The Italian government abolished the "scissors" that maimed masterpieces of cinema such as "Last Tango in Paris" and sent them to the "black list", as well as many other victims of the censorship that had been in place since 1914.
From now on, it will no longer be possible to ban the showing of a film in cinemas in Italy, nor to cut or change it for moral or religious reasons.
Instead of censorship, the Commission for the Classification of Cinematographic Works under the General Directorate for Cinematography of the Ministry of Culture will work.
That commission, which determines which age groups of viewers and which films are suitable, consists of 49 members, starting from experts in the film industry and for the protection of minors, to representatives of parents' associations and animal protection groups.
"By abolishing film censorship, we are definitely abandoning the system of control and intervention that allowed the state to interfere in the creative freedom of artists," welcomed the decision by Culture Minister Dario Franceskini, a member of the Democratic Party in Mario Dragija's coalition government.
It's "an important and historic step for Italian cinema. It's about time," Elena Boero, an expert on Italian cinema, told AFP.
"It's a form of responsibility. We're mature," director Pupo Avati, whose film "Bordella," about the opening of a brothel for women in Milan, was censored in 1975, told AFP.
Many films have been the target of censorship for more than a century, among which the most important are almost all the films of the writer-poet and director Pier Paolo Pasolini, or the incendiary "Last Tango in Paris" by Bernardo Bertolucci with Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider, copies of which are even destroyed, except for three that are kept in the National Cinematheque.
A famous example of a censored film is "Rocco and his Brothers" (1960), Lucin Visconti's masterpiece, with Alain Delon and Annie Girardot.
According to the census carried out by "Cinecensura" - a virtual internet exhibition promoted by the Ministry of Culture, a total of 1944 domestic films, 274 American and 130 from other countries have been censored in Italy since 321.
More than 10.000 films were released in cinemas, but only after shortening and modifications.
Paradoxically, censorship "made films more attractive, arousing the public's curiosity, especially in the erotic field," said Pupi Avati. "But we didn't censor the movies because of the scenes of violence," he noted.
During more than a century of censorship in Italy, the motives for cutting or banning evolved from interests of political, moral and religious control, to a kind of opportunism: avoiding censorship brought state subsidies.
The last major case of censorship is from 1998, the film "Toto Who Lived Twice" by Daniele Ćipri and Franco Mareskest, set in monstrous and apocalyptic Palermo teeming with grotesque and blasphemous characters, while the city is under attack - by Catholic circles.
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