Saturday, April 10, 2010

Black Book and Censor

Finally I watched Black Book or Zwarte Boek a Dutch movie about WW II. The surprise part was I watched it on the telly, Indonesian telly, and the subtitle was pretty good. I have to mention about the subtitle, because even for English movie or TV series, sometimes the subtitles are below par.

The bad part was they censored it rather too much for my liking. Some sensual parts that explain why someone did something were cut. Weirdly enough, the part of killings were not cut. They even cut the ending (but not the beginning at the same place) that took place in Israel in the start of Suez crisis. Indonesian censor, go figure. Lucky I still have a copy of uncensored one, so I might watch it again.

I dont get why days in days out Indonesian TVs show lots of gruesome pictures and some of them were not even censored even though they aired it before 8PM. However, when it comes to kissing and sex, aired after 9PM, they censored them! I dont have kids, but I'd rather my kids see people kissing, than some gruesome murdered victims.

Another thing that bugs me, Why did they need to cut the ending just because it showed a kibbutz? What was the censorship agency trying to do, protecting Moslem from seeing an imaginary-funded-using-recovered-money-stolen-from-Jews-killed-in- the-war-kibbutz? Grow up!

2 comments:

colson said...

I have to run to the defence of the censor; if I were a middle-aged male Indonesian censor I also would want to keep the sight of Carice van Houten dyeing her pubic hair all to myself.

No, seriously, I can't but agree with you.I also have been wondering all my life why people who pretend to be very prudish, very anxious if it comes to sex, tend to be very lenient in matters of mediaeval punishments and showing cruel, violent pictures.

By the way: how did you like the film? At the time I thought it was a pretty well-made mainstream entertainment movie. The bonus to me was my favourite actress in theatre performances Halina Reyn.

triesti said...

@colson :From what I saw so far, it's pretty good... except for Johny de Mol.. he's rubbish.

For picturing a place that almost always cloudy or raining and at the time with famine, those people looked really well in flimsy clothing while walking up and down in a bright day:)

there was this part when they about to drink, and said 'morgen' in stead of 'proost'. is that why, if I remember correctly, guys at Corps do that at their societeit?