American Civil Liberties Union defends Ann Arbor Festival in court against censorship through withdrawal of public funding

At the end of March 2007, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Michigan filed a suit against the Michigan Council for Arts and Affairs (MCACA) to support the Ann Arbor Film Festival in the funding controversy it has been mired in for the past year. In 2006 the State of Michigan withdrew public funding from the festival, prompted by protests against the screening of films deemed immoral and thus in violation of the appropriations bill. The complaint lodged by the ACLU states that, not only are the objections to the films unjustified, the appropriations bill itself is not reconcilable with Article 1 of the U.S. Constitution (Freedom of Speech). 

The broader goal behind the ACLU’s complaint of changing the state’s promotion policy is in keeping with the strategy embraced by the Ann Arbor Film Festival. Festival funding was not withdrawn on the initiative of the MCACA itself; the move was instead triggered by a public campaign designed to put pressure on the state institution and cultural promotion as a whole.

The campaign took advantage of the opportunity presented by a fairly recent passage added to the appropriations bill for arts funding, according to which the MCACA is not permitted to foster art that contains the following content: “depictions of flag desecration”, “displays of sex acts” or “displays of human wastes on religious symbols”. These limitations have not hindered the promotion of film festivals in any way during the past ten years. In March 2006, however, a private organization publicly attacked the Ann Arbor Film Festival as part of a campaign to change tax policy. The actual occasion for this campaign was a proposal to increase the arts budget. In a pamphlet distributed by the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, which is against the funding of the arts with tax money as a matter of principle, the Ann Arbor Film Festival was cited as a negative example. As proof, a series of films screened in the festival programme were described as ‘pornographic’. In response, the MCACA withdrew $13,600 in funding from the festival that had already been approved.

Among the films cited as obscene was “Boobie Girl” – an animated film about a teenage girl’s problems accepting the size of her breasts, which is already beyond suspicion due to the fact that it won both a student Oscar and an Emmy Award! Other festival films were alleged to contain illicit ‘sex acts’.

Whether or not this is true and how it should be judged is just as unimportant in this context as whether the campaign’s ringleaders even saw the films in question – which is doubtful. The fact is that, even had they done so, they would not be qualified to evaluate the films from a critical, let alone an aesthetic, standpoint. Nor would a discussion of the films now or in future help to ward off this kind of shameless instrumentalization for ulterior political motives.

As is so often the case, this campaign was ultimately not about a critical confrontation with individual works of art, but rather about a populist disavowal of art in general with the specific goal of impeding public cultural sponsorship.

The Ann Arbor Film Festival has enjoyed a fine international reputation for decades as a forum for independent and experimental film. It is the oldest festival of its kind in the United States. The forty-fifth festival took place in March 2007, without the benefit of funding from the State of Michigan. The controversy about the state’s appropriations policy was however taken up proactively in discussions and programmes such as “Banned in Michigan”. The festival does not intend to apply for funding again until a change in the appropriations bill has been passed.

URL for the festival: www.aafilmfest.org

URL for the Mackinac pamphlet: www.educationreport.org/article.aspx

http://www.boobiegirl.com