Fed up with mandatory classification in the UK and the prohibitive expense to hopeful filmmakers applying for certification, one young filmmaker Charlie Lyme came up with a rather imaginative (and torturous) way to protest the strict censorship laws, by filming a ten-hour epic… of paint drying.
Today's the day: two BBFC examiners are currently watching 'Paint Drying'. AMA: https://t.co/weVqKBnZzf pic.twitter.com/tTsS15176P — Charlie Lyne (@charlielyne) January 25, 2016
Because BBFC classification is mandatory for all films set for public release, by submitting the film to the board for approval, Lyne effectively sentenced two employees to sit through the ten hours, seven minutes of footage over a period of two days.
“They're only allowed to watch a maximum of 9 hours of material per day,” Lyne explains in his Reddit AMA about his submission.
Why such an arbitrary number of minutes? Well that was born out of Lyme’s initial Kickstarter crowd funding campaign for the project, which raised £5,936 towards the cost of submitting the mind-numbing epic. With the BBFC charging all submissions at a cost of £8.51 per minute, that was the amount of time that the campaign bought him.
And it worked. Paint Drying did indeed receive a “U” certification which means it contained "no material likely to offend or harm."
Lyne argued on his Kickstarter page that the BBFC is archaic and outdated having originally been “established in 1912 to ensure films remained free of 'indecorous dancing', 'references to controversial politics' and 'men and women in bed together' amongst other perceived indiscretions.”
Perceiving these laws as outdated and ludicrous, Paint Drying was Lyne’s way of giving the board a taste of their own medicine.
It’s not just in the UK that censorship can often be a major roadblock for film release though – it’s an issue that’s divided the Australian film industry for years too.
UK film maker Charlie Lyne (Source: charlielyne.com) Source: Twitter
In 1989, David Stratton lambasted Australian censors on air on The Movie Show for giving Spike Lee’s acclaimed Do the Right Thing an R-rating.
“I'm also mad about the R-rating given the film by the film censors here, a rating given I believe solely on the basis of its language,” he said.
“Come you guys, are you kidding! Giving such a good film as this an R means really limiting its audience, it's a lousy, lousy decision.”
Former co-host Margaret Pomeranz has also been a passionate campaigner against knee-jerk censorship many times in the past, protesting the banning of controversial French film Baise Moi and 2002 film Ken Park by the Australian Office of Film and Literature Classification (OFLC). She has encouraged viewers to write to the Attorney General about their rights to see what they want.
The terms by which a film is classified or even ‘Refused Classification’ can seem somewhat fickle to the untrained eye.
It’s an issue that Jeff Sparrow explored in his 2012 book Money Shot, which focused specifically on censorship in pornography and saw him undertake training with the OFLC to try and establish what exactly constitutes an RC rating.
Sparrow found that real sex (as opposed to simulated acts) would earn an X rating, but if those same sex scenes included violence, ''sexually assaultive language'' or ''fetishes”, they were refused classification. When it’s technically illegal for anyone in Australia to sell X-rated films (although they’re legal to buy and watch) and therefore sex shops are already breaking the law by selling them, there’s really no incentive for them not to sell RC films too, rendering the whole system rather pointless.
With the internet meaning that anyone can override local censorship laws to effectively view whatever content they like from overseas, it does raise questions about the increasing redundancy of local classification boards.
The BBFC responded to the interest in this particular film by Lyne, in a press release via Mashable they said "The BBFC will classify the film as it would any other submission.”
“With regards to the motives behind making the film (as a protest against censorship and fees for classification), the BBFC was set up in 1912 by the film industry itself, as an independent body to bring a degree of uniformity to the classification of film nationally.”
As to whether Lyne can actually handle a taste of his own medicine? Apparently not, according to his Reddit AMA thread. Lyne said "To my great shame, I have not watched the film in its entirety."
Charlie Lyne's response on a Reddit thread (Source: Reddit) Source: Reddit
