Drawing a Line in the Dirt: Art, Pornography, and Academic Freedom

BOOK REVIEWS Drawing a Line in the Dirt: Art, Pornography, and Academic Freedom Peter Lehman University of Arizona Andrew Sarris once remarked that just when we have drawn the line at "Spaghetti Westerns," along comes Sergio Leone. He was, ofcourse, cautioning that we should not be too quick to dismiss an entire genre, however cheap and shoddy it may appear. His somewhat dramatic example, to which I shall return, was the director of the now internationally acclaimed Clint Eastwood "Man with No Name" films as well as other now recognized masterpieces such as Once Upon a Time in the West and Once Upon a Time in America. More recently and much more dramatically, George Bush captured the American imagination by referring to America's action in Saudia Arabia as "drawing a line in the sand." No question about it, America is in a line-drawing mood, and this has been no more apparent than in the recent attempts to draw the line between art and pornography. For most people who draw such lines, pornography is simply dirt and the line they wish to draw is intended to banish filth while protecting what is serious and worthwhile. Not surprisingly, the line-drawers have recently moved into the academic arena with the result that an alarming number of higher educational institutions have had attempts, some successful and some not, to close down art shows, film screenings, and theatre performances. The brouhaha surrounding the cancellation of the Robert Mapplethorpe exhibition in the nation's capital and the ensuing controversy concerning the funding policies of the National Endowment for the Arts are the related events which have received the most media attention. In response to this state of affairs, the American Association of University Professors held a conference on "Artistic Expression and Academic Freedom" at the Barns ofWolfTrap on April 29-May 1, 1990. The event brought together art and academic administrators as well as college and university professors. As President of the Society for Cinema Studies, I was fortunate to be among the invited participants. The conference culminated with the adoption ofa policy statement on vital areas of academic freedom. The entire July-August 1990 issue of Academe: The Bulletin of the American Association ofUniversity Professors is devoted to the conference and the topic of censorship and the arts in academia. Anyone interested in this topic should read this worthwhile issue of the journal. What follows here are some thoughts that grew out of the conference from my perspective as a film academic. During the first conference session, I was not surprised to hear Dusan Makavejev's WR: Mysteries of the Organism (1971) and Nagisa Oshima's In the Realm ofthe Senses (1976) brought up as examples ofworthy, artistic films 243 244Rocky Mountain Review with explicit sexual content. All the conferees seemed to agree that these and other films like them should be protected for campus screenings. Although I share my colleagues' high regard for both these films (indeed, I have published extensively on In the Realm ofthe Senses), I was disturbed by the way in which the conferees seemed willing to accept the kind ofline drawing whereby a few sexually explicit films were redeemable and, presumably, the rest could go down the drain. Before pursuing the dangers of drawing the line in this way, I want to digress with a brief survey of line drawing from the perspective of the institutionalization of film studies. The history of film studies in American academia is comparatively short. Since the late 60s, however, academic film studies have undergone enormous growth and are now widely recognized as a legitimate scholarly field. There is, perhaps, symbolic significance to the fact that the Society for Cinema Studies has just been accepted into the American Council ofLearned Societies. Within this brief time period, cinema studies has seen some important lines drawn and redrawn. Prior to the late 60s, academic film studies were most likely to be found in English departments. Indeed, the immense body of scholarly work on film/literature adaptation can only be fully understood within this institutional context. Films adapted from great novels provided one of the few legitimate areas of scholarly inquiry into the aesthetics ofcinema...