‘Posh porn’, Antichrist and the BBFC’s class prejudice

Lars Von Trier's Antichrist - a film so eye-wateringly violent and sexually graphic that it apparently made four people faint at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year - is released in British cinemas on Friday.

According to one reviewer, it is the "sickest" film ever to receive the nod of approval from the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC). Most films which, like Antichrist, feature scenes of unsimulated sex are stamped with an R18 certificate, meaning they can only be bought by those brave (or perverted) enough to venture into dark, dingy sex shops in the alleyways of Soho.

Yet Antichrist has been given a cinema release. As of Friday, anyone over the age of 18 can go to one of a small number of cinemas that will be showing the film and watch as Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg - playing a couple whose child has died - retreat into a forest and go mad.

There’s a difference between Antichrist and Barely Legal: one is art, one is porn

They have sex. They beat each other up. Ms Gainsbourg's character cuts off her clitoris with a pair of scissors. She demolishes her husband's testicles and then pleasures him until he ejaculates blood. Would you like popcorn with that?

As someone implacably opposed to all forms of censorship, I'm pleased that Antichrist is being released uncut. But I can also empathise with the confusion, at least, of the censorious lobby.

'What DOES it take for a film to get banned these days?' demands the Daily Mail. In recent years the BBFC has released into cinemas a host of films that contain graphic sex - Romance, The Idiots, Baise-moi, 9 Songs - while continuing to brand other films that contain graphic sex with a sex-shop-only R18 certificate. What's going on?

The BBFC's schizophrenic approach - its new willingness to approve some graphic-sex films coupled with its old determination to restrict access to dirty videos - is born of deep-seated class snobbery.

In essence, the BBFC trusts that arthouse cinema audiences, the kind that will see Antichrist, can watch sex and violence without going off the rails, but it is less sure about the rest of us - the Odeon-attending masses who might just go wild at the sight of an erect penis.

The BBFC has a penchant for 'posh porn' - arty films with real sex - and a deep suspicion of 'common porn' - unarty films with real sex - because it trusts those who watch posh porn but not those who watch the other kind.

Of course there's a difference between Antichrist and, say, Barely Legal: one is a work of art (allegedly), the other is porn. Yet the BBFC's differential treatment of such films is not informed by artistic judgements (some of the 'posh porn' it releases, like the French killer-girls road movie Baise-moi, is utter rubbish), but rather by prejudices about audiences.

The only films with unsimulated sex that the BBFC ever allows into a cinema space are arthouse or foreign. For example Catherine Breillat's Romance (unsimulated sex and fellatio) or Michael Winterbottom's 9 Songs (unsimulated sex, fellatio, cunnilingus and really bad dialogue).

Every other film with unsimulated sex, and there are lots, gets a Restricted 18, so that it can only be sold in around 250 legally approved sex shops in the UK, can never be shown in a public cinema, and cannot be sold or sent via post.

The BBFC ‘has a bias in favour of arthouse audiences’

This is class-based censorship. The BBFC entrusts images of graphic sex to those people it considers to be just like its members - well-educated and erudite - while doing everything it can to restrict access to images of graphic sex for everyone else.

It trusts that access to 'posh porn' will be naturally restricted by the self-selecting nature of the well-off audience, while access to 'common porn' must be more brutally restricted by top-down rules and regulations. As censorship expert Tom Dewe Mathews says, the BBFC "has a bias in favour of arthouse audiences".

This has long been the case. In his book What The Censor Saw, John Trevelyan, BBFC secretary from 1958 to 1971, revealed that he was sometimes more lenient on films due to be shown in one or two arthouse cinemas than he was on films that were mass released.

What some refer to as the BBFC's new liberal approach is no such thing. If anything, the BBFC has become even more interventionist into our viewing habits and thought processes. It now passes graphic films only if it judges that they are not sexually arousing.

It said of 9 Songs in 2004: "The intent of a sex film is sexual arousal. That is not the intention behind this film." This is extraordinary, first because the BBFC imagines that it knows what turns people on, and second because it clearly sees it as its job to restrict access to anything sexually arousing. It has become the policeman of pleasure.