The other two films were little parables disguised as something more ordinary and gritty. In the first of these I watched, Visitations, a bank robber called Damo is released from prison and drives around Melbourne, visiting his old mates and trying to determine who dobbed him in to the cops. The film ends when the car crashes and everyone — Damo, together with all the possible traitors he’s collected along the way — dies. The last film, Autumn, Winter, is about an unhappy couple who find themselves alone in a country house that’s sinking into the mud. They eat, kiss, dance, sleep, argue, and mope around saying disconnected, arty things to each other. The camera dwells for long periods on the shifting leaves in the dark garden outside, the raindrops waiting to fall, while a Bach fugue plays so loudly it scorches the ears.

I watched all three films with a feeling of gathering anxiety, hoping to catch sight of a face I might recognise from my childhood — Abbie, for instance, or, better still, the face of my father as an extra in the background. But I didn’t. I saw no one I knew, and I grew so weary eventually, so drained sitting there in the dark, that I forgot what it was I was supposed to be doing. I felt scraped out, drifting mindlessly, but without peace. It was all I could do just to get to the final scene of Autumn, Winter where the house, with the sad couple still inside, finally disappears entirely, a bit clumsily, into the mud. Two bubbles float on the surface for a few seconds, then burst. Relieved, disappointed, dehydrated, I stumbled out onto Flinders Street, into the cold air. Life! Traffic! The twenty-first century!

It turned out I actually was sick, and I slept terribly that night, lurching through a swamp of garish dream-films: static sequences, bad acting, scenes that repeated themselves again and again, with slight variations. It was as if there were something poisonous about all those images, something almost radioactive that needed to be purged and sweated out. Those too-bright oranges and pinks and greens. The fluttering lines of static. All those dirty, sunburnt hippies. Or perhaps it was simply that I had gone down too far into the seventies, had seen too much or come up too quickly. Maybe films measure time — or dissolve it — in ways we don’t understand.