Cleanflicks: An Affront To Cinema Or A Necessary Service?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVwCa87qrC0 Cleanflicks used to be a company that was explored brilliantly in the documentary Cleanflix. I recommend you watch it for yourself if you haven't already but for the sake of this article I'll just summarize it very briefly. Basically, Cleanflicks takes movies and edits them to reflect a version of the film that religiously inclined people can watch without offending their beliefs. This includes editing all the "crap" out of movies like violence, foul language, profanity and themes that may be deemed offensive. If you're a fan of Friends then a reference to Phoebe not being allowed to watch the endings to sad kid's movies would describe what Cleanflicks does perfectly. I bring this up because I've often wondered if the owner of a film's content is the creator of the film themselves or if it's the people who choose to watch the film and Cleanflicks is a great topic to use when discussing this duality. They take the position that movies are better when they are edited to reflect a higher moral standard but they don't take into account the fact that some films feature extreme violence or profanity in a cautionary or satirical fashion that is essential to the core of the film's artistic statement. A Clockwork Orange and Saving Private Ryan are two films that capture this idea perfectly. Both have been edited heavily by Cleanflicks and both use violence in a way that is organic and cautionary in regards to the real world and fantasy respectively. They view the violence as immoral and take the position that if a person subjects them self to the content of A Clockwork Orange and Saving Private Ryan then they are offending The Lord while also perverting their beliefs. I'm not going to argue whether that's true or not because religion is a very broad thing and can mean many different things to many different people but I can argue the nature of art itself. By editing movies Cleanflicks is tampering with an artist's personal vision. They are taking a deeply personal statement made with careful precision and large quantities of time by deeply committed individuals and altering it to fit their own vision. The question still remains: is this okay? I would have to say no but if you believe otherwise I'd love to hear your argument in the comments. The reason I think it is definitely wrong for someone to edit out the bits of a film that they dislike is very simple. They may own the dvd and the right to watch the movie but they don't own the film's contents. In my opinion the filmmaker owns the contents to their own work. Just imagine if a deeply religious person, like the founder of Cleanflicks, decided that they wanted to alter a painting by Caravaggio or one of Goya's masterworks because it didn't agree with their personal beliefs. The owner's of the museum that those works are displayed in would be furious and the public wouldn't let them anywhere near the paintings. If that's the case then why is film not held in such a high regard? The editors at Cleanflicks "improved" such masterpieces as Taxi Driver, The Godfather, Psycho, 2001: A Space Odyssey, There Will Be Blood and Pulp Fiction by removing the very things that make these films some of the best of all time. Taking the violence out of Taxi Driver is truly massacring the artistic license of Martin Scorsese, one of cinema's greatest artists, and taking the theological ideas out of 2001: A Space Odyssey that they didn't like turned one of the most thought provoking and beautiful films of all time into a worthless shell. This all goes back to the debate about art and the rights of the artist versus the rights of the people who want to partake in the art itself. It also goes much deeper than that because art is something that is grander than any one artist or any one person who is a consumer. Art is a universal and ambiguous tool that is something that can be used to express the feelings of one individual, express the feelings of an entire generation of people or, simply, present life and humanity at their most honest state. This is, ultimately, why Cleanflicks is actually doing a disservice to the artist themselves. The filmmakers whose movies have been through the Cleanflicks process are no longer relevant to their own creators which makes them revert to failures or works in progress. If art is being manipulated to be put into a form where it no longer reflects the view of its creator or is unable to present an honest portrayal of human existence then that is wrong no matter the reasoning behind it. A viewer has to honor the creative decisions of the person who made the movie they are watching and the majority of the modern film audience have no regard for anyone but themselves. By learning about realities that are different from our own through watching movies that feature violence and profanity we are not perverting our conscious as the founder of Cleanflicks states but rather bringing ourselves to a more enlightened state of being that helps us to better understand the world around us. This is why art is so much more important than people realize. Great art can be used to teach as it entertains while also presenting an accurate portrayal of the time in which it was made. Yes, films like Triumph of the Will and Birth of a Nation are two examples of morally reprehensible filmmaking but they present two very important times in the history of the world that can't be ignored and must be used as learning tools. Just imagine if Cleanflicks edited those films. What would we have to accurately reflect cinema at that point in time? The world can be an ugly and complicated place a lot of the time but trying to edit that side of life out of our entertainment won't make people or our situations any better. If we embrace that, yes, the world is a harsh place but also one that's full of beauty just waiting to be found in unexpected places then life suddenly becomes much more tolerable and much more enjoyable. This is ultimately why I feel that Cleanflicks is doing an injustice to cinema but I'd love to hear any arguments against my opinion in the comments since this topic has so many different sides to it and I've only presented one here.