At Deptford Film Club, we’re old enough to remember when arthouse movies were very serious, mannered pieces that made us feel a strange mix of antagonised, fascinated and tired. Maybe it was the greyish colour schemes or the clothes or the terrible dubbing. Maybe it was the Important Metaphors. What makes these films stand out from today’s movies is that they don’t look like adverts. Try Possession, a Euro divorce movie that slowly morphs into a body-horror flick….
An amazing sequence from the 1968 Argentinian film Hour of the Furnaces, one of the early films of the Third Cinema.
Uh, they don’t make them like they used to… it’s a live-action dog sexual harassment film from the 1930s!
I’ve recently been teaching English as a foreign language to students from Tunisia. One bit of grammar they loved was the past perfect. The flashback tense. For example, “When we got home last night, I realised that we had been burgled.”
The flashback is a standard thriller device; to start at the end and then jump straight back to the beginning of the story in the past…
