Film Historian: 'Psycho' Altered Ideas On Censorship [View All]

[Barack_America]

Hitchcock's "Psycho" recently celebrated its 50th anniversary.

From NPR's "All Things Considered":

Film Historian: 'Psycho' Altered Ideas On Censorship

The 50th anniversary of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho was this past week. The film was groundbreaking in many ways --including having been the first to show a toilet on-camera. Host Melissa Block talks with David Thomson, film critic and author of The Moment of Psycho: How Alfred Hitchcock Taught America to Love Murder.

{Excerpt from transcript:}

BLOCK: You have this great line in your book, you say this: Sex and violence were ready to break out, and censorship crumbled like an old lady's parasol. The orgy had arrived.

Mr. THOMSON: Well, you know, it's 50 years ago, and the cinema was a very different form. It was very controlled. There were certain things you could not show. You could not show a toilet. Everybody, most days of the week, uses a toilet, even in America, and yet it was something you could not show on a film because it was thought to be offensive.

And Hitchcock said, well, this is silly. And he got away with it. Now, that's a fairly minor detail because the film is really much more known for its violence and for the sort of way in which sexuality and voyeurism is tied into the violence.

And in hindsight, it's clear that "Psycho" was a film that indicated the end of the code, the end of formal censorship. By the end of the 1960s, you can do and show nearly anything in a film....

More:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=127937275

Short, but very interesting.