You Ken Park Here

by Sze Kai Chen
10 July 2003

Margaret Pomeranz at the screening.

It was the kind of welcome a professional party-pooper should have expected. The renegade audience gathered at Balmain Town Hall for the illegal screening of the movie Ken Park hissed and heckled police Superintendant Arthur Katsogiannis when he climbed on stage to stop the event.

Katsogiannis, from the Leichhardt local area command, politely asked the screening’s organiser, SBS film critic and anti-censorship campaigner Margaret Pomeranz, to stop the DVD and hand it over.
Stopping the machine, Pomeranz turned to the restive audience to explain: “I have to comply, I have to comply.”
Without a microphone, however, she was inaudible above the jeers of people who had come more in solidarity with the organisers than to watch the banned film. But then Pomeranz seemed to change her mind, hit the play button again, and was rewarded with cheering and clapping.

Free Cinema, a group which counts among its members Pomeranz, ABC TV’s Media Watch host David Marr, film writer Jane Mills and the president of the Film Critics Circle of Australia, Julie Rigg, organised the illegal screening as an act of civil disobedience to
challenge the treatment of Ken Park.

American directors Larry Clark and Ed Lachmann’s film had been banned via a Refused Classification (RC) rating in May by the seven-member Classification Board of the Office of Film and Literature Classification(OFLC), after a local distributor submitted it for video and DVD sale and hire.

The film was deemed by the Board to deal with matters of sex in such a way that they “offend against the standards of morality, decency and propriety generally accepted by reasonable adults to the extent that it should be refused classification”.
“Refused Classification” means the film cannot be legally sold, hired, advertised or exhibited in Australia.

The Sydney Film Festival, which had already scheduled Ken Park in its 2003 program, resubmitted the film for review in June but the three-member Classification Review Board upheld the OFLC’s previous decision. The scenes objected to included those of child sexual abuse, actual sex by people depicted as minors, and sexualised violence.

In Pomeranz’s view, it is “ludicrous” that millions of adults around the world have seen Ken Park while Australian adults cannot.
“I feel that the Classification Board is not representing my community of filmgoers at all,” she said, adding that she wanted to broaden the debate by allowing more adults to see the film.
And she challenged the Classification Board’s supposed representation of the standards of the community.
“How do [the OFLC] know they are representing community standards in this country by refusing classification to this film?” she asked.
Film practitioner Geoff Burton agreed: “I’m more interested in the issue of anti-censorship than I am in this particular film,” he said. “My
priority is to make a statement about the need for freedom of choice.”

He and his son were two early birds who had arrived at the Town Hall at 6pm, having heard of the screening by word-of-mouth.
They were not the only ones to get there early. A lone police sergeant was already on the scene at 5pm, just as the media was preparing for their briefing from members of Free Cinema. Ironically, Balmain Town Hall is next door to the Balmain Police Station.

“Well, it has a certain logistical convenience,” Julie Rigg joked at the media briefing, “but, honestly, we’re not expecting to be shut down.”
Yet shut down they were. Pomeranz and her colleagues stepped on stage at 8pm, 15 minutes earlier than scheduled, after realising they couldn’t squeeze any more people into the Town Hall. More than 450 people had already packed into the hall while many more were being turned away at the door. Most had been told there wouldn’t be a screening, but that didn’t deter them.

After starting the DVD for the second time, Pomeranz pleaded for the film to be played to the end.
“Let them see it, then charge me with the offence,” she said to police, but Superintendent Katsogiannis explained he could not allow it “It’s just a film. It won’t hurt anybody, you know,” responded Pomeranz.

Meanwhile, an audience member had turned the projector onto another wall, as the stage was too crowded with media and police to see the screen. In response, the police literally pulled the plug, shutting off the projector and the DVD player.
“Margaret, can I please have the film now?” asked Superintendent
Katsogiannis. Pomeranz grudgingly tried to oblige, only to realise - much to her obvious amusement - that with the power was off, there was no way in to the DVD player.

With the power switched back on Pomeranz couldn’t bring herself to remove the disc, allowing the police officer to do it instead.
“It goes against my principles,” she said. Handing over the case for the DVD, she quipped: “It’s got my fingerprints on it.”

As Pomeranz and her colleagues were led away to the police station, I asked her how she felt.
“Disappointed. I’d have loved people to see this film. I didn’t achieve anything tonight. I failed.”
But the issue is not over, she said. “It has got to be the beginning of the fight.”

Earlier, Pomeranz told Reportage that the idea for the screening had started on the footpath outside the State Theatre after the
censorship forum that replaced the screening of Ken Park at the Sydney Film Festival. She also clarified that Free Cinema is not associated with Watch on Censorship, the organisation of which she is the President and of which many in Free Cinema are also members.
According to Pomeranz, Ken Park is not titillating.

“It’s bleak, it’s depressing. It’s not a film you’re going to get off on.”

At the media briefing, Rigg observed how film censorship in Australia has been steadily slipping backwards since the mid-90s, “most
particularly [through] restrictive guidelines which have been
conservatively applied.

“I remember a little poem I read once that says, ‘Nothing ever changes until someone goes too far’,” Rigg said. “They’ve gone too far banning this film.”

In her speech to the audience after the police intervention, Rigg brought up the case of Peter Greemaway’s The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, a film produced by Kees Kasander, who also produced Ken Park.
That film, according to Rigg, was initially refused classification in the United States, but the subsequent uproar over the decision resulted in a change in the classification system.

“We want more radical changes than that. Let’s keep fighting for them,” she said.

Jane Mills, on the other hand, saw the content of the film as an important factor in the debate.

“It’s about time the issues raised in these films are the ones we discuss and not just whether or not we should or shouldn’t see it, ” she said.

Asked before the aborted screening what advice she would give if the screening was stopped, Mills replied: “Regroup. Try again.”