Jaz cover issue low res - Flipbook - Page 4
Redemption History
How a Carmelite nun, her ‘Celestial
Orgasm’ and a medieval law of
seditious libel created Redemption
Redemption and Salvation Films were never planned, rather they emerged from the
chaos caused by the banning of the short film Visions of Ecstasy.
S
ome time in the late eighties
having made a short erotic
film, AXEL, I decided to
make another one, only with a
slightly bigger budget, a nun,
more sex, and a sassier subject matter
to wrap it all up in. I had recently spent
some time in Italy and Rome and while
there I had seen Bernini’s extraordinary
statue The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa. This
inspired me and I set about reading
everything I could find, in those preinternet days, about Teresa, who, aside
from being immortalised in stone as a
woman seemingly forever In the throes
of sexual ecstasy, was, in reality, a devout
sixteenth-century Carmelite nun.
That said, Teresa was very much
to blame for her sexy image having
described one of her visions thus:
In his hands, I saw a long golden
spear and at the end of the iron tip I
seemed to see a point of fire. With this,
he seemed to pierce my heart several
times so that it penetrated my entrails.
When he drew it out, I thought he was
drawing them out with it and he left me
completely afire with a great love of God.
The pain was so sharp that it made me
utter several moans; and so excessive was
the sweetness caused by this intense pain
that no one would ever wish to lose it, nor
will one’s soul be content with anything
less than God.
Visions of Ecstasy was, despite its
flaws and failings, a visual combination
of both Teresa’s sensual writings and
Bernini’s sculptural representation of
her. One defines the other.
In genuinely trying to capture
a sense of Teresa’s yearnings and
ecstasies which she describes in her
autobiography The Interior Castle by
phrases such as ‘painlessly tearing my
flesh, and going deep inside me,’ and
‘it is such a severe pleasure’ I realise,
within our culture, these words to
a contemporary reader sensual and
unmistakably erotic although I don’t
think that was Teresa’s intention nor the
meaning she wished to convey when
she initially wrote them down.
My creation was a visual interpretation
of Teresa’s inner struggle between
physical pleasure and spiritual ecstasy
as represented in Visions of Ecstasy
2/Salvation
A very bloody Louise Downie in Visions of Ecstasy
by both her psyche and her eventual
capitulation to her desires personified
by her caressing a Christ-like figure. In
her earlier writings, Teresa also hinted at
having some kind of physical or sexual
relationship with another girl when she
was fifteen and it is widely accepted
now that there is a sapphic quality in
Teresa’s universe as well. Something
I too represented as part of her inner
struggle with herself. Visions of Ecstasy
is not pornographic and nor is it, in my
opinion, blasphemous as it attributes
nothing to God or Christ, rather it is a
19-minute visual exploration of Teresa’s
musings and repressed desires set to
music and nothing more.
Had Visions of Ecstasy been released
and sold independently as AXEL was
previously, I have no doubt that I would
have sold enough to have covered my
costs enabling me to make another film
but I doubt very much if Visions of Ecstasy
would have been noticed by the wider
world. Indeed I was already working on
my third film, Asphyxiation, inspired by
the writings of Violette Leduc at the time
Visions of Ecstasy was submitted to the
BBFC when my troubles began.
The BBFC’s director at this time
was James Ferman, whose job was to
censor, classify and control the UK’s
film media at the behest of the Home
Secretary. Ferman had held this position
for years under both Conservative and
Labour governments and ran the BBFC
very much as his own personal fiefdom
where the parameters of film censorship
were decided by Ferman alone. Aside
from the occasional brouhaha around a
controversial film Ferman could do pretty
much as he liked, answerable only to the
Home Secretary, who generally left him
alone. However, in order to release a film
in the UK it must, by law, be classified by
the BBFC so there was no avoiding it.
Films are submitted, a fee based on
the films’ running time is paid and an
employee of the BBFC watches it. Then
it is either passed uncut, or passed with
cuts, or is refused a classification which
effectively bans it as no film can be legally
released in the UK without a BBFC
classification.
In 1989 when I submitted Visions of
Ecstasy to the BBFC, blasphemy as an
issue had gone from being a forgotten
relic of the middle ages to the front
pages following the fatwa issued by the
Ayatollah of Iran against the author
Salman Rushdie for his novel The Satanic
Verses. While Martin Scorsese’s The Last
Temptation of Christ and the pop video
for Madonna’s song Like a Prayer were
keeping blasphemy bubbling away in the
background as a topic for Christians. I
should mention at this point that the UK
law of blasphemy was actually a law of
seditious libel dating back to 1378 and
only covered Anglican Christians, no
other religion was covered or as some
would argue, protected, by it.
With the submission of Visions
of Ecstasy, Ferman, I believe, saw an
opportunity to state that he had noted
the concern over religious offence and on
that basis had refused Visions of Ecstasy
a certificate on the grounds that it was,
potentially blasphemous. It also played
well with the Home Office and mainstream
media as he was able to say that the
BBFC was socially responsible regarding
blasphemy while not banning The Last
Temptation of Christ or Madonna’s
video, both of which, ironically, had been
declared blasphemous by the Vatican.
When a film is refused a certificate
you can either accept the decision or
challenge it. I should also mention that
very few films are actually banned in
the UK with the vast majority passed as
submitted or cut. If you challenge a ban
the decision is reviewed by a small group,
the Video Appeals Committee (VAC),
made up of the great and the good. My
case was their first in years.
Because my film had been refused
classification on the grounds of
blasphemy I immediately contacted the
National Council for Civil Liberties (now
called Liberty) and they managed to get
a leading criminal law firm to represent
me to the BBFC and VAC. This upped
the ante and things became adversarial
very quickly. I then issued a press release,
which proved to be a mistake, but brought
home to me just how machiavellian the
state could be.