Vignettes #52

I've already mentioned before attending an interdisciplinary seminar at the university on the topic of censorship, which included professors and students from the psychology, law, art, theology and German literature faculties. I also told you that the psychology professor there was a quite awkward person.

With my activity as a cinema owner and my work with Lyssa humana I was very experienced with many aspects of censorship and able to participate quite actively with the discussions, which most of the professors very much appreciated - but not the psychology guy who seemed to dislike me, but then he apparently wasn't liked by his own colleagues either. I think he was self-opinionated, quite ignorant of the achievement of others and a bit scheming.

One day he announced that he had an extraordinary case he wanted to discuss with the group bypassing the schedule for that day. It was immediately obvious that it was meant to be a provocation in my direction. He described the contents of the German horror and splatter movie Nekromantik 2 in all its bloody details trying to shock us listeners. Then he expressed his own disgust about 'this hideous trash' and his shock that a German court had ruled the movie to be 'art' and was therefore not banned.

Since I actually knew the director, Jörg Buttgereit, personally, and had so far played all his movies at the cinema including Nekromantik 2 I explained that despite the summary the director had rather made the attempt to create a more artsy film than part 1 had been, and when I had screened it at my cinema there were flocks of disappointed fans leaving the movie midway for the simple fact that they thought it was boring.

So, after having said that, one of the law professors addressed his psychology colleague with the words: "If a German judge says it is art, and Mr. Kretschmer here says it is art, then we have all means to believe that it is truly so."