Imagine your job required you to watch paint dry for 10 hours straight. Sounds like a nightmare, right? For a select few at the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC), this wasn’t just a metaphor for boredom – it was their actual, excruciating reality, thanks to one ingenious filmmaker.
Back in 2016, British filmmaker Charlie Shackleton decided to make a statement. His medium? A single, unbroken shot of white paint drying on a brick wall. And the runtime? A mind-numbing 607 minutes, or just over ten hours. He called it, quite simply, Paint Drying.
Now, why would anyone subject themselves, let alone others, to such an ordeal? Shackleton’s motive was brilliant in its simplicity and profound in its aim: he was protesting the BBFC’s classification fees. In the UK, every film released commercially, even independent ones, must be submitted to the BBFC for classification, and they charge per minute of footage.
For indie filmmakers, these fees can be a significant barrier. Shackleton, having successfully crowdfunded the exact amount needed for the BBFC’s fee for a 10-hour film, decided to turn their own system against them. He forced the censors to endure every single frame of his minimalist masterpiece, purely to get it classified.
Can you imagine being one of those poor souls? Sitting there, hour after hour, watching a wall. I’m picturing a room full of highly dedicated, slightly baffled professionals, perhaps armed with copious amounts of coffee and an existential dread previously unknown. They had to watch it, by law, to give it a rating.
And they did. Paint Drying was eventually classified with a ‘U’ rating, meaning ‘Universal’ – suitable for all audiences. No surprises there, unless you find the slow desiccation of acrylic paint particularly disturbing. The BBFC later confirmed they had indeed watched the entire film, describing it as ‘unsimulated, real-time footage of paint drying.’
This isn’t just a quirky anecdote; it’s a brilliant example of artistic protest. Shackleton’s film cleverly highlighted the financial burden on independent creators and questioned the very nature of film classification. It dared to ask: what is a film, and who gets to decide its worth or its cost?
So, the next time you hear someone say a movie is ‘like watching paint dry,’ you can tell them about the time it literally was. And that it was a powerful, albeit incredibly boring, act of defiance against a bureaucratic system. Bravo, Charlie Shackleton, for turning tedium into a triumphant statement!