Education news
Here are our popular website articles written by BBFC staff. Like the Case Studies they delve in to key issues, films, initiatives, historical moments and offer insight into how the BBFC has responded to different events and changes in the film and media landscape.
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Tough to Watch - Extreme Reality
20/08/2007
Early in the history of film, audiences were drawn to documentaries which promised to show the extremes of human experience - medical operations, attacks on animals and real life executions became popular even as mainstream cinema shied away from on-screen kisses. Ever since, such films have...
Game On
14/08/2007
Video games are an area of the BBFC's work that often results in confusion. People who don't play games often don't understand them and cannot fathom why they are so attractive to so many of the nation's teens and young adults. This lack of understanding has led to some video games (or even video...
Drawing Comparisons: The History of Manga and Classification
20/09/2006
The term ‘manga,’ meaning ‘irresponsible pictures', was first coined by Hokusai, the famous Japanese artist. The production of popular comic books and pictures of everyday life emerged in Japan early in the 19th Century and flourished into the 20th.
The Games We Play: Video Game Classification at the BBFC
15/08/2006
Games have often found themselves causing controversy and it isn’t only modern games like Grand Theft Auto that have done that. The first to upset the media (in this case over violence) was the 1976 title, Deathrace. A racing game bearing absolutely no relation to today’s sophisticated equivalents...
Sound Decision: The Da Vinci Code
25/06/2006
The answer is one related to semantics. The BBFC did suggest that the work would not necessarily receive a 12A if it maintained some strong sound effects, but it did not ask for any cuts to the film’s score or incidental music, as suggested by some reports.
War of the Worlds: Controversy and the 12A
03/11/2005
The classification awarded to a film by the BBFC can have an impact on success at the UK box office, a factor well known to distributors and filmmakers.
Bollywood & Sex - a BBFC Perspective
02/06/2005
Bollywood directors have recently made a pragmatic shift in their style of film-making, faced as they are with urban audiences on the Indian subcontinent grown increasingly blasé about the traditional no-go area of sex due to the plethora of western channels available on TV. Additionally Bollywood...
Video Nasties
19/05/2005
As VCRs became increasingly popular in the early 1980s, the market became saturated with titles, some of which had never previously been classified for theatrical release in the U.K., and others which contained material previously cut as a condition of classification.
Political & Religious Issues: A South Asian Perspective
14/05/2005
Films and videos that contain politically sensitive material or inflammatory references to religion that may cause problems within or between different communities in the UK may either be subjected to cuts or moved up the category scale or even, in very rare cases, be rejected.
Batman. We Rate Him.
01/05/2005
The Batman franchise was given a boost in 2006 with a prequel directed by Christopher Nolan (Memento, Insomnia). As with all would-be blockbusters, the classification awarded it by the BBFC plays a significant part in the film’s success at the Box Office in the UK. The film was submitted with a...