A WOMAN sits at a table, a pen and a sheet of paper in front of her. Out of shot, a man’s voice begins to dictate instructions, which she notes down somewhat sulkily. “Replace ‘my tits’ with ‘my breasts’” he begins. “Remove ‘they could fondle and play with them.’” The injunctions become increasingly bizarre and hilarious. Demands to tone down or remove sexual language are soon joined by embargos on religions, political parties and historical events.

“Do not spread your legs” (2011), Rabih Mroue’s short video, provides a tragicomic window onto Lebanon’s struggles with censorship. Each of the changes requested by the unseen man in the film was taken from a real list of alterations and cuts demanded by censors after Mr Mroue submitted a play script for approval. In accordance with a legislative decree issued in 1977, all theatrical scripts must be submitted to the Bureau of Censorship for review, and they must receive official clearance before they can be staged in public. A law from 1947 requires that television programmes and films also pass the censors’ muster. Flouting the decree can result in a fine, bans and temporary or permanent closure for the institutions involved.

Officially, the bureau is entrusted with banning any work deemed to disrespect religion, disturb the public order, incite sectarianism, offend public sensitivities or insult the dignity of the head of state. They add their own bugbears to that list. Sexually graphic scenes, deemed “immoral”, often end up on the cutting-room floor, as do references to local political parties, explorations of the Lebanese civil war, or anything with a connection to Israel (a more logical boycott given that the two countries have officially been at war since 1948, with periodic outbreaks of fighting since then). As with most censorship, enforcement is inconsistent and unpredictable.

Public awareness of the state’s cultural interference improved in 2012 when March, a local NGO, launched the Virtual Museum of Censorship. By scouring old newspapers and using crowd-sourcing, March was able to create an online database that lists complete or partial bans on books, films, music or TV shows. It is the first public record of censorship, dating back to the 1940s, and it provides valuable insight into the shifting concerns and priorities of the Lebanese state. The data indicate that spikes in censorship usually coincide with political upheaval (see chart), and that censorship has been climbing steadily (though Gino Raidy, vice-president of March, admits that the data-gathering approach means that older examples may have been missed).

From 1950, when censorship starts to be practised regularly, until 1968, most bans relate to material linked to Israel or Judaism, reflecting tense Lebanese-Israeli relations in the wake of the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. Sometimes the boycott extended to artists with no Israeli or Zionist affiliations. “The Milkman” (1950), a slapstick comedy, was banned in Lebanon due to the Jewish origins of Jerry Lewis, the film’s American star.

From 1968 to 1975, amid rising tensions in the run-up to the civil war, the government interfered with works on political and religious grounds. In 1968, Issam Mahfouz’s play “The Dictator”, about a mentally disturbed tyrant who believes himself humanity’s saviour, unsurprisingly fell afoul of censors. Sadeq Jalal Al Azm was arrested in 1970, accused of inciting sectarianism with his book “The Critique of Religious Thought”.

Unsurprisingly, censors clamped down further during the 15 years of conflict. Mr Raidy speculates that censorship would have been more prevalent during this period had there been a stable government to enforce it. Amid the chaos of the war, which saw leaders assassinated and rival governments claiming legitimacy, artists were more likely to be kidnapped than subjected to a state ban, a situation likely to have exacerbated self-censorship. Actors Antoine Kerbage and Elias Elias were both kidnapped during this period, according to March’s data.

While the Taif Agreement and the official end of the civil war in 1990 brought an uneasy peace, censors waged a new battle on culture. Mr Raidy attributes the enormous increase to the state’s emphasis on promoting sectarian unity by preventing discussion of the war. Randa Shahal Al Sabbagh’s film “A Civilised People” (1999), for example, was censored for its depiction of a loving relationship between a Muslim militiaman and a Christian maid during the conflict. “Maybe you could talk about these things during the war, but when the war stopped, you can’t talk about the Palestinian question, you can’t talk about Sunni-Shia relations,” Mr Raidy says.

During the late 1990s, censors sought to stamp out rock and metal music. Dozens of bands, including Black Sabbath and Nirvana, were banned after the Catholic church deemed their music Satanic. The haphazard way these bans were implemented make it hard to pinpoint exact dates, but for several years metal fans were at risk of arrest simply for wearing a band’s T-shirt.

Another significant spike in 2000 marks the year that Israeli forces withdrew from south Lebanon after an occupation lasting 18 years. Yet this period saw censors ban material deemed religiously and politically sensitive and works deemed “immoral” even more than works linked to Israel, which suggests that at times of heightened political tensions censors crack down across the board.

The assassination of Rafik Hariri, a former prime minister, and the withdrawal of occupying Syrian troops in 2005 marked the beginning of another steep climb in censorship. The period until 2012 was marked by a series of car bombings and assassinations—and an increase in the frequency of religiously and politically motivated censorship. Increasingly, bans were issued for reasons that appear arbitrary, if not absurd. Lady Gaga’s album “Born This Way” was banned in 2011 on the basis that it is “offensive to Christianity”, due to a track entitled “Judas”. That year the children’s film “Puss in Boots” was banned until the name was changed to “Cat in Boots”.

Sadly, circumstances are not improving. Lebanon’s turbulent history remains particularly taboo, as do Israeli relations (“Wonder Woman” was banned in May 2017, thanks to Gal Gadot, its Israeli star). While censors are increasingly permissive of films with sexual content, growing support for gay and transgender rights has rattled religious authorities and led to a punitive increase in the number of cultural productions banned for portraying non-conforming relationships in a positive light.

Since the onset of the war in Syria and the election of a president in 2016 after a two-year vacuum, Mr Raidy says that censorship has become more prevalent. Not only is it more frequent, but March’s data reveals that the causes of censorship are more diverse than ever before. In the run-up to elections, scheduled for May after a delay of five years, the crackdown is only likely to intensify.