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.
