Nik lives in Essex, UK and works in London as the editor of MacUser magazine. The posts and comments on this site do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions of values of his employers.
send an email // view profile
One of the RSS feeds I subscribe to is the BBCF log of film classifications. It gives you a heads-up on films heading this way, and a brief run down of why the board decided they should be suitable for certain types of viewer.
The site also has a run down of stats going right back to 1914: that’s 92 years of British film history full of quirky, interesting facts. Like, for example, the BBFC only classified 7 films in 1920, but at the turn of the next decade went from scrutinising 68 in 1930 to a massive 1,308 in 1931.
Its busiest year was 1951 when it classified 1,567 films, after which British cinema releases went into a long, slow decline, going as low as 344 in 1987. That’s not 344 British films: it’s 344 films total - from all around the world - classified for cinema exhibition. The graph below shows the number of films released in British cinemas and the number to which the BBFC made cuts.
Those stats are most interesting, though, when you look at the number that have been cut as a percentage of of the total number released. The most lenient year of recent times was 2004, when five films - 0.9% of the total number released - were snipped. So far in 2006, of the 135 films assessed to date, 1.5% - two films - have been censored.
That’s very lenient when you compare it to the rash of puritanical censorship in the fifties, early sixties and mid seventies. In the latter it reached its peak with over a third of all films released in 1974 (240 out of 708) requiring some cuts before being shown in public.
Related posts:
- Brief Encounter at the National Theatre
The National Theatre did a special Valentines screening of Brief Encounter last night. It was a chilly outdoor showing, projected onto the wall of... - Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
We booked tickets to see Charlie and the Chocolate Factory at the Imax last night. I'd not been there since I was sitting through a... - Narnia
We went to the cinema last night, for The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe and came home disappointed. I'd read...
One Response to “Censorship”
Leave a Reply
I think I can throw some light on this sudden upsurge in censorship Nik.
It’s all to do with the rather bizzare 2004 amendments to The Sexual Offences Act.
In a nutshell the government redefined the definition of the word ‘child’ from 16 to 18. This has massive implications on people in general, for example an 18 year old looking at sexual pictures of a 17 year old (sexual can mean a girl in a bikini) is now technically a paedophile - however it is perfectly legal for them to have consensual sex.
But it gets worse than that.
The BBFC have had to trawl through old movies where 16 and 17 year olds could now be deemed to include classified and illegal scenes that were perfectly legal 18 months ago. The new law is retrospective and applies to all images, regardless of when they first came into circulation.
You can read more here..
• Posted at 10:17 pm on April 16th, 2006 by Kev.http://www.melonfarmers.co.uk/argcsoff.htm