The BBFC and Film Classification

The BBFC is the company that categories all films that pass through England; they have certain guidelines that they have to abide to in order to categories each film. There are five main topics that they have too focus on, as well as a number of smaller topics. The five main topics are:

• Sex

• Violence

• Drugs

• Racism & Language

• Immatability Techniques

The BBFC made it clear that they do not create moral stance in the public, meaning that they do not create what the public think is acceptable, but they try to reflect societies morals as a whole.

Sex

The way the BBFC look at sex is depending on how it is contextually justified within the text. There are two different kinds of sex in a film, naturalized Nudity and sexualized nudity. Naturalized is when nudity is shown, but not in a sexual manner. Naturalized nudity can be shown in lower graded films like PG or 12. However, when the nudity starts to become sexual, or sexualized nudity, the film starts to move up the certificates.

Another topic within sex is sexual violence; this is referring to things like Rape. The way in which his is assessed is on how long the scene is and how it relates to the narrative of the text. The rape scene has to be shown in a evil light for it not to be cut from the film, lots of rape scenes do get cut from films.

Violence

This is categorized depending on the graphicness of the violence, for example, “Tom & Jerry” is a very violent cartoon, but it categories as U. However, when you look at films like “Saw” or “Hostel” the films move up the ranking due to the context of the violence and how graphic it is.

A subcategory within Violence is Weapons, the way that weapons are graded in films depends on how the weapon is portrayed and whether or not is is in the “goodie” or “badies” hands. Furthermore, what has to be accessed is whether the weapon is a common household item like a knife, that people have easy access too.

Drugs

Drugs are an easier thing to categorize. In lower graded films drugs are aloud to be talked about, but as soon as the film shows people using or creating drugs it starts to move up the certificates.

Racism and Language

Starting with Language, the way a film is catogorised based upon langague is the specificly what language is used and how frequently. Some words in the language are concidered much more offencive than others, meaing that use of these very offencive words make a film easy to categories.

if a film is catogorised purly on racisum the BBFC have to look at several things; is the Rasicum verbal or phyical? how offencive is it? and does it show racisum in a possitive manner. Most films that are based souly on a plot about racisum are usally of an 18 rating, this is because people under the age of 18 may not understand that the film is actually discouraging racisum rather than promoting it, two examples of this kind of film are 'This is England' and 'American History X'.

Immatatible Techniques

Another very important thing that the BBFC have to look at is immitabity techniques. This is referring to things shown in the text that people may copy. For example in lower graded films they look for child safety things that children may copy. In the higher categories they look at things like how the preparation of drugs is show. A very key topic in this is suicide techniques; they have to make sure the film doesn’t show how to commit suicide in a educational manner.

A.Snowden