot watch.
“By taking that viewpoint, he redefined the role of the censor and it’s no coincidence then that under his watch, the censor’s office became the classification office which was there to give people guidance so the censor’s job wasn’t to ban any longer, it was essentially to say adults are there to make their own minds up.
“It just strikes me that that’s pretty much the mature way to go.”
Andrew you opened the Irish Film Festival London in 2023 with One Night in Millstreet, your documentary about Steve Collins’ fight against Chris Eubank.
Are you looking forward to coming back?
Andrew: “We always have a great time at the festival in London.
“The last time we screened there, it was the Collins/ Eubank movie, one of the most interesting screenings I’ve ever been to because they were both in the theatre.
“I thought it was all going to kick off inside the theatre before we even got to start showing the film.
“I don’t think I’ve ever been involved in a theatre where there was so much tension so I’m expecting a more sedate audience for this one.”
Any last words on In The Opinion of the Censor before I let you go?
Andrew: “It’s too easy, I think, sometimes, to judge people and it would have been very easy to look at the early censors and also the early lawmakers who created this legislation as some sort of Taliban kind of fundamentalist group that have made this series of ridiculous decisions.
“These were people of their time and of their era who genuinely believed that what they were doing was the right thing and what I hope we’ve done is to say in the context of today, some of these decisions seem ludicrous but ultimately, they did these things for the right reasons and they were all honourable men.
“Censorship in Ireland has been a pretty mad ride but there are reasons for the madness.”
Lydia: “Hopefully will shine a light on just another era of Irish history that people wouldn’t have known too much about.
“I certainly found it interesting anyway.”
In The Opinion of the Censor screen 2pm Saturday 15 November at VUE Piccadilly as part of Irish Film Festival London.
Irish Film Festival London runs 12- 16 November. For more information, click here.
