FILM CULTURE

Film Moments You Can’t Unsee Or Unthink

Some movies have a way of reshaping your perceptions and reactions forever

How many can you count? (Photo by Sergi Ferrete on Unsplash)

One elephant, two elephant, three elephant, four elephant… I’m counting seconds in my head. Softening butter in a basic holiday rental microwave oven, maybe. Or tracking a storm by the lag between a lightning bolt and thunderclap.

But somehow my brain has decided that I’m in a school darkroom in Scotland, calculating film exposures in Gregory’s Girl. I can’t remember the name of the character — it’s been over thirty years since I last saw the movie — but I can hear his voice counting along with me.

If you don’t put in the elephants, you don’t get real seconds.

I was reminded of this permanent rewiring of my thought processes in an exchange of comments with Christine D Richardson on her article about uncanny albino spacemen holding hamsters the other day, and how we now need to time ourselves having clicked on an article to make sure we don’t penalise the author under the 30-second rule.

Spookily enough, when doing a quick search on Google today for the relevant clip from the film, it came up with that original comment of mine as one of the top returns. Perhaps thereby cementing the concept even further into…