MPAA Rates Poster an F

Kirby Dick, director of "This Film Is Not Yet Rated," a new film devoted to the MPAA and its ratings system, said that's not the only irony in the MPAA's decision. He compares the MPAA's secrecy to the secrecy that has governed so much of what has happened at the prison in Guantanamo and other U.S. facilities where suspects in the war on terror have been held.

"It's also interesting that the image is of someone whose vision is being blocked -- and that's the image that they're blocking," Dick said. "When you get into censorship, the irony never stops."

Dick's new film, which will be released in September, focuses on the Classification and Rating Administration, which decides if a film is PG or R or gets the dreaded NC-17 rating, more than the five-member panel known as the Advertising Administration, which made the decision about the "Road to Guantanamo." But Dick found that small films are often at a disadvantage when they deal with the MPAA.

"Foreign films and independent films are right at the end of their budgets" when they get to shepherding their film through the MPAA process, he said. They don't always have the budget to reedit their films or make other costly changes that will assure smooth sailing with the association. And while filmmakers and distributors can simply forego an MPAA rating -- and with it oversight of their advertising -- without an MPAA rating, it's difficult for a movie to break out of the limited art-house and festival circuit into the big bucks of wide distribution.

Serious subject matter also puts small filmmakers at a disadvantage. The huge budgets of companies that make movies of fake violence aids their marketing effort to titillate the public, while small companies that deal with real violence must be more demure. Cohen, of Roadside Attractions, said that he made only one effort to get the MPAA to reconsider the decision, arguing that because it dealt with serious issues in the real world of the war on terror, the standard for the poster should reflect a greater tolerance for the troubling nature of the material.

"We went to their boss, but then we kind of folded," he said. Persistence, however, often pays off. Large studios "are more relentless," Cohen said, and can often wear down the decision-makers.

The small flap over the Guantanamo movie poster mirrors, in many ways, the larger issue of how the subject, and the image of torture, circulates within American culture. American newspapers, which for years now have held extraordinarily graphic images of the Abu Ghraib abuses, have kept to standards of taste that make many, if not most, of the images unprintable. Yet many of those images circulate freely outside the United States, where they continue to inflame opinion against the U.S. and its foreign policy.

As the photos from Abu Ghraib began to trickle out, and with new revelations about the extent and seriousness of prisoner abuse, the importance of images to frame the torture debate has grown. Without seeing those images, it can be difficult to build a visceral case against the Bush administration's substantial relaxing of rules regulating torture. Advocates for full disclosure, including many voices on the Internet, have argued that the consequences of an American drift toward acceptance or indifference to torture are so profound that there should be exceptions to the usual standards of taste. Which is essentially the argument Cohen made to the MPAA.

They listened, said Cohen. "But they just didn't want the head with a bag on it."