The Terror and the Time (1978)
There's a particular kind of unease that settles in when you're watching a British-produced documentary from 1978 attempt to reckon with the brutal machinery of British colonialism. That unease never fully leaves you during Rupert Roonaraine's The Terror and the Time, and honestly, I'm not sure it's meant to. Whether that discomfort is by design or simply an unavoidable consequence of the film's inherent contradictions, it makes for a genuinely strange and difficult viewing experience.
The first thing that hits you is the presentation itself. This thing looks and feels like something unearthed from the deepest shelf of a broadcasting archive, grainy and raw, with a narrator whose clipped, mid-century English accent immediately plants you in a very specific era of television documentary-making. There's a sombre, almost clinical atmosphere to it all, a kind of detached authority that was clearly the house style of the period. Whether that aesthetic is intentional or just the honest byproduct of age and budget, it gives the whole thing a time-capsule quality that's genuinely fascinating before a single argument has even been made.
And the arguments, when they come, are serious ones. The subject matter here is the brutal history of colonialism and slavery in Guyana, known at the time as British Guiana, and there's no pretending that's comfortable territory for any film, let alone one made under British auspices in the late seventies. My suspicions were up immediately. You can't watch something like this without asking who made it, who funded it, and whose comfort they were trying to protect. And those suspicions aren't entirely unfounded. There are moments where the framing feels paternalistic, where the horrors of empire are handled with a certain gentleness that sits uneasily against the weight of what's actually being described. When you're dealing with the systematic destruction of human lives and communities, softening the blow feels like a choice worth questioning.
That said, and this is where my feelings get genuinely mixed, the film still lands with real force in places. The archival material is stark, and the recounting of what was inflicted on the population of Guyana doesn't always pull its punches the way you might fear. More than anything, I came away having learned a huge amount about a chapter of history that Western education has consistently buried or ignored. That's not nothing. That's actually quite a lot. The sheer accumulation of uncomfortable fact eventually overrides the dated presentation and the occasionally awkward framing, and you find yourself leaning in whether you want to or not. I was similarly struck watching One People, another film from this region and era that forces you to sit with histories that rarely get the screen time they deserve.
What you're left with is something genuinely difficult to place. This is a flawed document, shaped by the limitations of its moment and, perhaps, by the blind spots of its makers. The lens through which colonial atrocity is filtered here is not always the right one, and a modern filmmaker approaching the same material would, you'd hope, do so very differently. But as an educational piece, as a record of a nation confronting its traumatic past, it carries weight. It made me think, it made me uncomfortable in the right ways as well as some wrong ones, and it shone a light on history that needed shining on.
Two and a half stars feels accurate. Not a recommendation without reservations, but an essential watch if the subject draws you in, and it should.
Rating: ★★½ | Year: 1978 | Watched: 2026-07-17
Where to watch
Watch in the US
Stream: Criterion Channel
Physical: Amazon US
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