Ideas, still dangerous in a democracy?Sources

Source 1: Italian colonialism and crimes of warThe Lion of the Desert and Fascist legacy

The Lion of the Desert is a movie realised in 1981 by the Syrian-American director Moustapha Akkad. It tells the life of the Senussite Lybian Resistance leader Omar Al-Mukhtar, who fought against the Italian Army during all the decade of the 1920s, until he was imprisoned and sentenced to death (at an illegal trial) in 1931. Among the big cast of the movie, Anthony Quinn (Al-Mukhtar), Oliver Reed (Gral. Rodolfo Graziani), Rod Steiger (Benito Mussolini) and Irene Papas (the Lybian woman Mabrouka).

The movie was forbidden in Italy because in 1982 it was considered “offensive for the honour of the Italian Army” by a Giulio Andreotti Government’s representative, belonging to the Liberal Party.

The movie has never been distributed in Italy, and a public projection was blocked by the police in 1987. The following year it was shown in a semi-offical way at some festival, while the promise to broadcast it on public tv was never kept.

In 2009, after the visit of Lybian leader Muhammar Gheddafi (who arrived in Italy showing a picture of Al-Mukhtar on his chest) the private national Tv platform Sky broadcast it for many days, putting an end on an almost 30 years history of censorship.

Image: Omar Al-Mukhtar

Fascist Legacy is a documentary film, which was produced by BBC in 1989, about Italian war crimes during World War II. It is divided into two parts, basically focusing on the occupations of the Balkans and Northern Africa. Italian public television RAI bought a copy of the film but for years it was never shown to an Italian audience. The reason must be sought in the historical lack of a public debate on Italian responsibilities in the occupied lands, and an almost total absence of analysis of Italian colonialism in general, a subject very unlikely to be found even in history school programs.

Some public discussion came out in the last ten years, after the Parliament issued “il Giorno del Ricordo” (the Day of Remembrance), for the Italian-speaking minority who lived in former Yugoslavia, and which had been killed or forced to leave from those lands after World War II. The self-pitying which this day had been constructed on had finally to face the opposite story about the responsibilities of the fascist ruling over slavic-speaking populations who lived inside the Kingdom of Italy after the Great War, and in the Yugoslavian lands which had been occupied during World War II.

After two Italian film-makers were jailed in the 1950s for depicting the Italian invasion of Greece, the Italian public and media were forced into ‘forgetting’ what had really happened. And this made it easier for some people to write an opposite version of the invasion. In 2004 only the Italian private channel La7 has shown large excerpts of "Fascist Legacy". Showings of the documentary were also organized in Italy by groups with an antifascist orientation and members of the Slovenian-talking minority in Italy.

Image: Marshall Pietro Badoglio during Ethiopian Campaign

Source 2: Spain and King Juan Carlos documentary

French state television has broadcast a documentary about Spain’s former monarch that the Spanish public network TVE has so far refused to air.

Yo, Juan Carlos I, rey de España (or, I, Juan Carlos I, King of Spain) was broadcast during primetime on France 3.

Directed by Miguel Courtois, who also co-wrote the script with Laurence Debray, author of a biography of the Spanish ruler, the film reviews the last 40 years of Spain’s history through the eyes of Juan Carlos.

The French press has described the documentary, filmed over several months in 2014, as “an intimate and moving portrait of a personality with an exceptional destiny” and as a “brilliant” piece of work.

Yet the Spanish broadcaster feels that the production is of little interest to anyone, that it is taken out of context, and that it is no longer relevant.

“It’s about a king who is no longer king”, said a station spokesperson. “It is anchored in the past.” The source added that despite its French premiere, there are no plans to air the piece in Spain.

The deal between the French production company Cinétévé and TVE (The Spanish National TV – company) – which contributed archive footage – was brokered under RTVE chief Leopoldo González-Echenique. But he was replaced in September 2014 by a new president, José Antonio Sánchez, and relations cooled off.

Cinétévé handed over the finished production to TVE months ago, but there are no indications that a Spanish voiceover has even been added.

“We have a treasure, which is this interview with the king just a few months before his abdication, and that we want to share with Spanish audiences,” said filmaker Miguel Courtois at a recent press screening of the film. “This is absurd. In the end, Spaniards will have to travel to France to watch it, just like in Franco’s time”.

Image: Juan Carlos I, King of Spain from 1975 to 2014

Source 3: Internet censorship in nowadays Hungaryimage: Protest against internet tax in Poland and Hungary

Access to the internet in Hungary continues to expand, despite government policies and judicial decisions over the past few years that have threatened to impose restrictions on access and online content. In late October 2014, the Orban administration issued a proposal to tax internet service providers (ISPs) per gigabyte (GB) of data transferred. Many assumed that ISPs would pass on this fee to consumers, which could potentially inhibit or discourage users from accessing more data-heavy websites and applications. Following significant protests, the government withdrew the proposal, but signaled that it intended to revisit the issue later in 2015.

In the past, the government has refrained from blocking online content, other than illegal gambling websites, despite persistent calls to ban the far-right website Kuruc.info, a site that frequently features xenophobic, anti-Semitic, and other hate speech content. This year, a court issued an order to delete, or make “inaccessible,” an article on the website denying the Holocaust. Since the website is hosted on servers in the United States and the court could not force the deletion of the content, the court subsequently decided that the article should be blocked within Hungary.

Since 2010, the conservative Hungarian Civic Union (Fidesz) and its ally, the Christian Democratic People’s Party (KDNP) have executed a major overhaul of Hungarian legislation, including new laws regulating the media (including online media outlets and news portals) and new civil and penal codes, causing significant concern among civil liberties advocates and the international community more broadly. The established regulatory authority, the National Media and Infocommunications Authority (NMHH) and its decision-making body, the Media Council, were created to oversee the mass communications industry, with the power to penalize or suspend outlets that violate stipulations of the media regulations. In April 2011, the national assembly adopted a new constitution, the Fundamental Law of Hungary, which includes a provision concerning the supervision of the mass communications industry and the media as a whole. The parliament also created the National Agency for Data Protection, whose independence has been called into question due to the political appointment process of the agency’s leadership.

Immediately after the 2010 media laws were passed, Hungary came under fierce criticism from the international community, as the laws were deemed incompatible with the values of the European Union. Despite the modifications to the media laws in May 2012 based on the ruling of the Hungarian Constitutional Court in December 2011, members of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) and the Council of Europe have argued that the laws remain unsatisfactory, and that unclear provisions and the significant power given to the NMHH continue to threaten media freedom. In January 2013, the Council of Europe welcomed the results of the dialogue with the Hungarian government about media regulation,while domestic nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) expressed their continued concerns to the Secretary General of the Council of Europe.

Source 4: Street-art and censorshipAn amazing wall by the worldwide famous street-painter Blu in Los Angeles (USA), and an even more amazing move by MOCA (the Museum of contemporary Art) which decided to erase it within 24 hours.

The painting showed a large group of coffins, like the ones of soldiers’ bodies sent back home from war situations, covered up by big notes of one dollar, instead of the national flag.

Was the mural too politically charged for other members of the MOCA team?

If a blanket anti-war (or anti-death industry?) statement is too controversial for MOCA, what can we look forward to this spring?

Apparently MOCA has provided a response (which took significantly longer to formulate than it took to buff the wall):“MOCA commissioned Blu, one of the world’s most outstanding street artists to create a work for the north wall of The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA. The Geffen Contemporary building is located on a special, historic site. Directly in front the north wall is the Go For Broke monument, which commemorates the heroic roles of Japanese American soldiers, who served in Europe and the Pacific during World War II, and opposite the wall is the LA Veterans’ Affairs Hospital. The museum’s director explained to Blu that in this context, where MOCA is a guest among this historic Japanese American community, the work was inappropriate. MOCA has invited Blu to return to Los Angeles to paint another mural.”

To me, this is a terrible explanation. The concept that street art and graffiti must be 'appropriate', to the point of not making political statements, is absurd and contrary to the history of the medium. In this context, I doubt the 'Art on the Streets' show will be appropriate to its title.Blu's reaction:1. Moca asks me to paint a mural2. I go to L.A. to paint the piece and I almost finish it3. The Moca director decides to erase the wall4. On the next day the mural is erased by Moca workers5. Journalists are still not sure if this can be called censorship so they start asking my opinion about that

Image: Blue’s painting on MOCA’s wall

Source 5: Social conflict and freedom of expression

A big movement of protest has been spreading in a north-west Italian valley (Val di Susa) since more than 20 years, against the building of a high-speed railway, which will connect Lyon with Turin, called TAV (Treno ad Alta Velocità, High-speed train), especially because of a big and deep tunnel that, following the main project, was to be built in the middle of the Susa Valley.

Image: A manifestation of NOTAV movement in Susa (Turin)

The protesters, called No-Tav, showed during the years many ways of fight: manifestations, public speeches, internet documents (in which they claim the uselessness of the gallery and of the tracks, questioning the large quantity of money that will be spent to do it, and the big environmental problems that making a hole in that mountain may cause), but also direct actions and sabotages against instruments, working machines, fences, in a valley which has become a sort of military zone, but also a national (and international) symbol of the political fights against environmental exploitation, and for a more democratic use of public resources. Many protesters already faced trials and jail (two of them, Edoardo Massari and Maria Soledad Rosas, in the beginning of the protest, also committed suicide while imprisoned). One of the most famous cases was that against a popular writer and journalist, Erri De Luca, who was charged, and had to face a trial, because he expressed solidarity with the protesters saying that “he agrees with them” and that “the TAV must be sabotaged”. The accusations against him were based on a law issued during the fascist period, and still partly working. The trial finally ended with a complete acquittal of the writer.

Here follows his speech, during the trial:

Erri De Luca, speech in the Turin Courtroom, Oct. 19, 2015

I would be present here in this courtroom even if I were not the writer indicted for incitement.

Beyond my insignificant personal case, I consider the indictment here in question an experiment, an attempt to silence contrary words.

So I consider this courtroom an outpost overlooking the immediate present of our country. I work as a writer, and I consider myself the victim of a will to censorship.

I am indicted for an article in the criminal code that dates back to 1930 and that dark period of Italian history. I consider that article passed again by the subsequent drafting of the Constitution of the Italian Republic.

I am in this courtroom to know if that text is still in force and prevailing or if the court shall have the power to suspend and invalidate Article 21 of the Constitution.

I prevented my lawyers from arguing for the unconstitutionality of my charge. If successful, he would have stopped this process and transferred these proceedings to the halls of a Constitutional Court overloaded with work, where a ruling would take years. If admitted, the application would have bypassed this courtroom and wasted this precious moment.

We believe that what is constitutional has to be decided here, in public places such as this, as well as in a police station, in a classroom, in a prison, in a hospital, at work, on the borders crossed by asylum seekers.

What is constitutional is measured at the ground floor of our society.

Extenuating circumstances are inapplicable to my case. If what I said is a crime, I repeat it and I keep saying it.

I am indicted for having used the word “sabotage,” a word I consider noble and democratic.

Noble because it was pronounced and practiced by valiant figures like Gandhi and Mandela, with huge political results.

Democratic because its origins are in the labor movement and its struggles: striking to sabotage production.

I defend the legitimate use of the word “sabotage” in its most effective and wide meaning. I am willing to be criminally convicted for its use, but I will not be convicted as a means of censorship or to restrict free speech in Italy.

I said: “Shears are useful.” For what? How could one sabotage a colossal and harmful project with only shears? There were no other items of insidious hardware mentioned in my phone conversation [with a journalist].

Therefore, you are incriminating verbal support of a symbolic action. But I won’t get into my lawyers’ field of expertise.

I conclude by re-affirming my belief that the so-called high-speed railway line in the Susa Valley should be hindered, obstructed and impeded, then sabotaged in self-defense for the health of the soil, air and water of a threatened community.

My words are still contrary. I await to hear whether this is a criminal offense.

Image: The writer Erri De Luca

Source 6: France and the war of Algeria (1954-1962): censored movies

The war for Algerian Independence largely influenced French society and its freedom of expression, because of the sensitive subjects of army, war, nationalism and colonialism. Some movies which portraited this post-colonial war, or the issue of pacifism in general, were hit by censorship in different ways.

Image: Soldiers in the war of Algeria, 1958

We chose three, each of them with a specific source.

Tu ne tueras point, by Claud Autant-Lara (1961) source translation (Source 6a)

La battaglia di Algeri, by Gillo Pontecorvo (1965) source translation (Source 6b)

Le petit soldat, by Jean-Luc Godard (1960) source translation (Source 6c)

Source 6A: «Thou shalt not kill» (1961), the censored movie

by Claude Autant-Lar

by Jacky Tronel | Thursday, November 1st 2012

Adler is a young seminarian from Germany whose pacifist beliefs are despised by his comrades, enroled like him. At the time of the liberation of Paris he executes a Resistance fighter. To escape this nightmare, he enters a cloister. But, in order to cover himself, his sergeant, who has ordered his execution, urges the head of the convent to commit Adler to free himself.

In the jailhouse he finds himself in the same cell of Jean-François Cordier, a Catholic conscientious objector who, in spite of the war, obstinately refuses to use any weapon. During the trial, Cordier declares himself an atheist conscientious objector, not anymore a religious one. Adler, for having killed and obeyed, will be acquitted, while Cordier, for having refused to kill and disobeyed, will be condemned to one year of prison, tacitly renewable.

A director’s torment with censorship

Filmed in Yugoslavia, mainly from Italian capital, by a French team, the movie by Claude Autant-Lara, in the French language, is nonetheless a Liechtensteino-Yugoslavian coproduction, with major financial support from Lichtenstein.

«We should cheer Autant-Lara for his bravery and his uprightness. After some years, with the desire of filming a project called The objector, the son of Louise Lara, driven out from the theatre Comedie Francaise because of pacifism during war time, succeeded against all odds to realize this vibrant praise of what is to him the supreme courage: the refusal to bear arms and kill his brothers, even under orders from above. Finding no producer, he put into the company every penny he had, went around in Yugoslavia and tried, in the very meanwhile of the Algerian war, to urge the same claim (for pacifism) that his mother had stated publicly in 1914-18. He didn’t succeed. The censorship which controlled the film productions did not allow the showing of the movie until 1963, one year after the Evian agreement that ended the Algerian war. His film seems to have been very annoying for the censors, since they managed to get the showing placed in the offseason, and this prevented ‘Thou shalt not kill’ from reaching a wide audience and provoking a healthy debate on the issue of the objection. His movie could still provoke, since no Tv channel wanted to broadcast it. Facing the problem with a great honesty and clarity, it would be a great starting point for a discussion about the “Folders of the Screen”. We can hope that one day ‘Thou shalt not kill’ will have the same reputation as the song ‘The deserter’ by Boris Vian.» (Text by Guy Bellinger, Guide des films de Jean Tulard, Robert Laffont, Paris, édition 2005.)

The pacifist and anarchist Louis Lecon, portrayed in front of Claude Autant-Lara’s movie poster.

«Tu ne tueras point» [source]. «From 1958 on, Claude Autant-Lara would make 13 movies more, of different quality, but imbued by a healthy libertarian thought. From that last period I would like to keep two titles: ‘Thou shalt not kill’ and ‘Le journal d’une

femme en blanc’. Loyal to his youth’s beliefs and to the memory of his mother, at the age of 60, Claude Autant-Lara, in the very moment of the war of Algeria, resumed his taskto defend the pacifist cause in the world. ‘Thou shalt not kill’, which was soon called ‘The objector’, put on the scene a young man who refuses to carry arms in spite of the world war. Laurent Terzieff is impressive in the role. You can feel a personal engagement behind the actor’s know-how. The realization was hard. Without financing, the director invested his own money in the production of the movie, which was finally filmed in Yugoslavia. Having been chosen for the Venice Festival in 1962, ‘L’objecteur – Tu ne tueras point’ was presented as part of the Yugoslavian pavilion, because France had refused to take it under its own. Suzanne Flon won the prize for Female Interpretation. But problems were not over for Autant-Lara. The movie was blocked for two years, and censorship did not allow its showing in France until 1963, just one year after the Evian agreement.» From the speech by Francis Girod under the Coupole (venue of the Institut de France) in homage to Claude Autant-Lara.

Source 6B: The Battle of Algiers. History of the “censorships” by Benjamin Stora

Gillo Pontecorvo’s movie «The Battle of Algiers» has been long invisible on French screens. But this censorship is quite peculiar because it didn’t come from the State, as in all the other cases of Algerian war movies made before 1962. [1] This time the prohibition came from “society”. The owners of the cinemas abandoned the projection of this movie after some threats made by the associations of repatriers (the “black-feet”) or by some veterans (officers or simple soldiers who had made military service in Algeria).

In 1966, the jury of Venice Festival awards The Battle of Algiers with the Golden Lion. Shot just three years after the War of Algeria, in the raws of the famous Casbah, in the same place where the “Battle” took place, the movie has, at first, a great documentary value. We can see the attack made in the winter of 1957 by the paratroopers of Coronel Bigeard and of General Massu. The French officiers are shown as cold anti-guerrilla professionals (and this will be quickly identified and used by US schools of education, then at war in Vietnam or Latin America). The problem of torture is treated, shown and visualized in a breathtaking scene. That of indiscriminate violence against civilians too, through the face of a child just before the explosion of a deadly bomb. In France, the movie is not distributed, due to pressure from the principal repatriers associations (it was the name given to the populations in exile from Algeria after the summer of 1962).

After the general strike of May-June 1968, a new generation, who has not known the War of Algeria, arrives on the front stage of the political scene. The youngsters who enter politics in that moment want to attack the silences of French official history. The period of Vichy is put under accusation through the documentary ‘The sorrow and the pity’, by Marcel Ophuls, which gives the image of country showing very little resistance. But there was also the War of Algeria, and in 1971 or 1972 the movies ‘Avoir 20 ans dans les Aurès’ by René Vautier, or ‘RAS’ by Yves Boisset meet a big success among the young people. So, is this the momento to show ‘The battle of Algiers’ on the screens? No. The film distributor of then asks for a censorship visa at the beginning of 1970, to show the movie. On July 4th, 1970, the day before the first showing, the directors of the cinemas of Paris abruptly decide to cancel it from the program. The threats of the veterans’ associations, especially the paratroopers, are very hard and very accurate. The precedent of the theatrical piece ‘Les Paravents’ by Jean Genet is on everyone’s mind. Some old paratroopers had poured into the Odeon Theater on October 1st 1966, destroying the place. On August 20th, at the end of the summer, a cinema director of the Latin Quarter decides for the projection of The battle of Algiers. But it’s an only occasion.

A year later, in October 1971, the «Studio Saint Séverin» cinema, in Paris programs the movie for the first time inside the regular season. The windows of the cinema are smashed at each session. The film becomes the symbol of the challenge which vibrates in the Latin Quarter, a stronghold of student dissent against the government, between militants of the extreme left and the extreme right (led by the small group "West"). Finally, the director withdrew the movie from the cinema. And it will take until... October 2004 to again watch ‘The Battle of Algiers’ in the cinemas of Paris, or

to be aired during a primetime on a French television channel. The movie do not have a great audience, in the cinemas or on tv.

The history of the long term invisibility of ‘The Battle of Algiers’ is meaningful because of the relations between The French society, the war of Algeria and its representation on screen. This movie didn’t meet with an official censorship by the State, which made its distribution impossible. A decree directly facing the movie by Pontecorvo doesn’t exist, as did in the same moment the one which hit ‘La Religieuse’ by Jacques Rivette (an adaptation of the work by Diderot). In spite of appearances, censorship came from elsewhere. At first, the groups upholding the memory of French Algeria absolutely wanted to defend the “civilizing mission” of France towards the colonies. These groups were very active, powerful, well organized, especially a few years after Algerian independence. Forty years later they haven’t disappeared (we could see their efficiency on the vote of the February 23rd, 2005, law called “The good work of the French presence overseas”), but their role is very less important. Colonial memory is hard to have transmitted. But the censorship came nontheless by... the audience. French people still find it difficult to look back at their colonial past, and the main problem of the genre “movies about war of Algeria” is the indifference of the audience, the commercial flop of every movie.

This double censorship “from down”, by the French Algeria nostalgic people, and by French people in a wider sense: take us elsewhere: where the past doesn’t pass, self censorship arrives.

[1] We quote by heart the censored movies: l’Algérie en flammes by René Vautier, Tu ne tueras point by Claude Autant-Lara, Le Petit soldat by Jean Luc Godard, Octobre à Paris by Jacques Panijel, Muriel by Alain Resnais ou Adieu Philippines by Jacques Rozier. The war of Algeria is the last big ageo of massive censorship in French cinema. About this issue I refer to my book, Imaginaires de guerre, Paris, poche, Ed La Découverte, 2004.

Source 6C: Le petit soldat

(Extract from Unspeakable Secrets and the Psychoanalysis of Culture, by Esther Rashkin, Suny Press, 2008, pp. 81-2)

[…] One case that had particular resonance for [Bernardo] Bertolucci was the censoring of [Jean-Luc] Godard’s Le petit soldat [The little soldier], made in 1960 and not released until 1963. This event cast a pall on virtually all French filmmakers of the time who had been eager to take on the vexed question of Algeria and the especially taboo subject of torture. The film’s banning was all the more troubling since the story, about a French hit man hired by the government to assassinate an Algerian revolutionary, was fairly evenhanded in its political stance, depicting the use of terrorism and torture by both sides in the conflict, Algerian as well as French. Bertolucci, one of the leading figures of the Italian New Wave and a committed Marxist, was greatly influenced by Godard’s politically engaged cinema. His decision to cast Jean-Pierre Léaud as Tom in Last Tango, after Godard had used the actor in seven ideologically charged films, thus had its own political implications. Léaud’s clownish imitation of a New Wave director, who shoots (like Godard) unscripted, with available light, synchronous sound and a handheld camera, and who tries but fails to film the story of a French colonel who served in Algeria, evokes the entire corpus of Godard’s work, but it especially calls to mind the censoring of Le Petit Soldat.

This subtle filmic intertext is joined by another New Wave film that openly talked of torture in Algeria: Alain Resnais’s Muriel ou le temps d’un retour [Muriel, or the time of a return]. Given what happened to Le petit soldat, Resnais tread carefully and opted to show no images of the brutality in Algeria. Instead, Bernard, a former conscript returned home to France, recounts the story of Muriel’s torture while showing amateur movies of his smiling army buddies posing in the Algerian desert. (The film, made in 1962, was nonetheless suppressed and not released until 1963.) The dissonance between Bernard’s sickening narrative and the benign pictures he projects on screen reflects Resnais’s need to censor his own film. At the same time, it functions as a critique of the government’s suppression of filmmaking about the war. This critique is reinforced at the story’s end when Bernard shoots and kills Robert, the soldier who led the torture of Muriel but suffers none of Bernard’s remorse. Doubly charged, the scene represents more than a personal act of reckoning or an allegory of a nation’s awakening sense of regret and guilt. It also speaks of France’s efforts to deny the horrors of torture, erase the memory of its moral slide, and obliterate the traumatizing reminders of a national tragedy. Seen fron this angle, Jeanne’s shooting of Paul – her own “torturer” and stand-in for a colonizing father who may have abused her or others in Algeria – functions as a repetition of Muriel’s ending and as a preservative gesture that counters the film’s suppression. That is, her shot echoes Bernard’s shooting of Robert and the elimination of a figure of the brutal colonizer. In the same instant, it sutures the quashing or “killing” of Muriel ou le temps d’un retour back into the visual, cinematic history of the war. Jeanne’s shot, in sum, quotes Muriel’s subtitle and becomes itself “the time or moment of a return”: a moment that speaks of the need to recall and restore film memory – even as distorted, tortured or deformed [...]

Source 7: Censorship and self-censorship in countries of the former Yugoslavia

Writer and publicist Muharem Bazdulj (BiH), when discussing the freedom of press during the 1990s, claimed that the type of pressure changed in countries of the former Yugoslavia.

“The pressure was more brutal back then, now it is more subtle and it’s regarding the economic struggles, rather the political one – like when we were talking about ‘Stop the Reuters’”.

Censorship means monitoring and narrowing the freedom of expression. This can be implemented through various means, from the closing of unwanted media, deleting or crossing out some unwanted parts, and the falsification of those parts that do not match the legal provisions.

The authorities may implement censorship in accordance with the laws, or alternatively by the secret services informally. Censorship with no specific form can be implemented easier in a country where the current solvency and survival of both publicly and privately owned media is dependent on state money or informal market redistribution of private money.

Self-censorship refers to the restriction of freedom of expression and publishing, which media itself imposes on their journalists and publishers.

In the context of press freedom, it is considered as extremely problematic process. Self-censorship is when a journalist or editor, consciously or unconsciously, avoids reporting on topics that might irritate advertisers or politicians. The problem with censorship and self-censorship lies in the fact that they are difficult to prove.