Visions of Ecstasy (1989)

Visions of Ecstasy (1989), a 20 minute short film by UK director Robert Wingrove, was released the year after the Last Temptation of Christ furore and, as such, was always likely to hit the headlines. Wingrove's film was an exploration of the sexuality of Saint Teresa of Ávila, a subject which had interested numerous artists and writers before and caused various controversies. It became the first and only film to be banned in the UK on grounds of blasphemy. When Wingrove appealed to the European Court of Human Rights that his right to free speech was being unjustly curtailed, they found against him and upheld the ban.

Eventually, though, it found it's way onto DVD in 2012, then onto YouTube and is currently showing on Mubi. It's not a film I'd particularly sought out as it doesn't really have much to do with the biblical narratives – really it's a work of fantasy and imagination inspired by religious figures.

Seen 20+ years after all the controversy it's hard to know what to make of it. It's very much a late 80s/early 90s British art film, Jarman-esque you could even say (if you don't have a huge number of frames of reference for this kind of work, which I do not). It could be classified as a silent film – certainly there's no dialogue – but the soundtrack by Siouxsie and the Banshees bassist Steven Severin plays a key role in situating the film beyond the realms of reality.

There are two main scenes, which are intercut, the consistency of Severin's soundtrack blending-together the multiple joins between the scenes. In the first Teresa and another nun (her psyche) kiss, standing up. In the other Teresa clambers upon Jesus, who is lying prostrate nailed to the cross.

Many claim that it's pornography, but I don't think that carries much weight. Aside from Visions of Ecstasy's religious angle, it's hard to see how this would gain anything more than a 15 certificate. The whole film consists of erotic material, but two-thirds of the characters keep most of their clothes on and the other has his dignity preserved by a historically implausible loincloth. 

Wingrove has a history of work that has pushed at the boundaries of what certain parts of society have deemed acceptable. His coffee table book "The Art of the Nasty" featured images from the "video nasties" banned in the UK in 1984. Peter Malone notes how in 1999 Wingrove made Sacred Flesh, about "a convent where the superior had visions of Mary Magdalene and discussed sexuality, the Catholic Church, and its attitudes toward sex".¹ He's directed various sexploitation/horror films including three in the Satanic Sluts collection. Back in 2013 his website described his work like this:

I also direct the odd film, get banned for blasphemy, fight censorship, produce books, attempt to write a novel, run a nightclub, shoot pornography, create imagery, flirt with Satanism and have an unhealthy obsession with political extremes.

It's hard to imagine now, but back in the late 80s there was a lot of political heat around censorship. Last Temptation was a relatively small episode compared to the extent of the column inches spent frothing about video nasties, the pro-gay movement, Madonna's "Like a Prayer" video and whatever else Mary Whitehouse was campaigning about. Wingrove was told by the BBFC that if Jesus had been a statue rather than an actor they would have passed it.²

Despite the above Wingrove later claimed "Visions didn't set out to offend and the film was about Teresa, it wasn't about Christ. I know how to be blasphemous and offensive and Visions is not what I'd have done had I set out to do that".³

What I've not really been able to grasp was what Wingrove was intending to do with the film. Looking back, while there are obvious points of comparison with Jarman's The Garden (which came out the following year), it doesn't feel like its cut from the same cloth. The sexuality in Jarman's film feels like it's deeply-felt self-expression. Wingrove's feels more exploitative, not least because Sacred Flesh is typically considered a nunsploitation film. Visions is artfully shot, but I'm not how artistic it is. Perhaps it exists to give erotic pleasure to those who find something sexy in the more visceral/ritualistic elements of Christianity, something which does little for those who don't share that predilection.

As is often the case in these scenarios, controversial films such as this live on, extending far beyond their actual merit because of the fuss that was made about them. Wingrove says he wasn't deliberately intending to often, and I'm inclined to believe him. Ironically, if Mary Whitehouse and the various other protesters had just let him be, few of us would even have heard about it. 

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1 - Peter Malone, Screen Jesus: Portrayals of Christ in Television and Film  (Lanham/Toronto/Plymouth, UK: Scarecrow Press, 2012), p.245.

2 - Mentioned in discussion on "Heart Of The Matter - Censorship Debate" (BBC) broadcast in 1996 available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbUz9lbGhrM

3 - Mentioned in "Banned In The UK - Visions Of Ecstasy" broadcast (08/03/05) available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QC98HABm5p4

Rethink on Visions of Ecstasy Ban

The British Board of Film Classification may reconsider their decision to ban a controversial Jesus film. Visions of Ecstasy was rejected in 1989 on grounds of blasphemy, and, accoding to one of the BBFC's websites it remains the only film to have been banned in the UK on grounds of blasphemy.

Released in 1989 the controversy came hot on the heels of debates about Last Temptation of Christ and the Salman Rushdie novel 'The Satanic Verses'. The 19 minute film depicts a scene in which a "sexualised figure of St Teresa of Avila caresses the body of Christ on the cross".¹ The ruling eventually ended up in the European Court of Human Rights in 1996, where the BBFC's decision was upheld.

This June, however, sees the repeal of the blasphemy law, which might pave the way for the ban to be lifted. And, according to The Observer, board member Craig Lapper has invited director Nigel Wingrove to resubmit the film for classification.

Searching the web for a bit more information on this film I also came across a 2006 Mark Kermode article from The Observer which discusses the film ahead of the (then) proposed 'Racial and Religious Hatred Act'. He describes the film as

an innocuous (if rather silly) short film depicting 'the ecstatic and erotic visions of St Teresa of Avila'...St Teresa is first seduced by her own sexual psyche (played, conveniently, by a photegenic 'babe'), and then mounts and caresses the crucified body of Christ. Technical shortcomings notwithstanding (hands which seem to move freely despite apparently being nailed down) the film raised a problem for the BBFC, which is forbidden from classifying material which may infringe the laws of the land.

His overall point is, I think, that whilst he thinks such material is distasteful, we shouldn't maintain a law which "privileges the sensitivities of Christians over those of others". Wingrove himself apparently has some reservations about resubmitting the film after all this time. "If I did release it, I would need to put it into context"².

1 - "Visions of Ecstasy", Students' British Board of Film Classification - http://www.sbbfc.co.uk/case_study_visionsofe.asp
2 - "Rethink over Christ 'porn' film ban", The Observer, 6th April 2008 - http://film.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,,2271373,00.html

MTV on Paradise Lost,

The publicity machine for The Day the Earth Stood Still is starting to get up and running which gives director Scott Derrickson the chance to talk about his next project - an adaptation of Milton's Paradise Lost. Even so, the recent piece at the MTV Blog is surprisingly lengthy for a film that's not due out until 2009. The official site contains nothing more than an email address.

I'd recommend reading the whole article, but here are a couple of choice quotes to whet the appetite.

Imagine the most evil creature that ever existed, a villain who commits atrocity after atrocity, who has scarred the world and each and every creature in it, a scoundrel so heinous he makes Heath Ledger's anarchist Joker look like Mother Teresa. Now imagine that you like him.

Director Scott Derrickson says that when you see his upcoming adaptation of "Paradise Lost," the epic 17th-century poem by John Milton about the Fall of Man, you won't be able to help but have sympathy for its bad guy: the devil.

I've not read the original, but I don't think the director of The Exorcism of Emily Rose is meaning to be subversive here - he insists it's all in Milton's original work.

In the movie, Satan goes from being a completely good being [an angel] to becoming the most heinous kind of evil, and you really have a hard time knowing exactly where he crossed that line because you were with him," the director said. "What is interesting about that story, in the way Milton laid it out, is that people jump off with him at different points and some never at all. Properly done, it's a story that tells readers a lot about themselves.

"You have to respect that Milton created the first anti-hero with that poem, and certainly this was preserved in the script," Derrickson added. "At what point does love turn to jealousy, jealousy turn into hate and hate into evil?

Thanks to Jeffrey Overstreet for highlighting the article.

Salomé (1922)

Alla Nazimova was one of the leading figures of 1920s cinema, not just in her native Russia, but throughout the film-viewing world. Not only was she an actor of some repute but she also wrote, edited, produced and directed. Indeed, whilst her husband Charles Bryant was given the directing credit for Salomé, many consider that Nazimova is, at the very least, worthy of consideration as a co-director. Certainly she, in combination with her friend Natacha Rambova oversaw the film's art-direction and had a hand in the design of the costumes and sets,. The costumes and sets were based on the original drawings Aubrey Beardsley created to accompany Oscar Wilde's play.

Whilst the film lacks Strauss' music and omits most of Wilde's text, it is very much an adaptation of Wilde's 1891 play, itself drawing on numerous writers and artists stretching back from Flaubert and Moreau all the way to the New Testament. David Thomson records that Nazimova herself called it "a pantomime of the play", and there's a certain appeal to that description (624). Wilde's plot and sense of decadence are clearly at the forefront, much of the film's dialogue belongs to him, and the film retains the occasional Wilde innovation, such as calling John the Baptist 'Jokanaan'.

Another aspect of Wilde's work that remains is the production's atypical sexuality. Numerous sources testify to Nazimova's lesbianism or bisexual (e.g. Lambert 162), and the result of her bold choices with respect to costume and set design was to create one of the earliest pioneering works of queer cinema. With its androgynous characters, stylised costumes and phallic props, Salomé is perhaps the most camp of all biblical films - a category with no shortage of competition - and it's influence can be seen in an array of subsequent films based on the New and Old Testaments, from 1933's Lot in Sodom, through to more macho efforts such as The Passion of the Christ (2004).

The visual impact of Navimova's work is breathtaking, with avant garde, art deco, sets and strangely alien-esque costumes. Herod looks like a cross between Bacchus and a circus clown, Herodias like one of Macbeth's witches and Nazimova herself looking like she had just stepped off the set of Metropolis, itself still half a decade from completion.

But its emotional impact is no less powerful. Whilst there seems very little interest in Ulderico Marcelli's original musical arrangement, contemporary versions of the score are well and truly in abundance. Recent soundtracks such as those by Mike Frank or P. Emerson Williams or The Bad Plus have revitalised the movie bringing it new-found popularity in the modern age.Indeed it's one of the finest examples of Silent film music coming full circle: just as in the early days a movie might be accompanied by anything from a single pianist to a full-scale orchestra, depending on the size of the venue and the grandeur of the production, today live showings feature an inspiring array of accompaniments from canned music on a DVD, through small collectives, right up to 70-piece orchestras.

In a version of Salomé that I saw recently, Hayley Fohr's drone inspired score combined violin and double bass with drums and manipulated vocals to give an ethereal power to Bryant, Nazimova and Rambova's images. Paul Joyce described it as "a mix of avant rock, post-rock, electronica and trace elements of folk/country" which captures it nicely. The music gave heightened the emotional impact of the film, but it's clear from the fact that this is such a popular film to screen that this is not a two-way street. Even watching the film in silence the power of its imagery is clear.

Fohr chose to omit the film's intertitles, a decision which proved controversial with some. Watching the film again, this time with the intertitles included, I'm not convinced they move the plot on a great deal, although their design and their use of Wilde's dialogue give them a certain aesthetic pleasure. It would have been better had the missing intertitles simply been cut, rather than replaced with several seconds of black screen. Nevertheless, I'm reminded of the famous dictum of another key director of the silent era, Alfred Hitchcock: "Show, don't tell". If nothing else, Fohr's the wordless approach does underline the film's ability to convey its story and its meaning based purely on its imagery.

What lies at the heart of all this emotion are the film's themes of desire, rejection and unrequited love. Herod desire's his step daughter oblivious to the pain he is causing Herodias. But Salomé has no eyes for him, only for John, who in turn is too pure for the sultry dancer. Instead Jokanaan gazes only towards the heavens. Meanwhile two of Herod and Herodias' servants (Herodias's unnamed page and Narraboth the Syrian guard) are similarly entangled. The former has eyes only for the moon - which looms large in numerous shots - the latter keeps an overly attached eye on the princess. Salomé is oblivious to both. In a desperate attempt to keep Salomé away from the Baptist, Narraboth takes his own life, but when his body falls at Salomé's feet she barely even notices, stepping over his body to continue her attempt to win a kiss from the prophet (see above). When the princess finally gets her kiss, once Jokanaan's head has been removed from his body, it so enrages Herod that he has her immediately executed.

Sadly the film's pioneering expression of sexuality proved similarly fatal to its performance at the box office. In addition to its unconventional style, rumours that the film had "employed only homosexual actors" (Anger 163) and tales of on-set debauchery, hurt the film at a time when the industry was still suffering from the fallout from the Fatty Arbuckle scandal. Yet somehow it was this film, rather than some of Nazimova's more commercially successful films that has survived. No doubt this is partly because it became cherished by a community that was still very much living underground in the early 1920s, but perhaps it was also because, in a field where still few, if any, women are known primarily by their surname in the way that many men are, this film, more than any other expressed a purity of artistic vision and single-minded determination to make the film the way she imagined it.

In addition to Joyce's review, readers may also like to read those by Martin Turnbull and God is in the TV.

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- Anger, Kenneth (1981 [1975]) Hollywood Babylon New York: Dell Publishing
- Joyce, Paul (2018) "Under the Moon… Salomé (1923) with Haley Fohr Ensemble, Barbican" at ithankyou. Available online at:
http://ithankyouarthur.blogspot.co.uk/2018/05/under-moon-salome-1923-with-haley-fohr.html
- Lambert, Gavin (1997) Nazimova: A Biography. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
- Lindsay, Richard A. (2015) Hollywood Biblical Epics: Camp Spectacle and Queer Style from the Silent Era to the Modern Day, Santa Barbara, California/Denver, Colorado: Praeger.
- Theophano, Teresa (2002) "Film Actors: Lesbian" at glbtq.com. Available online at
http://www.glbtqarchive.com/arts/film_actors_lesbian_A.pdf
- Thomson, David (2002) The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, LONDON (Little Brown), Fourth Edition.