Ritið : tímarit Hugvísindastofnunar - 01.05.2019, Page 133

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tekur á sig nýja og flóknari mynd um leið og merking hugtaksins verður umdeildari
og fleiri taka þátt í að skilgreina og móta það. Í þessu sambandi verður lykiltákn-
mynd bannlistans skoðuð sérstaklega, en það er ítalska kvikmyndin Cannibal Holo-
caust (Ruggero Deodato, 1980).
Lykilorð: Íslensk kvikmyndasaga, Kvikmyndaeftirlit ríkisins, Kvikmyndaskoðun,
bannlistinn, braskbíó
A B S T R A C T
„Indiscriminate blood bath without artistic merit“:
The Icelandic Video Nasties List and the Film Certification Board.
The regulation of film exhibition in iceland has closely shadowed the history of cin-
ema exhibition itself. Although regulation practices have undergone various shifts
and realignments throughout the twentieth century, they retained certain core con-
cerns and a basic ideological imperative having to do with child protection and child
welfare. Movies were thought to have a disproportionate impact on children, with
„impressionable minds“ often being invoked. Their interior lives and successful
journey towards maturity were put at risk each and every time they encountered
unsuitable filmic materials. Thus, while assuming that adults could fend for them-
selves among the limited number of theaters in Reykjavík, children were a whole
another matter and required protection. Civic bodies were consequently formed
and empowered to evaluate and regulate films. But even in the context of fairly
rigorous surveillance and codification, the turn taken by regulatory authorities in
the 1980s strikes one as exceptional and unprecedented. The Film Certification
Board (TFCB) was, for the first time, authorized to prohibit and suppress from
distribution films deemed especially malignant and harmful. Motivating this vast
expansion of the powers of the regulatory body were concerns about a variety of
exploitation and horror films that were being distributed on video, films that were
thought to transgress so erroneously in terms of on-screen violence that their mere
existence posed a grave threat to children. Two years after finding its role so radical-
ly enlarged, TFCB put together a list of 67 „video-nasties“, to borrow a term from
the very similar but later moral panic that occurred in Britain. Police raids were
conducted and every video store in the country was visited in a nation-wide effort to
remove the now illegal films from rental stores.
This article posits that the icelandic nasties list can be viewed as something of a
unique testament to the extent to which the meaning, aesthetic coherence and the