I Start Counting!

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MichaelB
Joined: Fri Aug 11, 2006 6:20 pm
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I Start Counting!

#1 Post by MichaelB » Thu Mar 18, 2021 11:03 am

Full specs announced:
BFI Flipside presents release No. 042
I Start Counting!
A film by David Greene
Starring Jenny Agutter and Bryan Marshall
Music by Basil Kirchin


Released on Blu-ray for the first time in the UK on 19 April 2021
See/share the original trailer

Eerie, atmospheric and poignant with the peculiar pain of growing up, this 1969 long-unavailable and much sought after coming-of-age thriller boasts superb performances from its youthful leads, a sharp screenplay by Richard Harris (1960s TV series The Avengers), adapted from the haunting novel by Audrey Erskine Lindop, subtle camerawork from Alex Thomson (Excalibur) and an exceptional score by eccentric soundtrack maestro Basil Kirchin (The Abominable Dr. Phibes). Now restored, this bona fide cult film classic is finally released to watch at home, stacked with extras including new interviews with Jenny Agutter and Richard Harris; an interview about ambient music pioneer Basil Kirchin with Trunk Records’ Jonny Trunk, a video essay on the film, an audio commentary and complementary films from the BFI National Archive.

Growing up in a new-town tower block at the tail end of the 1960s isn’t easy for awkward adolescent schoolgirl Wynne (Jenny Agutter, An American Werewolf in London). She has a bad case of puppy love for her much older foster brother, George (Bryan Marshall, The Long Good Friday). And to add to her anguish, might he even be the crazed killer of teenage girls known to prowl the woods nearby?

Special features
• Feature newly scanned and restored in 2K from the 35mm Interpositive
• A Kickstart: Jenny Agutter Remembers I Start Counting! (2020, 20 mins): a new interview with the actress
• An Apprentice With a Master’s Ticket (2021, 40 mins): acclaimed screenwriter Richard Harris looks back over an eclectic career in television and film, ranging from The Avengers to A Touch of Frost
• Worlds Within Worlds (2021, 33 mins): Jonny Trunk, founder of cult label Trunk Records, revisits the life and art of ambient music pioneer Basil Kirchin
• I Start Building (1942-59, 25 mins): a selection of rare archive films recalling the ‘New Town’ dream
• Danger on Dartmoor (1980, 57 mins): plucky kids face peril in this full-length Children’s Film Foundation bonus feature, written by Audrey Erskine Lindop
• Don’t Be Like Brenda (1973, 8 mins): the perennial problem of teenage promiscuity is explored in this cautionary film designed for adolescent viewers
• Loss of Innocence: a video essay on I Start Counting! by filmmaker Chris O’Neill
• Audio commentary by film historian Samm Deighan
• Theatrical trailer
• Image gallery
• Newly commissioned sleeve artwork by Matt Needle
***FIRST PRESSING ONLY*** Illustrated booklet with an essay by Dr. Josephine Botting, a curator at the BFI National Archive, and biographies of David Greene, Jenny Agutter and Clare Sutcliffe by Jon Dear

Product details
RRP: £19.99 / Cat. no. BFIB1416 / 15
UK / 1969 / colour / 105 mins / English language, with optional hard-of-hearing subtitles / original aspect ratio 1.85:1 // BD50: 1080p, 24fps, DTS-HD Master Audio 1.0 (48kHz/24-bit)

jlnight
Joined: Tue Oct 22, 2013 10:49 am

Re: I Start Counting!

#2 Post by jlnight » Thu Mar 18, 2021 1:11 pm

One single screening on BBC1 on 28/05/82.

Danger on Dartmoor has turned up on Talking Pictures in recent times. Bryan Marshall also appears in Out and Rooms.

Bought the I Start Counting soundtrack but still haven't got around to listening to it.


Craig Wallace
Joined: Fri May 05, 2017 9:22 am

Re: I Start Counting!

#4 Post by Craig Wallace » Fri Apr 09, 2021 8:34 am

jlnight wrote:
Thu Mar 18, 2021 1:11 pm
One single screening on BBC1 on 28/05/82.
The film was also screened at least once on Sky Movies Gold in the early to mid 1990s. I still have a VHS recording of it but no precise date.

jlnight
Joined: Tue Oct 22, 2013 10:49 am

Re: I Start Counting!

#5 Post by jlnight » Sun Apr 11, 2021 5:04 am

You are right - it appears to have been shown between August 1993 to April 1995. I hope that narrows it down!

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therewillbeblus
Joined: Tue Dec 22, 2015 3:40 pm

Re: I Start Counting!

#6 Post by therewillbeblus » Fri Dec 17, 2021 8:24 pm

This film is a flat-out masterpiece, a thriller squarely-directed at the adolescent fluctuation of emotional dysregulation and fantastical reality-testing hinged on these erratic emotions. It's only a "thriller" because of the internal physiological thrills our surrogate Wynne (an extraordinary Jenny Agutter) experiences both uncontrollably yet also with command, a sublimation youth engage in to issue control over how these intrusive sensations emanate through our schematic representation. Ultimately Greene's willingness and courage to hold its coming-of-age themes in seemingly-exclusive, and polarized, spaces of transparent developmental normalcy and in the peripheral elisions of perversely haunting implications, is the film's most tremendous accomplishment- and pushed far beyond the limits we've come to expect.

I Start Counting! would make a terrific double feature with Paul Almond's Isabel from the year before, though this film should be viewed first as it's well-disguised as the more conventional horror study with a deceptively brighter sheen, which Almond's film will eviscerate all glow from once it's viewed in that context. The ethereal score -mimicking that of a child's soundbox- during a few surreal scenes feels all the most unsettling once you realize not only how at-odds we are from Wynne's delusional psychology, but that it's because she is just as divorced from herself, and if we take these insinuations deep under the iceberg of face-value (as the film seems to offer more of a platform than Isabel does to plant our feet, hence why that film informs on this one's enigmatic density), the rewards will be limitless.

A scene where the two main teenage girls are talking about sex plans in church between reciting prayers is heavily disturbing, but not because of that superficial juxtaposition of content. The hairs raise when Wynne nonchalantly responds, "I've been fixed" as an answer to how she won't get pregnant, followed by an expected oneupmanship in Corinne's declaration of how many times she's had sex. Both are not only lies, but reminiscent of the kind of make-believe play little girls engage in before puberty, here taken into an adult world of consequences neither child is aware of, and that will determine disastrous consequences for one of them. The subsequent brush against an adult with ephebophilia demonstrates how unprepared Wynne is for the experience her body is seeking, and at that moment- like so many other, subtler contrasts drawn in this film- we feel the split between her physical drives and emotional intelligence being torn with equal urgency by her mediating mind. How exhausting, explosive, and vivifying these incongruous sensations are when blossoming into daily, combustive storms. Kept inside, they would destroy anyone, so they must be externalized into a thriller with inventive resilience to survive and to achieve the ceiling of euphoria the body is demanding to receive.

It's frequently challenging to discern what's real from imaginary, as the objective design is a mask that's fatalistically subverted with supreme subjectivity- from actual illusions of action to sensory overload in sound design. The amplification of chewing at dinner, following the rejection she's suffered after finally making her play with unrestrained risk, is suggestive of similarly-raw agitations we've all felt in some form when our unsolicited vulnerabilities were deflated by another's rebuff in our youth). We even get some face-swapping on bodies, which is portrayed as less ambiguous but still as nebulously-stirring as Isabel in regard to the inferences on the principal's psychology! On the surface, Wynne is simultaneously frightened by and sexually drawn to an older man with whom she shares a non-genealogical family member, but while the film offers the possibility that her helpless magnetization and repulsion are sourced in different 'reasons', the dreamlike, unreliable progression also disconcertedly offers the option that perhaps they're motivated by the same impetus.

Does Wynne crave a stronger, capable protector, even if that 'capability' and 'strength' are rooted in immoral hedonism? Is she confusing what she seeks in naive rationalizations, or is she actually not as helpless or innocent in her intentions as we might think (her fabricated confession in her lying games with Corinne later in the film heavily implies, if not outright states, that she wants to be his protector!)? Does she crave danger as a way to cope with, or attempt to greet, the 'thrills' her body engulfs her in? For all the illusory material on display, this is an acutely accurate portrayal of how neurological development affects our sexual impulses in the nucleus accumbens at this very age. At one point, she demands to only speak with George after she's observed to be drunk by her family, controlling her environment where she can (it's significant she capitalizes on this moment with independent admittance, rather than cowering into a powerless role of getting 'caught' against her will- a cunningly empowering reversal of circumstance). Wynne slyly dominates her social context while also starkly placing herself in submissive positions- though this itself can be a creative means by which to fulfill her internal impotence with externalized force. What an appropriately-chaotic and lucidly-charged examination of the mess of psychosexual development in a terrifying social world of unknowability in self and others; activating self-discovery via faulty methods of security and sovereignty.
SpoilerShow
If the themes weren't already hammered on hard enough from the myopic perspective of Wynne's subconscious relationship with her milieu, her intimate witnessing of the real killer's mirrored self-driven delusional behavior is showstopping. After cornering her, he does not actualize his violent impulses, but rather lowers his own defenses, emasculated to relinquish self-preservation for determinist surrender to his own feelings for Wynne. Emotional hunger is apparently stronger than violent rage in men too at an age when both are in full force, and Wynne's exposure to seeing another person driven to the same heights of psychological acuity finally grants her sobriety to this as a problematic and shared trait, freeing her from the prison of bound egocentricity. What a statement: that this is what it takes to awaken a teenager from their skewed self-indulgent pubescent influencers!

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