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Movies began with the Lumiere brothers
and the forward motion of a train

“Ladies and gentlemen, you are now gazing upon a photograph of the famous Black Diamond Express. In just a moment – a cataclysmic moment my friends, a moment without equal in the history of our times – you will see this train take life in a marvellous and most astounding manner. It will rush towards you, belching smoke and fire from its monstrous iron throat…”

That was J. Stuart Blackton, caricaturist turned travelling exhibitor of moving pictures, in New York circa 1897. He was introducing The Black Diamond Express, a short film of a train speeding towards the camera, which regularly made “women scream and men sit aghast.” It had been a similar story two years earlier, on the other side of the Atlantic. On 28 December 1895, in the Grand Café on the Boulevard des Capucines in Paris, the Lumière brothers showed a short film called L’arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat. Thrilled audiences reportedly ducked, screamed or ran out of the room. Even the poker-faced Maxim Gorky felt moved by this “train of shadows”: “It seems as though it will plunge into the darkness in which you sit, turning you into a ripped sack full of lacerated flesh and splintered bones.”

People loved the new phenomenon of moving pictures and they came in droves, wooed by movie magic and an “excitement bordering on terror.” Now, of course, all that “magic” nonsense has gone and Gorky, bless him, sounds like a 5-year-old child. We know that filmic trains won’t really run us over, and that it’s all an illusion, despite the CGI obsessives constantly striving to make the extraordinary look ordinary. I mean to say: did Peter Jackson’s dead-eyed CGI King Kong seem any more “real” than Willis O’Brien’s stop-frame monster in 1933? No. A film is only real in the way that memory is real. And images enter your memory not because they’re realistic, but because they’re memorable.

The original King Kong is as "real" as the
most recent version

Nowadays, film has been tamed. Movies are subjugated by constant hommages in popular entertainment like The Simpsons, and through videogames we can even replay the lives of certain movie characters, exorcising their onscreen dilemmas. But the main change is that we’re now totally in charge of the viewing process. If we’re not watching films in 5-minute bursts on tiny iPod screens, we’re on the sofa in the security of a home environment, clutching the all-powerful remote control. Cinematic images are at our beck and call. We can do anything we want with them.

So surely it’s time to wake up and move out of our comfort zone.

The digital age means freedom for film viewers, so let’s take advantage of the situation. We can now re-edit images, chop up films and make them do our bidding. And if this is to take liberties with so-called classics, who cares? It’s all fiction anyway. To paraphrase Roland Barthes, only the bourgeois text strives to control its own reading so that it can appear invariable as a solid, unalterable object. And to me that’s a good enough rationale for a reinvention. We should be able to retell and reinterpret any film we like, however we like. And we can start with that most subversive of acts: playing them backwards.

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Memento played with ideas of
backwards viewing

Of course, reverse footage is nothing new. Jean Cocteau used it to great effect in Orphée (1950), so did Mary Ellen Bute in the dream sequences of Finnegan’s Wake in 1966. Even back in the Grand Café, the Lumières were projecting their Destruction Of A Wall first forwards then backwards, with the audience gasping as the wall defied all logic and reassembled itself. (And they thought the train was unnerving.) Czech director Oldrich Lipský even went so far as to film his 1966 absurdist comedy, Happy End, entirely in reverse. It starts with the protagonist replacing his head after execution, and ends with him as a baby being pressed back into his mother's womb.

However, the point here is to view something backwards that wasn’t actually intended to be viewed that way. To do so with an entire feature would be insane, naturally, and liable to lose you friends. But start reversing iconic scenes and try not feeling a little thrill of subversion. Watch with renewed wonder as a naked Janet Leigh is resurrected by a shadowy angelic hand in Psycho. Gasp like a 19th-century Parisian as a possessed Linda Blair gets her just desserts and inhales thick green vomit.

It can be just as liberating reversing plotlines, rather than the footage itself. The Sixth Sense, for instance, becomes the story of a neurotic psychologist whose premonition of his own death sadly comes to pass; Back To The Future finally lives up to its name; and Raging Bull turns out to be a redemptive tale about a fat failure of a comedian who goes on a diet and makes it in boxing. And if you’ve ever wondered why Nicolas Cage is so excited as he fills his supermarket trolley with booze at the beginning of Leaving Las Vegas, it’s because he’s just recovered from a life-threatening illness, thanks to the miraculous healing powers of alcohol.

Reading a plot backwards can also expose the dullness of a film whose narrative is already reversed. Christopher Nolan’s Memento (2000) survives its volte-face and remains a haunting statement about memory. Gaspar Noé’s Irreversible (2002), though, is left thoroughly exposed in its true colours as a point-free excuse to feature a nine-minute rape and call a nightclub “Rectum”.

Watching films backwards is about going back to the beginning, in more ways than one. It’s about recapturing the sense of awe of those early audiences. So, I hear you ask, how exactly do you watch a film backwards?

Since the beginning of cinema, films have been in total control of how we view them. They’ve told us where to look, and for how long. Now, though, thanks to digital technology, we’re free to watch them any way we like. We can reverse them, speed them up, change their chronology, slow them down… And that’s just with the remote control.

This is progress, of course, which can only be good. After all, it means our options are open. However, it also means that because we’ve taken ownership of movies, we’ve started to take them for granted. We even know how they’re made, thanks to the obligatory behind-the-scenes DVD extras, along with endless commentaries, deleted footage and, inevitably, the Director’s Cut. To quote David Lynch: “When you know too much, you can never see a film the same way again. All the magic leaks out.” And that’s the problem. The magic’s gone and the spell has been broken.

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F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu -
a slapstick comedy?

If films are now ours then let’s take them and do what we like with them; and, in doing so, regain that feeling of wonder that those early audiences had. In his lush hymn to cinema, Imitations Of Life (2003), Canadian Michael Hoolboom does exactly that, juxtaposing home movies with everything from Citizen Kane to The Terminator, layering iconic images over unknown images, as if tapping into an alternative world of the imagination. It’s a very modern vision of the way film exists in our heads, making the familiar seem unfamiliar. And that’s the key.

Watch a film backwards, and the same thing will happen. It’s an odd thing to do, of course. But is reversed footage really any more “unreal” than, say, slow-motion? In the silent era, cameras were hand-cranked so speeds were variable, depending on what the scene required. The great F.W. Murnau believed that changing the speed of a film, whether slower or faster, actually evoked the supernatural. Admittedly, this can make some of his films look a little strange. Witness the hideous Count Orlok in Nosferatu (1922), rushing through an eerie moonlit forest in his carriage, like something out of the Keystone Cops.

Douglas Gordon’s Turner Prize-winning 24-Hour Psycho (1996), though, saw Hitchcock’s masterpiece transformed into something completely new. Projected onto a giant screen at a mind-numbingly slow two frames a second, the infamous shower scene crawled by, almost imperceptibly, for a chilling 40 minutes. It was its very familiarity that gave the piece its malevolence. Gordon followed it up ten years later with One-Minute Psycho, a colour remake shown at breakneck speed, which wasn’t quite as effective.

By now, I think you’ve got the picture. Watching a film backwards is just one of many ways to start seeing films differently. Some psychotherapists even use it as a treatment for emotional disorders. Patients are asked to visualize a childhood trauma being played out on a cinema screen. They then imagine climbing into the screen – the premise of Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose Of Cairo – to connect with their younger selves. Once inside the scenario, they forcibly run the movie in reverse, thereby “undoing the damage” and facilitating a cure.

You can look at films any way you like, and it doesn’t end at the remote. Stop following the story and start looking for brand names, for instance. You think you’re watching Marilyn Monroe being cute and dunking chips in champagne in Billy Wilder’s Seven Year Itch (1955), when really you’re being surreptitiously sold Bell Potato Chips by a ghost. Cinema, it seems, is still a “kingdom of shadows”.

And so, how do you watch a film backwards? The answer is with an open mind. And why would you bother? Because you can. Whichever way you look at it, it’s time for one thing. Action.