The Many Faces of Jesus
[c] Thorsen won a partial legal victory in 1989, when a Danish court overturned the government's determination that The Many Faces of Jesus violated the moral rights of the authors of the canonical gospels, but declined to regrant the funding.
In the United States, a long-running hoax emerged falsely claiming that a movie similar to The Many Faces was in production, which has endured as a chain letter for 40 years[update].
Behrendt declined to fund Thorsen's plans, but Fredholm authorized a grant of 600,000 kr., at the same time acknowledging that the film was poised to be "blasphemous, pornographic, sadistic, obscene, and poetic".
[16] In one scene, Jesus was to strip in the presence of a group of prostitutes and chant "Prophet save us, God Hare Krishna, Hallelujah, Red Front, Heil Hitler".
[8] Previous artists like Luis Buñuel and Pier Paolo Pasolini had depicted Jesus in film in provocative manners, but Thorsen deliberately courted controversy and criticism.
[17] Denmark and France's decisions quickly led to both domestic and international controversy, exacerbated by media coverage that included Thorsen astride a rocket, which he said Jesus' penis would match in size in the film.
[21] The Danish ambassador's residence in Rome was attacked with Molotov cocktails on 28 August,[22] while the embassy in Madrid [da] received bomb threats around the same time.
The leftist newspaper L'Humanité condemned the decision as setting a "grave precedent" for suppressing freedom of expression at the whims of pressure groups.
Under Poul Hartling's Venstre government, Justice Minister Nathalie Lind vowed to block any further efforts at producing the film in the absence of such a reform.
[29] In 1976, however, the Danish Ministry of Culture ruled the project to be against the moral rights of the apostles Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, overruling the DFI.
Conservative activist Mary Whitehouse and the National Viewers' and Listeners' Association (NVALA) strongly objected both to the notion of the film and to Thorsen's presence in the country.
[37] Prime Minister James Callaghan said that Thorsen would be "a most unwelcome and undesirable visitor to these shores";[38] NVALA members wrote letters to Queen Elizabeth II, who through a spokesman responded that the planned film was "obnoxious",[7] an unusual comment on a matter of public debate.
[48] Member of Parliament Ivan Lawrence sought to have the film banned outright; Home Secretary Merlyn Rees said that this was not within the office's power, but expressed openness to denying Thorsen entry.
[49] Thorsen countered that he had a right to enter the United Kingdom as a citizen of a European Economic Community (EEC) country,[50] a point which was debated in legal circles for several months.
Rees explained, to cheers in Parliament, that the action was "on the grounds that his exclusion was conducive to the public good",[51] an exception to EEC freedom of movement rules.
[51] Whitehouse's biographers Michael Tracey and David Morrison describe the affair as "one of the few occasions for a very long time when there had been a massive and public consensus on a moral issue".
[54] In August 1977, U.S. media reported that David Grant, a British producer of pornographic films, had facilitated a deal to publish the screenplay as a book in the United States, with a US$600,000 advance going to Thorsen.
[68] Thorsen went through various rounds of litigation with the DFI and the Ministry of Culture over the course of 11 years, centering on the decision that the screenplay violated the apostles' moral rights.
A number of Danish cultural figures testified on Thorsen's behalf, including a young Lars von Trier, who was a fan of Quiet Days in Clichy.
The state argued that the work was blasphemous and pornographic and that the DFI members had approved it against their chairman's wishes to get a legal position, in some cases without having read the screenplay.
[8] On 10 October 1989, after a five-week trial,[69] the court ruled that Thorsen had not violated the apostles' moral rights, but found the Ministry of Culture not liable and refused to reinstate the grant.
Critic Morten Piil wrote that "This Thorsen provocation, especially the erotic component, is in 1992 hopelessly past its sell-by date, and what remains is a clumsy, slow-moving allegory full of old effects and shabby preachments".
