Sightlines · World & politics course
Forbidden Fruit: A History of Cinema in Twelve Scandals
Every film on this list was, at some point, illegal to watch somewhere. Not obscure films, not failures — some of the most technically accomplished films ever made, and that is precisely the point: nobody bans a clumsy movie. This course traces a century-long argument between filmmakers and the people who feared them, and the through-line is uncomfortable but clarifying — censorship follows craft. The films that got banned were the ones that worked too well: editing that could conduct a crowd's pulse, images that could make the forbidden look ordinary, camerawork that could put an audience inside a mind it didn't want to occupy. Watch these twelve in order and you watch cinema discover its own dangerous powers one at a time — first the power to move masses, then the power to show bodies, then the power to implicate the person in the seat.
The scandal starts at the source. Griffith and his cameraman Billy Bitzer assembled, at feature length and full power, the basic machinery of screen storytelling — the cut between two simultaneous events, the close-up planted inside the crowd scene, the iris that pinches the frame down to one telling detail — and used it to sell a poisonous fantasy of white supremacy. Watch the final act with a stopwatch: the shots get shorter and shorter as two lines of action converge, and your heartbeat obligingly speeds up with them, which is exactly the problem. The film was picketed, banned in several cities, and protested by the NAACP from its opening week, and the protests were right; but the technique was so effective that every filmmaker in this course, including the film's fiercest enemies, built on it. It is the founding scandal of the medium: proof that the grammar of cinema is powerful, and that power has no politics of its own.
Eisenstein studied Griffith the way a rival general studies a captured weapon, then rebuilt the weapon to fire in the other direction. Where Griffith cut to make separate shots flow into one smooth world, Eisenstein cut to make shots collide — boots descending a staircase against a mother's face, a vast aerial sweep against a single cracked pair of spectacles — so that meaning sparks in the gap between images rather than inside any one of them. His famous trick with three stone lions, spliced so that a statue seems to wake and rise, shows the method nakedly: movement nobody filmed, fury nobody sculpted, created entirely by the splice. Governments understood immediately what this meant. Potemkin was banned or butchered across Europe for decades — not for anything it showed, but for what its editing could make an audience feel about mutiny. It is the first film on this list banned purely as a technology of persuasion.
Then the scandal moves from the crowd to the bedroom. Buñuel's surrealist provocation — desire loose in polite society, bishops on the rocks, a woman rapt over the marble toe of a statue — provoked an actual riot: right-wing demonstrators attacked a Paris screening, and the film disappeared from public view for roughly half a century, the longest suppression in this course. The technique to study is the opposite of Eisenstein's fireworks: Buñuel shoots his outrages in plain, evenly lit, classically composed frames, with the calm of a nature documentary (the film literally opens with borrowed footage of scorpions). The scandal is never in the camera; it is in what the camera consents to look at without blinking. That deadpan — filming the unspeakable as if it were the weather — becomes the signature move of transgressive cinema, and you will see it again, pushed to its limit, in Pasolini.
Hollywood produced its own unshowable film almost by accident. Browning, who had worked carnival sideshows as a young man, cast real sideshow performers in a circus melodrama — and then, in the film's most radical decision, refused to light them like monsters. No expressionist shadows, no gothic murk: Prince Randian, born without arms or legs, rolls and lights a cigarette in clear, even light, filmed the way you'd film anyone doing something skillfully. That visual matter-of-factness — Buñuel's deadpan arriving independently inside MGM — is exactly what audiences couldn't bear; the horror trappings promised distance and the photography refused to provide any. The film was cut by a third, banned in Britain for thirty years, and effectively ended Browning's career. Its inversion — the monstrous located in beautiful bodies, the humanity in "freakish" ones — had to wait decades to be read correctly.
Here is the course's darkest lesson, and the mirror image of Potemkin: a film banned not by the regime it threatened but by the democracies that survived the regime it served. Riefenstahl took Eisenstein's rhythmic cutting between individual faces and advancing masses, added the mountain-film vocabulary she'd been trained in — heroic bodies low-angled against open sky — and applied the whole kit to a Nazi party rally, opening with an aircraft's cruciform shadow gliding over medieval rooftops before its passenger descends through the clouds. The craft is real: constant variation of angle and height, aerial views turning crowds into pattern, movement everywhere in what is nominally a record of speeches. That's why it remains restricted in Germany to this day. Set it beside Potemkin and The Battle of Algiers and you have a three-part seminar in the same question: what happens when editing this good serves causes this different.
After a war fought partly with film, the scandal turns inward: what if the dangerous party is the viewer? Powell — then one of Britain's most honored directors — made a film about a young cameraman who kills with his camera rig, and told you nearly everything in the first minutes, so that watching becomes knowing, and knowing becomes complicity. The central invention is an object: a small mirror bolted beside the lens, so the act of filming and the act of watching fold into a single gesture — a film about looking that catches you looking. Otto Heller shot it in handsome, faintly inappropriate color, refusing both gothic shadow and kitchen-sink grit, which made it worse: it looked respectable. British critics didn't ban it; they did something more effective, savaging it so completely that it vanished from circulation and Powell's career collapsed. It is the pivot of this course — the point where "scandalous" stops meaning what the film shows and starts meaning what the film makes you do.
France banned it for five years, and you can see why in any single frame: Pontecorvo's reconstruction of the Algerian insurgency looks exactly like news footage, and not one foot of it is. The film even confesses this on a title card before it begins — no newsreel used — and the confession makes you trust it more. Marcello Gatti degraded his film stock for grain, shot through long lenses that catch faces as if unobserved, cast nonprofessionals in the real Casbah, and built every shot to carry the slight instability of an image grabbed under fire. This is the Griffith–Eisenstein–Riefenstahl lineage arriving at its most sophisticated form: persuasion so complete it impersonates evidence. Militaries and militants alike have screened it as a textbook ever since, which tells you the ban was, in its way, a professional compliment.
By the late sixties the old American censorship code had collapsed, replaced by ratings — and this film promptly became the only X-rated picture ever to win Best Picture, a scandal the industry inflicted on itself. Schlesinger, a British realist, and Adam Holender, a Polish-trained cinematographer, looked at New York the way Pontecorvo looked at Algiers: real streets, harsh overexposed daylight, a Times Square with no glamour lighting to hide behind. The technique to watch is the treatment of costume — Joe Buck's fringe, Stetson, and tooled boots are photographed as a performance of manhood that the city sees through instantly, the rhinestone myth of the Western dying in a coffee-shop window's glare. Its frankness about sex and loneliness between men, unthinkable under the old code, arrived not as provocation but as observation. Within three years the X rating it wore would be reclaimed by pornography, and the films that followed on this list walked through the door it opened.
The strangest ban in the course: Kubrick withdrew the film from Britain himself, after press hysteria over supposed copycat crimes, and it stayed unseeable there until after his death. The film earned the panic through a specific optical strategy inherited from Peeping Tom: it locks you inside its narrator's point of view and won't let you out. John Alcott's extreme wide-angle lens makes whatever is near the camera bulge and loom — the world as it looks to an appetite — while Alex's silken voice-over greets you like an accomplice from the first shot, the camera pulling slowly backward through the Milk Bar as if bowing you into his company. Then the film asks its real question: if the state could switch off a man's capacity to choose, what exactly would be saved? Britain, arguing about whether the film caused violence, was accidentally restaging the film's own debate about conditioning — a scandal the movie had already scripted.
An Italian court didn't just ban this film; it ordered the negative destroyed and stripped Bertolucci of his civil rights for years — the most literal attempt at erasure in this course. What so alarmed the judges was not pornography but prestige: Marlon Brando, at the height of his fame, in an art film about two strangers who meet in an empty Paris flat and agree to exchange no names. Vittorio Storaro lit that flat from the palette of two Francis Bacon paintings that hang over the opening credits like an instruction — amber, ochre, the orange of a bruise — turning a real apartment into a sealed world with no past and no coordinates. Where Midnight Cowboy had used frankness as street-level observation, Bertolucci used it as excavation, and the fact that the film's ethics — particularly its treatment of Maria Schneider — have been rightly re-examined ever since only confirms its place here: a scandal that never stopped being one.
The endpoint of Buñuel's deadpan. Pasolini transposed Sade's eighteenth-century catalogue of cruelty to the fascist Italy of his own childhood and had Tonino Delli Colli shoot it in cool, even, symmetrical frames — no shock cutting, no shadows, atrocity administered with the composure of a formal dinner. The structure comes from Dante: graded circles of descent replacing any conventional plot, power presented as pure consumption. Crucially, the film keeps building distance into its own images — violence observed through windows, at the far end of courtyards, through the wrong end of civilized instruments — so that the act of watching from a safe remove becomes the subject, extending Peeping Tom's question to its terminus. It remains banned or restricted in multiple countries half a century on, and Pasolini was murdered before its release, sealing its reputation as cinema's ultimate forbidden object. It is the hardest watch on this list and the most rigorously made.
The same year, from Japan, the counter-move: not cruelty but rapture pushed past every legal limit. Ōshima, the great insurgent of the Japanese New Wave, took the explicitness of his country's commercial sex-film industry and fused it with the most refined pictorial tradition available — Hideo Itō's lacquered, saturated color and still, frontal framing consciously echo classical erotic woodblock prints, and the tatami-level camera of the old masters is turned to purposes they never imagined. The film had to be developed and edited in France to evade Japanese law; it triggered an obscenity trial at home and has never been shown uncensored there. Watch for the single scene where history enters at all — a man threading quietly against a column of marching soldiers, 1936 swallowing the country around him — and how the film frames turning inward, toward a private room, as its own act of refusal. It closes the course where L'Âge d'or opened it: desire against civilization, and civilization reaching for the ban.
Run the arc back and a pattern emerges. The first generation of scandals — Griffith, Eisenstein, Riefenstahl — were scandals of editing: states banning films the way they'd ban weapons, because the cut had proven it could organize mass feeling. The middle scandals — Buñuel, Browning, Powell — were scandals of the unflinching frame: the discovery that the calmest photography is the most transgressive, and that a film can turn its lens around and indict the viewer. The last wave — from Midnight Cowboy through In the Realm of the Senses — came when the censorship systems themselves collapsed, and serious filmmakers rushed the open ground to ask what bodies, desire, and cruelty actually look like when nothing is required to stay off-screen. The inventions all stuck: Pontecorvo's forged-newsreel texture is now the default style of political cinema, Powell and Kubrick's complicit point-of-view runs through the modern thriller, Buñuel's deadpan is the house style of transgression. What the bans never managed to do, in a single case, was make the film go away. The scandal always outlived the scandalized — which is, perhaps, the real lesson these twelve films teach: in cinema, suppression is just delayed distribution.