Learning on ScreenBBFC: Learning from the Past
T.P O’Connor was born in Athlone, Ireland in 1848 and was a journalist in Dublin and London. On his death in 1929 he was ‘Father of the House’ of Commons, a title reserved for the longest-serving Member of Parliament at any given time. When appointed President of the BBFC, one of his first tasks was to give evidence to the Cinema Commission of Inquiry, set up by the National Council of Public Morals in 1916. He summarised the BBFC’s Policy by listing forty-three examples of things which had been cut from films over the previous three years.
Cuts were made to ‘indecorous, ambiguous and irreverent titles and subtitles’; ‘drunken scenes carried to excess’; ‘the modus operandi of criminals’; ‘cruelty to young infants and excessive cruelty and torture to adults, especially women’; ‘unnecessary exhibition of under-clothing’; ‘offensive vulgarity, and impropriety in conduct and dress’. The list goes on to cover controversial politics, vitriol, the King and officers and colonies, depictions of the figure of Christ, realistic war fear, strangulation, pregnancy, profuse bleeding, opium use, and problems like eugenics, contraception and ‘race suicide’ (the reduction in an indigenous community whereby a racial group’s birth rate falls below its death rate).
Two things are clear from this list: first the majestic language of early censorship, and second some potentially outmoded concerns. However there are similarities between the concerns then and modern debate and discussion around the role of classification.
BBFC screening room
Today the BBFC practices transparency in its decisions and tests them regularly with the public. In contrast to the early days of the BBFC, a key principle of today’s BBFC is that adults should be free to choose what they watch within the law. Many of the old concerns about propriety and appropriateness of complicated, distasteful or difficult themes would, if in line with the Human Rights Act and other laws, would cease to hold relevance, especially at the 18 category.
Other concerns however, such as nudity, sex, swearing, drugs, violence, gore, weapons, criminal and dangerous imitable activities, remain on the modern classification agenda. These are now handled by appropriate age classification and clear advice for consumers about what those films contain. There are also new, more modern preoccupations, such as a desire from the public for the BBFC to be mindful of discriminatory language, themes or behaviour, and the treatment of themes like bullying, especially in works aimed at children.
The BBFC may have moved away from removing entirely references to venereal disease or birth control in educational works, but we still have to take into account the balancing act between what parents tell us they are happy for their children and teenagers to watch, even in the name of education, and what messages are useful and beneficial to those groups if treated appropriately.
The same is true of the BBFC’s own education offering. By tailoring in-house seminars and school visits to suit the age-groups of those involved, the BBFC can demonstrate the classification process and key concerns, such as violence and threat, to children of all ages. When speaking to older age groups we often contextualise the work of the BBFC through history. Similarly academics researching BBFC files often draw parallels between film classification and wider historical issues, in particular the public’s attitudes towards harm and appropriate viewing. Films themselves are informed by history in both their making and their reception and so the work of the BBFC continues to focus on balancing these to accommodate the context of a work and the way it will be received by modern audiences.
Lucy Brett
BBFC Education
See also the Viewfinder reviews of related books and DVDs:
- A Clockwork Orange
- The Devils
- Film and Video Censorship in Modern Britain
- Shogun Assassin
- Straw Dogs
