Sexual violence, good taste and the education of the cinema audience: Gender and censorship in 1920s Sweden

Abstract

Abstract This article makes use of records in the archive of Sweden’s National Board of Film Censorship for a discussion of the censorship of visual representations of sex and violence in films by women directors during the 1920s. From the perspective that Swedish film censorship was utilized to educate and control Swedish cinema audiences, not least concerning taste, the question is posed: how did gender and nationality play a role in the assessment of taste? Focusing on three case studies, namely Karin Swanström’s Kalle Utter (1925), Dorothy Arzner’s Manhattan Cocktail (1928) and Olga Preobrazhenskaya’s The Women of Ryazan (1927) and comparing censorship records with reviews in the daily press, the article demonstrates how nation played a role in the assessment of taste and the decisions to cut these films. The analyses also reveal that the censoring of sexual violence had a tendency to diminish acts such as rape and forced kissing in a narrative as well as on a moral level.