Messages from the future, precognition, the Butterfly Effect, the Grandfather Paradox, time loops, multiverses, wormholes... There seems no end to the variations on the time-traveling theme. Yet filmmakers were slow to recognize its dramatic potential. Despite several screen versions of Mark Twain’s novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889) and H.G. Well's novella The Time Machine (1895), and time travel being adopted as a recurring device in 1960s TV shows such as The Twilight Zone and Star Trek, it remained a marginal phenomenon on the big screen, chiefly confined to experimental or arthouse films (La Jetée, Je t'aime, je t'aime, Idaho Transfer). But the floodgates finally opened in the 1980s blockbuster era with The Terminator (1984) and Back to the Future (1985), mainstream entertainment that hit the sweet spot between science and fiction. Henceforth, time travel, bolstered by increasingly sophisticated special effects, would be a familiar element in Hollywood's SF arsenal.
This year, the Offscreen Film Festival is doing an entire strand on time travel movies, serving up not just crowd-pleasers such as Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, Looper and Interstellar, but some of the lesser-known and alternative examples of the genre, from rip-roaring B-movies such as Trancers (1984) to brain-scrambling cult favorites such as Timecrimes (2007) and Triangle (2009).
Here's an overview of the more than 40 films that they will be screening.
