It was not a storm but a quiet administrative tremor: Wim Wenders has withdrawn his 1975 film 'The Wrong Move' from circulation over a topless scene involving a teenage actress. British censors, ever vigilant, have applauded the decision. But what does this say about the shifting sands of cultural conscience, and the uneasy relationship between retrospective ethics and historical context?
Let us first consider the film itself. 'The Wrong Move' was built on a script by Peter Handke, a director with a complicated past of his own. The topless scene, now deemed unacceptable, was filmed when the actress was 17. In 1975, this might have passed without comment. Today, it is a ticking bomb. Wenders, in his statement, calls it "a mistake" and acknowledges the need to live with the consequences of one's past choices.
But here is the rub: the film was not being re-released in cinemas. It was available on a streaming platform, the Criterion Channel, which had been offering it for years. The withdrawal is a pre-emptive strike, a gesture born of a new moral vigilance that demands artists police their own back catalogues. The British Board of Film Classification, which rated the film for its DVD release in 2020 after viewing it, now has the opportunity to commend this self-censorship.
This is not about defending indecency. The exploitation of minors is rightly condemned. But we must ask: at what point does a work become its sins? Wenders is not the first. Philip Roth's 'The Human Stain' was pulled from an audio edition because of a racial slur. 'Gone with the Wind' was temporarily withdrawn and then re-presented with contextualising material. Each case forces us to confront the difference between art that endorses and art that depicts.
Consider the cultural shift: where once we debated the artistic merit of a film or book, we now debate its moral safety. The very act of viewing becomes fraught with liability. The British censors, in applauding Wenders, are signalling that the guardians of taste have become guardians of a new kind of purity. This is not about protecting children from a 45-year-old film that few were likely to seek out. It is about sending a message: we are watching, and we are on the side of the right.
Yet there is a human cost. The actress, now in her late 60s, may or may not welcome this erasure. Perhaps the scene haunts her. Perhaps it was a footnote in a career that moved on. But the decision to withdraw the film is made by men in offices, not by the subject herself. We assume we know what power looks like, and we assume it looks like a director and a camera. But power is also the ability to render something invisible, to declare that its existence is too dangerous to permit.
What will future audiences make of this? They will not see the film, so they will not judge it. They will only know that it was removed. Censorship, however well-intentioned, creates a vacuum. And in a vacuum, the past becomes a puzzle with missing pieces. We might be better served by including a warning, by funding a documentary that contextualises the scene, by trusting the public to have nuanced reactions rather than protective ones.
In the end, Wenders has done the honourable thing by his own lights. But the applause from British censors leaves a sour taste. It feels too easy, too comfortable, a way of congratulating ourselves that we are better than the 1970s. But we are not better. We are just more afraid. And when fear becomes the primary lens for viewing art, we lose something vital: the messy, uncomfortable, ongoing conversation about what it means to be human.
So here is the real 'wrong move': not the film, but the idea that we can fix the past by deleting it. The true ethical act is not to hide the evidence but to reckon with it, to say 'this is what we were, and this is what we are now trying not to be.' That conversation is harder, more enduring, and ultimately more honest than any withdrawal.
