I Start Counting

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David Greene’s belatedly en vogue film I Start Counting (1969) isn’t so much a coming of age picture as it is a meditation on the role that imagination and fantasy play in one’s first real romantic love. Labeling I Start Counting as a coming of age narrative makes some sense since, by the film’s conclusion, Wynne (Jenny Agutter) has dispensed with most of her naively conceived notions of sex and romance. But I Start Counting never addresses Wynne’s reckoning with the realities that snuff out her fantasies.

Greene’s approach really puts Wynne’s “crush” on her foster brother George (Bryan Marshall) at the forefront of the film. The main concern of I Start Counting are the ramifications of Wynne’s commitment to her fantasy of a sexually romantic relationship with George. The film uses the backdrop of the prowling serial killer (Simon Ward) as a means to explore the darker side of Wynne’s obsession. She suspects that George may be the murderer and Greene weaves little dream sequences of murder and intimacy flawlessly into the more concrete world of the narrative.

Clearly I Start Counting, for all of its “kitchen sink” trappings, is a film of subjectivity. The blood on George’s sweater is sexually arousing for its danger and the possibility it suggests to aid George in eluding the police. At the same time those blood stains rhyme visually with Christ’s stigmata which offers another violent yet erotic dimension to Wynne’s fantasies as the lone Catholic in her foster family. I Start Counting is brimming with these types of cinematographic details that, by design, lock the spectator into Wynne’s perspective.

Curiously enough it is these details which perpetuate the constant atmosphere of potential violence that makes I Start Counting so unsettling. These details have no direct association with the serial killer subplot though they do draw on the suggestion of that threat to be affecting. Primarily the sense of danger in I Start Counting comes in the form of the male gaze and its direct link to several key POV shots. Greene makes it explicit that Wynne is aware of this gaze but opts to cope via applied ignorance. Of course the dangers here stem from the tradition of female virtue being threatened while the audience looks on, savoring the schadenfreude.

The eerie dreaminess and slow burning tension of I Start Counting align it, with regards to genre, more closely to the horror film than either the melodrama or the thriller. A direct aesthetic link can easily be drawn from Seth Holt’s film Scream Of Fear (1961) to I Start Counting to Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man (1973). The village setting of these films is just as essential as the nods to the surreal and the focus on building tensions. In a village out in the countryside isolation and the potential for buried secrets and ancient magical rites flood the imagination of characters and viewers alike.

I Start Counting addresses its setting directly with a plot thread involving a development company coming to demolish entire city blocks to make way for projects which includes the demolition of Wynne’s beloved childhood home (a central location in the film). As “progress” finds its way to Wynne’s village the landscape becomes one of derelict buildings and construction sites. Greene correlates the urbanization of the village with Wynne’s own loss of innocence; making the subtext literal in the visual sense.

I Start Counting is far more complex and affecting than it first appears. With its themes of sexuality, murder and urbanization it’s clear why now, after so many decades, the film has found new life. It’s almost hard to believe that I Start Counting wasn’t the same kind of instant cult classic that The Wicker Man was and that it took a boutique home video label to revive this film’s reputation. But thank God that they did.