What’s Lost When Censors Tamper With Classic Films – The New York Times

This particular change to The French Connection came unexplained and unannounced, so we can only guess at the precise reasoning behind it. But we can imagine why the language was there in the first place. The French Connection was adapted from a nonfiction book about two real detectives, both of whom appear in the film, and the scene clearly wants to situate the viewer within a certain gritty milieu: a space of casual violence, offhand bigotry, sophomoric humor. We see a bit of banter between two policemen working in what was then called the inner city, dialogue underlining their good cop, bad cop dynamic; in certain ways, its not so different from the set pieces you would find in Blaxploitation films of the era. Doyles eagerness to get to the bar hints at the long-running alcoholic cop trope, and his homoerotic jokes are offset by his womanizing another ongoing genre clich. His racist barbs give a sense of his misdirected frustration. Doyle is presented as flawed, reckless, obsessive, vulgar, rough around the edges but, of course, were ultimately meant to find him charming and heroic. He is one in a long line of characters that would stretch forward into shows like The Shield and The Wire: figures built on the idea that good cop, bad cop can describe not just an interrogation style or a buddy-film formula but also a single officer.

Attempting to edit out just one of a characters flaws inevitably produces a sense of inconsistent standards. We get that true heroes shouldnt be using racial epithets. But theyre probably supposed to avoid a lot of the other things Popeye Doyle does too like racing (and crashing) a car through a residential neighborhood or shooting a suspect in the back. This selective editing feels like a project for risk-averse stakeholders, so anxious about a films legacy and lasting economic value that they end up diminishing the work itself. The point of the edit isnt to turn Doyle into a noble guy, just one whose movie modern viewers can watch without any jolts of discomfort or offense. If Gene Hackman is American cinemas great avatar of paranoia a star in three of this countrys most prophetic and indelible surveillance thrillers, The French Connection, The Conversation and Enemy of the State then his turn here might anticipate the intensity with which entities from police departments to megacorporations will try to mitigate risks like that.

Artful jump cuts can illuminate all kinds of interesting associations between images. Bad ones just create bumps in logic; theyre disorienting in a way that suggests external, self-interested forces at play. The one newly smuggled into The French Connection reveals, to use a period term, the hand of the Man, even if its unclear from which direction its reaching. (Is it Disney, treating adult audiences like the children its used to serving? Did Friedkin, who once modified the color of the film, approve the change?) Censors, like overzealous cops, can be too aggressive, or too simplistic, in their attempts to neutralize perceived threats. Whoever made the cut in the precinct scene, sparing the hero from saying unpleasant things, did nothing to remove other ethnic insults, from references to Italian Americans to the cops code names for their French targets: Frog One and Frog Two. It also becomes hilarious, in this sanitized context, to watch the films frequent nonlinguistic violence: A guy is shot in the face; a train conductor is blasted in the chest; a sniper misses Doyle and clips a woman pushing a stroller.

Surveillance, as the movie teaches us, is a game of dogged attention; focus too much on one thing and you miss a world of detail encircling it. Nit-picking old artworks for breaking todays rules inevitably makes it harder to see the complete picture, the full context; we become, instead, obsessed with obscure metrics, legalistic violations of current sensibilities. And actively changing those works continually remolding them into a shape that suits todays market eventually compromises the entire archival record of our culture; were left only with evidence of the present, not a document of the past. This is, in a way, the same spirit that leads obdurate politicians to try and purge reams of uncomfortable American history from textbooks, leaving students learning and living in a state of confusion, with something always out of order, always unexplained.

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What's Lost When Censors Tamper With Classic Films - The New York Times