Quote:
Originally Posted by Nosferatu@Cult Labs  From my perspective, the BBFC have told a distributor what material would be acceptable for a 12A certificate and what would be permitted for a 15. If the distributor decides to leave the film as it is and have it released with a 15 certificate, all the BBFC have done is advised about classification, not forced any cuts to be made. If the distributor chooses to make changes to the film in order to secure a lower certificate (and therefore a larger audience), the censoring has been done by the distributor and not the BBFC, who have merely classified the film. |
That is exactly the point I was hinting at. Category cuts mean that the film could have been certified uncut, they are not films censored by the BBFC but are cut by the distributor for commercial reasons.
Of the 5 films that had compulsory cuts three would appear to be because they breach law. Such laws can only be changed by government, the BBFC cannot just choose to ignore them. We could have a debate about whether animal cruelty or explicit representation of child sex abuse should be legal or not but that has nothing whatsoever to do with the bbfc.
So in effect, of the films listed by Melonfarmers, only two have compulsory cuts that are a matter of taste. That is two too many, and particularly for Soulmate difficult to understand.
Perhaps the Melonfarmers list is incomplete, but I can't see how to sort the BBFC's database to see just how prevalent the problem is (I imagine that a bigger proportion of the porn submitted to the BBFC is probably subject to compulsory cuts). From the ire of some in this thread it must be a much bigger problem than I think.