Malta's
Board of Film and Stage Classification submitted in court a list of policy
guidelines used by local censors to decide on ratings for films and theatre
productions.
This was at the request of Mr Justice Joseph Zammit McKeon in the ongoing
Constitutional case regarding this year's ban on Stitching.
This is the first time that the board's internal policy guidelines have ever
been made public, and what immediately leaps to the eye is an apparent
contradiction between the directions given to classifiers with regard to
theatrical performances, and the way these same performances are classified in
practice. In the section subtitled Stage Performances, the final sentence
reads: As with films, the classifier must take a decision after considering
each work globally, as much for its visual impact, as for the message the work
tries to put across. But members of the same board never watch a performance
before deciding what rating to give a stage play. The reason for this is that
the classifiers' rating has to be issued before any play can be performed in a
Maltese theatre: a fact which makes it physically impossible to rate any play on
the basis of its visual impact. Instead, the censors limit themselves to reading
the script: which as a rule gives little or no indication of the play's effect
on a visual level.
In fact, individual members of the censorship board have testified in court that
they had not watched Andrew Nielsen's Stitching before deciding to ban it
altogether. In justifying the ban, the Film and Stage Classification Board
chairperson Theresa Friggiri cited four taboo topics that led to the
decision: blasphemy; obscene contempt for the victims of Auschwitz;
dangerous sexual perversions leading to sexual servitude; and reference
to the abduction, sexual assault and murder of children... the latter
including a eulogy to the child murderers, Fred and Rosemary West.
However, it remains difficult to grasp how the censors could have reached this
decision after considering the work globally, as much for its visual impact
as for the message it tried to get across.
The cinema section therefore features a number of specific criteria
by which to rate a film. The criteria for film are: theme; language;
violence; nudity; sex; horror; drugs; faith and religion. For each of
the five possible film ratings – U, PG, 12, 16, 18 – the application
each criterion is re-evaluated for the age-group concerned. Language,
for instance, is taken into consideration before giving as U
certificate, but not for 18, and so on.
No such detail is provided in the theatre section, which by way of
contrast occupies only the final few paragraphs of the entire document.
This section, which loosely refers to film and theatre being different
media which require different approaches, appears to allow the Board
maximum discretion in the absence of any clear guidelines whatsoever. A
typical example concerns the guidelines for nudity on stage, which
consist in a single sentence: While nudity may be permissible on
film, this is not normally accepted on stage. But the guidelines
offer no indication of what circumstances may make nudity acceptable on
stage.
