Spain abolishes film script censorship

By Henry Giniger

* N.Y. Times Service

MADRID Abolition of censorship for scripts of Spanish motion pictures has just been announced and it appears to be part of the trend that is gradually making Spain less different from the rest of Western Europe in culture as well as in politics.

But just as there is resistance to political change by conservatives who used to proclaim that "Spain is different," the liberalization noted in the cinema, the theater and the press, notably, in the treatment of sexual matters, is not making everyone happy here. The Roman Catholic Church, for one, has been particularly critical.

The cinema and the theater have been the last fields where prior censorship has been exercised. It was abolished for the press eight years ago and is applied to books only in a very limited way. The recent decision to lift the requirement that a movie script had to be submitted to official review before shooting could start was greeted with great satisfaction in the industry. Now the government is under stronger pressure than ever to take the same step for

plays and is expected to yield soon.

But like opposition groups that have daily grown more aggressive in testing and widening the limits of political freedom in Spain, the theater, the cinema and the press have for several months been taking matters into their own hands. As far as moral and political standards are concerned, they have found more official tolerance than ever before in the last 40 years.

Two plays on homosexual themes, one of them the Matt Crowley work, "The Boys in the Band," are playing to packed houses. Bertold Brecht's "The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui," on the theme of Nazism and dictatorship, is one of Madrid's biggest hits despite some threats from extreme right groups.

A number of films that would not have been shown here a year ago, like "Midnight Cowboy" and "Clockwork Orange," have been allowed in with favorable reception by critics and the public. Movies and plays are showing more naked flesh than ever before.

So are magazines, a number of which have experienced a spectacular rise in sales. Wary of official disapproval and the still relatively rigid

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moral climate here, most of the magazines adopt the "Playboy" style without removing all the clothes. When one does, it is usually sold out or else seized on the ground of being "offensive to good customs."

The question of "destape," uncovering of the body, has become a major issue. The church's Commission for the Doctrine of the Faith recently issued a warning against "moral deterioration" in the movies, the theater and in the press.