British filmmaker Charlie Lyne, maker of 2014’s Beyond Clueless, is irritated with the British Board of Film Classification, and he found a clever way to express it. He submitted a movie for review with the title Paint Drying that lasts 607 minutes—a little more than 10 hours—consisting of “a single, unbroken shot of paint drying on a brick wall.”
Ordinarily at DM if we’re writing about a movie we haven’t seen, that’s something we’re probably not going to state in the post, or at the very least we’re going to soft-pedal it.
In this case I’m willing to admit, flat-out, that I have not personally watched all 607 minutes of Paint Drying to attest to its contents. It might be better than the latest installment of The Fast and the Furious franchise, but I have no idea. I haven’t seen that either.
Lyne’s beef with the BBFC, which has been in existence since 1912, isn’t limited to its tendency to censor—one might argue that classification doesn’t equal censorship per se, but in a capitalistic system, the difference between a PG-13 and an NC-17 rating is the difference between being a viable participant in the marketplace and not being one. Today there’s certain content that will never get included in a tentpole summer movie because an R rating by definition means that the audience permitted to see it would be smaller, and that has a self-censorship effect on filmmakers.
But that’s not all that Lyne is exercised about. The other thing that bugs him is that the BBFC charges filmmakers money to rate the movies, and that’s money a lot of independent filmmakers don’t have to spare. According to Lyne, the BBFC charges filmmakers nearly a thousand pounds to rate a 90-minute movie.
Late last year he started a Kickstarter to protest the BBFC. He raised £5,937, which permitted him to make his movie. As Lyne told the Independent, “People wouldn’t stand for it if the BBFC was censoring literature, music or any other art form, so why is film fair game? Paint Drying is my attempt to draw attention to that contradiction and I wanted to provoke a discussion about film censorship in the UK, which my project certainly has.”
Asked whether he has watched the film himself, Lyne blithely blurts, “Nah.”
On January 26 the BBFC released its rating for Paint Drying: “(U) no material likely to offend or harm.”
That led to this exultant tweet from Lyne:
£5,936 well spent. pic.twitter.com/DKfufcr4qk
— Charlie Lyne (@charlielyne) January 26, 2016
Previously on Dangerous Minds:
‘The Enemy Within’: Morrissey on Thatcher and British state censorship
They’re only movies: Moral panic, censorship & ‘video nasties’