Cecilia Cenciarelli

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L'Atalante

Growing up in a provincial Italian town in the 1980s there was only one way to discover cinema: you would need a 4 pack of 4–hour blank VHS tape (8 hours in LP mode), and never miss Fuori Orario (named for the Italian title of Scorsese's After Hours), an all-night film feast curated and introduced – always out of sync – by critic Enrico Ghezzi. In the morning, you'd harvest Ozu, Tarkovsky, Wajda, Buñuel, Ghatak, Tati, Renoir in their original language. The show rarely began on time, so the tape often ended before the last film was over, but of course it didn't matter. Fuori Orario's opening theme was 'Because the Night’ sung by Patti Smith and images were edited to the music: what film was that? There was a man swimming underwater; then a woman, also underwater, dressed in white; then their images superimposed… I was obsessed by L'Atalante even before watching it.