(Originally published in: (Mary, Mary) Are These The Hands That Cut, Exhibition Catalogue, 2006)

Censorship to me is the suppression of ideas. It's the suppression of books and magazines. It's manipulation for a political purpose. To me that's censorship and that's anathema in the democratic system. What we're talking about here is film regulation, the regulation of visual images that have nothing to do with or very little to do with ideas because you can communicate ideas without screwdrivers up a vagina, for goodness' sake. And that's what we're talking about and I don't think we should ever mix it up with the suppression of ideas. Not ever.

- Mary Brown, former head of the Ontario Film Review Board, in a 1985 interview with Cinema Canada

Marsha: I'm a bit nervous. I mean, I admit it, I've never done this before.
Mary: It's very simple all you have to do is say cut. If anything offends you just say cut.
Suzanne: We don't have to say it all together though…
Mary: No, then we can talk about it, what's wrong, what's right. And just discuss it. It's very democratic.
Marsha: And do we have to reach a unanimous decision? Or if one of us really believes that it's disgusting, for example…
Gerry: Well there is no, for instance, there is no, I believe, I've been on, I've served several times, and there really isn't a democratic process, I don't think that…
Mary: Well, really it's what I feel.
Suzanne: Well you are the most qualified.
Mary: But I want your support, you understand.
Suzanne: Mmhmm.
Mary: Yes.
Bernise: Mmhmm.
Suzanne: Mmhmm.
Gerry: And we should express ourselves, I think. For instance…
Mary: Oh by all means, express yourselves, express yourselves…
Suzanne: Somebody has to do it.
Mary: Speak out, speak out, feel free to say what it is that you wish.

- from Snip Snip by Colin Campbell with Rodney Werden. Featuring Colin Campbell as Mary, chair of a nameless Film Review Board; Suzanne Gillies as Suzanne from the Anti-foot Fetish League; Marsha Roban as Marsha from the Humane Society; Lisa Steele as Gerry, a Sex Counselor from the Clark Institute; and Berenici as Bernise from Right to Life

The word ‘cut’ perforates the dialogue in Colin Campbell and Rodney Werden’s Snip Snip . More than any other word spoken in the video it punctuates with celebratory, almost cathectic revere from Campbell’s film censor, Mary. For Mary, “the cut” is a thing, a thing that needs identification. She and her colleagues on the Film Review Board compulsively repeat, “That’s a cut” or “Is that a cut?” It is less of a debate over where to cut the film as it is a question of identifying where “the cut” occurs. In fact, the work that is reviewed in Snip Snip , a “kinky” Danish film called Lesbian Picnic, is never seen. Instead, we are given incredibly vague verbal descriptions of the film’s content – and this only occurs when that content is characterized as objectionable by the Board. Even these objections are vague and meandering. We do, however, see the physical filmstrip. Mary cuts away at it. We see the physical substance of the medium as a thing that contains “the cut.” While others on the panel deliberate over context – such as, in what context two or three fingers inserted in a vagina while masturbating is appropriate – Mary blankly ignores such trivial questions of content and gets right to work finding “the cut”:

Gerry: You see there is a theory of self-pleasure that is not as for instance detrimental to the society if...
Marsha: But to get back to your word context, in the context of this film I think it's quite suspect.
Gerry: Well, yes. If it were simply one person for instance.
Mary: Was it at the point of two fingers in or three? [Mary gestures with her fingers along the filmstrip with two fingers, then three to where the cut will occur.]
Suzanne: Two.
Mary: Suzanne for two.
Suzanne: I’ll start with two. If there's a disagreement I'm prepared to go with three.
Marsha: Two.
Mary: Marsha for two.
Bernice: Three.
Mary: Bernice for three?
Bernice: Three. Oh, just cut the whole thing.
Gerry: Well, I’m gonna abstain on this one. I think there's a context for the self-pleasure.
Colin: You think there's a context for the three fingers? Or two?
Gerry: Well it's the self-pleasure aspect of it, Mary. We've had this argument before. I bow to the majority in this case.

The debate does not matter to Mary. She takes “two or three fingers” to, literally, mean where the film should be cut – the physical cut. Holding the film print up to the light, she uses her own two fingers to make the cut somewhere near the point where two fingers are used in the film. Mary’s hand, like all censor’s hands, returns the moving image to the empirical laws of reality again and again. The film becomes objectionable material.

With “the cut” in the censor’s hand, film or video is no longer permitted to have its own structure. Each edit – that is, each point where an artist or author creates meaning or a range of meaning by forcing two or more cuts to meet – is susceptible to the censors castration. The censor’s singular cut is an attack on the construction of meaning – the meaning created from the artist’s edit is altered or denied.

Mary and her fellow suburban censors identify and replace the disgusting imagesin the narrative with cuts. But any primary referent to that disgust is quickly lost. The moment that a cut is made it creates a void – a rupture in the meaning of the work that signals lack. There is nothing there. There is no meaning and this is frightening. “The cut” is wide open.

Mary wants to control meaning. In fact, her job is just that. As a censor she controls meaning by deferring it away from the author’s control. And although “the cut” operates to remove disgust, when meaning is restricted in this process, lack appears as an even more troublesome repulsion than the precipitating content-based disgust. Mary’s solution to this further revulsion, that of meaninglessness, is to do what we all do when faced with disgust. She fetishizes it. And here, she fetishizes her disgust in the form of “the cut” – a cut becomes “the cut.” She uses the power of this fetish object, the censor’s power, to sublimate her anxieties. It is reassuring rather than dangerous. Her friends also feel this relief when she cuts the film:

Bernice: I'm just so relived when she cuts through that.
Suzanne: It's a purification of sorts isn't it?
Gerry: It's a very definite action. And that's the part that feels good.

But the power of “the cut,” just as with any fetish object, is that it hides the acknowledgment of its deception. Mary and the girls like it because it denies what is bad and it “feels good.” There is no reminder of disgust left by the cut. It is a metonymic endless deferral of meaning. It is not a metaphor. It does not stand in for something else. It obfuscates.

Fetish is effectively a kind of envers of the symptom. That is to say, symptom is the exception which disturbs the surface of the false appearance, the point at which the repressed truth erupts, while fetish is the embodiment of the Lie which enables us to sustain the unbearable truth… In this sense, a fetish can play a very constructive role of allowing us to cope with the harsh reality: fetishists are not dreamers lost in their private worlds, they are thoroughly "realists," able to accept the way things effectively are - since they have their fetish to which they can cling in order to cancel the full impact of reality.
–zizek

And, when a fetishist controls the cancellation or permission of representation, their fetish becomes meaning – “the cut” is legitimized and censorship applauded.

There is some serious, often vicious disdain for organized acts of suppression in the videos featured in this programme. Wayne Yung’s 1000 Cumshots, Lorna Boschman’s True Inversions, Campbell and Werden’s Snip Snip and the guerilla style cable-access show Glennda and Camille do Downtown featuring anti-feminist feminist Camille Paglia and drag queen Glennda Orgasm, all employ some form of aggressive elision against those who would censor. Though the pieces by Yung and Boschman are more personally reflective than Snip Snip or Glennda and Camille, they are not quiet, contemplative ruminations on the issue. All of these works use similar rhetorical devices to elide cultural repression. In each work, metaphor and irony are used to relinquish the dominion of the censor and “the cut”: metaphor is used in the form of visible, irregular edits that are symptomatic of overbearing regulated standards; and irony exposes the fallaciousness of the censor’s anxiety.

“An edit,” the meeting of two or more cuts, is a metaphor. When an artist or author dictates the meeting of an ‘out-point frame’ and an ‘in-point frame,’ meaning is constructed. It is opposed by the censor’s forced violation of meaning. The point of contact between frames is an empty one. The fetishistic cut denies this lack. “An edit” fills that liminal space of nothingness as a metaphoric symptom from which repressed meaning from all the sources edited together erupts. “An edit” is not a frayed end. “The cut” is. “An edit” is what Jacques Lacan would call a point de caption, or an “anchoring point.” It is a literal “upholstery button.” For Lacan, signification requires this point so that “the signifier stops the otherwise endless movement of the signification” (Ecrits, 303). In other words, the “button” stops the constant deferral of meaning found in metonymy by making metaphor. Meaning does not pass continually, uninterrupted, and unacknowledged from one cut to another. “An edit” stands in between and marks the substitution of one idea for another. “An edit” is not supplemental to the meaning suggested in the narrative structure. “An edit” constructs meaning.

These artists’ videos strategically use the edit to expose what might lie beyond the physicality of the medium, beyond the physical splice. This practice stands apart from and critiques the invisible, continuity-based editing of Hollywood cinema and commercial television by replacing that set of stylistic criteria with separate set of standards. Here, rapid, often uneven, low quality editing is employed as a metaphorical challenge, not only to what is accepted in commercial venues, but to a system that requires the submission of all titles for review. Most of the works shown this evening contain either intentionally abrupt, uneven editing from scene to scene or stylistic elements that deliberately problematize “standards” of production: both Snip Snip and Glennda and Camille do Downtown use all the trappings of low-budget cable access shows; Wayne Yung’s 1000 Cumshots builds to a clamorous finale with an onslaught of screen-noise in an excessively rapid montage; and, while skillfully produced, Lorna Boschman’s True Inversions, contains conscious non-diegetic inserts that trouble easy analysis of the video’s content. Such strategies undermine the invisible process of censorship by exposing the limitations of the language and systems used to affirm or deny content.

Of course meaning and the ability to represent meaning are precisely what is censured in censorship. “An edit” is vulnerable to “the cut.” When submitting a film or video to a ratings or censor board, that work’s meaning is susceptible to being eradicated by the fetish of the censor’s cut: to re-cut a film or video, to use “the cut” to remove what is represented, is a final, irreversible alteration of the work. This reconstituted form is a harbinger of what is missing, of what is lacking. “The cut” haunts the censored work like a ghost.

But like Mary, the censor, compelled by “The (fetishistic) cut,” is not concerned with the artists’ voice. Censorship does not regard the experimentation with set standards or constraints that is often imperative to creation and development as an integral part of the work. The censor is only concerned with presenting the power to restrict meaning that they hold in “the cut.” To preserve this dominion and to enjoy of “the cut,” the censor must hold tight to the disavowing disgust of “the cut.” Any threat to the sovereignty of “the cut” and to the resulting autonomy that it provides the censor can only develop when the primary disgust, the profane transgression appearing onscreen, is incapacitated. The deftest critiques of censorship, like the works featured in this screening, polemically challenge the dominion of the taboo. When what is culturally sanctioned as “disgust” is refuted or opposed, the censor is forced to reveal the meaning behind “the cut.” And this meaning is, of course an empty deferral of the disgusting threat.

The perverse or taboo presented in these videos cannot become the fetish-object of the censor’s gaze because disgust is already disavowed within the text. Here, the power of the taboo is ironically obfuscated by the overt presentation of the taboo. When it is permitted to show, when it isn’t cut, the primary disgust, the objectionable material in the visual content under review, is vulnerable to interpretation. This is what frightens censors the most. In this process, these authors’ are able to produce multiple meaning outside of and other than the meaning of disgust.

True Inversions features a complex, ironic back and forth between confession and performance; real-life lovers and onscreen pornographic lovers; seduction and rape. But here, none of these oppositions are ever clear. There may be a little confession in performance, a little performance in confession, and perhaps a little seduction in the idea or play of rape, a little bit of rape in the play of seduction. And Camille Pagila would agree with this latter pairing.

In Glennda and Camille Do Downtown, she calls for a revision of the intolerant classification of rape as removed from seduction. Standing at the edge of the piers on New York City’s West Side, Hudson River, Camille and Glennda talk:

Camille: Yes. You really risk death here. The timbers seem shattered with the force of so many orgasms!
Glennda: But that’s the thing that gay men understand – the risks that you take sometimes in these public situations, that there’s a little bit of a thrill. And maybe it’s irresponsible, but if that’s what you’re into, you know, you have a right, if you want to come out here. Maybe you’ll fall in the water, maybe you won’t!
Camille: That’s exactly right, Glennda. This is what I’m always saying about the feminist problem with date rape, okay? That gay men understand there is risk and danger in sexuality, particularly the outlaw kind. I’ve learned so much from gay men. I’m sick and tired of women whining. They go on a date, they get in this car with a stranger, go to a man’s room, and then they’re surprised when something happens, you know? I mean, I love the gay male attitude, which is to go out into the dark, have anonymous sex. Right from the period of the Roman Empire – under the arches of the Colosseum – people understood that you go out on a sexual adventure as a gay man, you may not come home again. You may get beaten up. That’s one of the thrills.

And whether or not you agree with her, it is her right to say that the idea of rape can be sexy, it is her right to see pictures or buy pictures of adults performing rape fantasies. Paglia’s fight is against rigid sexual identity and the representations that go with it. She wants to show what is taboo so that it can enter into representation, defeating its taboo. Wayne Yung’s work similarly debates strict standards in sexual longing and its representation.

1000 Cumshots is just that, a thousand images of muscular, white gay men cumming. They all look the same; the same skin; the same abs; the same pecs; the same cocks. Desire is limited through these limitations on representation. These men are standards to be held against. As Yung’s disturbing inset text states, “Welcome to the White Party / No Fats, Fems, or Asians.” Yung inserts an image of his own Asian body, coloured as white, masturbating atop these image ideals. Here, we are witness to pornography’s own taboo on ‘otherness.’ But when his text and body are superimposed on these ideal bodies and the meaning they connote, this representation stops the deferral of the ‘other.’

As I have explored, in Snip Snip a disavowal of the literal meaning of the anxiety that mediates censorship occurs. In anxiety’s place, “the cut” as fetish, gains representation – “the cut” has form. We see it on the blade edge of Mary’s scissors. Like Boschman, Glennda and Camille, and Yung, Campbell and Werden succeed in representing disgust. Here, censorship is conflated by metaphor and ironic reversal. The ironic disavowal and twist is that, what gains representation, the disgust or taboo that we are finally permitted to see, is “the cut.” And now that we can see it, we can choose whether or not to close our eyes.