Stores, homes raided; director Schlondorff responds
THE TIN DRUM, the 1979 winner of the Academy Award for Best Foreign
Film, was banned last
week as "obscene" by Oklahoma City District Judge Richard Freeman.
An adaptation of Gunter Grass'
bestselling novel of the same name, THE TIN DRUM is an allegorical
fantasy set in Nazi Germany.
The film features one scene in which the protagonist, an adult in a
young boyıs body, has implied oral
sex with a teenage girl in a bathhouse. Freeman was responding to a
complaint by a group called
"Oklahomans for Children and Families," an anti-pornography organization.
The ruling was followed by an investigation of video-store rental
records and
confiscation of the tape from video stores, including five Blockbuster
outlets and
one Hollywood Video, as well as seizure of a copy owned by the local public
library. Oklahoma City vice officers also raided the home of a local ACLU
director of development, Michael Camfield, who had rented the video in
order to
familiarize himself with the content of the film in preparation for possible
legal
action. The vice officers arrived at his home before he had even finished
watching
the film and demanded that he hand it over. In an appropriately surreal
moment,
Camfield attempted to talk the officers out of seizing the video with a
debate on
"constitutional law and artistic merit," but surrendered the tape when
it became
clear that his intellectual arguments were not going to dissuade them.
The incident touched off a media firestorm across the nation.
The director of
THE TIN DRUM, Volker Schlondorff, issued the following statement in
response to the ban:
"I am glad to see that 18 years after the fact, the obscenity
of THE TIN DRUM has caught the law's
attention. Of course, Gunter Grass' novel should be seized, too, in
all public libraries as well as in all
private homes worldwide. David Bennent, the boy who was eleven when
we were shooting the
incriminating scenes, is 29 years old now. So why not put him on trial,
too? The gratuitous violence of
most current summer blockbusters is truly obscene. The outrageous sexual
fantasies in THE TIN
DRUM are part of life and therefore can't be obscene."
Civil rights activists nationwide have called for a federal
investigation of the ban and the ensuing police action. Civil
libertarian and director of the Oklahoma ACLU Joann Bell
likened the police seizures to "book burnings organized by Hitler's
Gestapo." She also accused the Oklahoma City police of having
an "unhealthy relationship" with the group that initiated the action
against THE TIN DRUM. Camfield, who saw the scene in
question before the tape was confiscated, said "If ever there was
a work of art the demanded the support of First Amendment
advocates, this is certainly one of those works of art."
