Adult Themes

British Cinema and the X Certificate in the Long 1960s

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Edited by Anne Etienne, Benjamin Halligan and Christopher Weedman

Type: Studies
Subject: Countries > Great Britain
Keywords: Great Britain, 1960s, exploitation films, ratings, censorship
Publishing date: 2025 (July 24, 2025)
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Collection: Global Exploitation Cinemas
1st publishing: 2023
Language: English

Relative size

Physical desc.

Paperback • 264 pages
6 x 9 inches (15 x 23 cm)

ISBN

978-1-5013-7525-5

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Book Presentation:
Between the late 1950s and mid-1970s, British cinema experienced an explosion of X-certificated films. In parallel with an era marked by social, political, and sexual ferment and upheaval, British filmmakers and censors pushed and guarded the permissible limits of violence, horror, revolt, and sexuality on screen. Adult Themes is the first volume entirely devoted to the exploration of British X certificate films across this transformative period, since identified as 'the long 1960s'. How did the British Board of Film Censors, harried on one side by the censorious and moralistic, and beset on the other by demands for greater artistic freedom, oversee and manage this provocative body of films? How did the freedoms and restrictions of the X certificate hasten, determine, and reshape post-war British cinema into an artistic, exploitational, and unapologetically adult medium?

Contributors to this collection consider these central questions as they take us to swinging parties, on youthful crime sprees, into local council meetings, on police raids of cinemas, and around Soho strip clubs, and introduce us to mass murderers, lesbian vampires, apoplectic protestors, eroticised middle-aged women, and rebellious working-class men. Adult Themes examines both the workings and negotiations of British film censorship, the limits of artistic expression, and a wider culture of X certificate cinema. This is an important volume for students and scholars of British Film History and censorship, Media Studies, the 1960s, and Cultural and Sexuality Studies, while simultaneously an entertaining read for all connoisseurs of British cinema at its most vivid and scandalous.

About the authors:
Benjamin Halligan is the Director of the Doctoral College of the University of Wolverhampton, UK. His publications include Hotbeds of Licentiousness: The British Glamour Film and the Permissive Society (2022), Desires for Reality: Radicalism and Revolution in Western European Film (2016) and Michael Reeves (2003), and the co-edited collections: Politics of the Many (2021); Stories We Could Tell (2018); The Arena Concert (2015); The Music Documentary (2013); Resonances (2013); Reverberations (2012); and Mark E. Smith and The Fall (2010).

Press Reviews:
"Adult Themes offers a full range of fascinating insights into Britain's film culture across the long 1960s, specifically the deployment of the X certificate as a means of mapping previously uncharted territory in an increasingly permissive social climate. Taking in such varied films as Peeping Tom, The Party's Over, Secrets of a Windmill Girl, 10 Rillington Place and Zee and Co, made and released during John Trevelyan's liberalised leadership of the British Board of Film Censors, the twelve chapters (plus a thoughtful editors' introduction) provide new perspectives on how films of this era responded to, mediated, and sometimes anticipated attitudinal change - or directly challenged the status quo – by means of the new possibilities granted to them by the 'X'. Highly recommended reading for those interested in British cultural history, the Sixties, censorship and regulation, and the always contested cinematic terrains of sex and violence, crime and horror." ―Melanie Williams, Professor of Film and Television Studies, University of East Anglia, UK

"I well remember the British X certificate and how I sneaked into my first one -- Circus of Horrors (1960) -- in those distant days of yesteryear. These co-editors and their contributors have performed an indispensable job in covering such a wide area and providing information that will form indispensable reading for generations to come. Well-researched, expertly written in clear and concise ways and attuned to significant issues of culture and history, this will become a definitive work in this area for years to come." ―Tony Williams, Professor of Film and Literature, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, USA

See the publisher website: Bloomsbury Academic

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