‘Paint Drying’: the movie created in protest against film classification and censorship
In the United Kingdom, the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) is responsible for the classification and censorship of films released in the cinema and on physical media, and any director looking to showcase their work in the country must first receive a rating from the authority. While such a standard practice is often merely accepted by most directors, the filmmaker Charlie Shackleton once made a movie in protest against such censorship and the cost the BBFC charges to have a movie rated.
Shackleton had previously made the essay-style documentaries Beyond Clueless and Fear Itself, which explore the teen comedy and horror genres, respectively, before he released 2016’s Paint Drying, his critique of the BBFC. The London-born filmmaker first griped with the BBFC when he discovered that the version of David Fincher’s Fight Club that he saw had been heavily censored, thus reducing its sadistic graphic violence by six seconds.
The future director began to wonder whether any art ought to be censored, least of all the medium of film, especially in the relatively liberal artistic landscape of the United Kingdom. “After all, censorship was something I learned about in history lessons: a relic from the past, the preserve of dictators and despots,” Shackleton wrote in Vice in 2015. “In a society that baulked at the very suggestion of censoring literature, music, visual art, or theatre, why were movies fair game?”
In addition, Shackleton wanted to point out the exorbitant cost of having a film classified by the BBFC, showing that the average cost of an independent director could exceed £1,000. Beyond Clueless had cost £867.90 for a rating, which was around half of its distribution budget. But how might the director get back at the BBFC? Well, by forcing their examiners to watch a ridiculously long film about paint literally drying.
He shot around 14 hours’ worth of footage of white paint drying on a wall in an undisclosed location and began a Kickstarter campaign to decide how long the final runtime would be – dependent on how much money was raised. Now, the very idea of forcing someone to watch even an hour of paint drying just to give in an age rating is humorous. Still, by the time 686 backers raised £5,936, Paint Drying came out a rather generous 12 hours and 11 minutes, though this was reduced to 10 hours and 7 minutes after the Kickstarter fee and VAT were taken into account.
The final version of the film eventually arrived at the BBFC, coming in at 310GB in size, and the examiners decided to split their viewing session across two days given its ridiculous length; even Shackleton admitted that he had not watched his own work in full. On January 26th, 2016, the BBFC awarded Paint Drying a ‘U’ for ‘Universal’ rating, meaning that it contains “no material likely to offend or harm”.
Shackleton celebrated by tweeting that the £5936 raised to get his film classified was money “well spent”. He’d also admitted that even such a protest project was unlikely to get the BBFC to change their policies and costing principles. However, a consequence has been that Paint Drying is often brought up in conversation in the context of film censorship in general.
Paint Drying eventually got its first public screening at the Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane, Australia, between November 10th and November 29th, 2023. God bless anyone who managed to sit through it, let alone the poor BBFC examiners. Remarkably, though, Shackleton’s protest film is not the longest movie to have been rated by the BBFC, for the record goes to the 1971 French masterpiece Out 1, clocking in at an astonishing 12 hours and 55 minutes, which earned a 15 for “very strong language”.
Check out the teaser trailer for Charlie Shackleton’s Paint Drying below.