that one piece media that changed your view on the medium.

I was already a fan of movies, but Pulp Fiction really blew me away as a 13 year old aspiring film buff. It was the first film I'd seen that didn't follow the established conventions of a Hollywood three act structure/A-plot with romantic subplot formula which I'd been trained to believe up to that point was the only way movies were made. I loved how fresh and seemingly random the dialogue and structure were, how it didn't wrap up in a neat little bow and it seemed to just defy explanation. It just felt so fresh and different and exciting and it really opened my mind to what the medium was capable of.

I was aware of the Porn chic label and that the 70s films had stories, but my only interaction with one for years was Deep Throat which I wasn't too impressed by. Yeah they have stories, big whop, they're still really boring and pointless stories. Femina Ridens was the first erotic film I ever saw that had comparable symbolism, themes, visual motifs, cinematography and art direction to any serious drama. That one film singlehandedly made me a fan of Golden Age erotica.

I've now seen maybe ~500+ films and the only comparable experience to them has been I Dolci Inganni, where I just had no idea what to expect, had never seen anything quite like it and was blown away by how good it was. For me, that was the one that changed my opinion of young/teen girl oriented movies. I liked the occasional Mean Girls or John Hughes film before, but it always seemed like movies about teen girls had to be done in a certain style, had to have a certain manufactured put-on "cool" factor, plus they usually had really dated trendy pop-culture references and soundtrack. That was the first film I ever saw that told a girl's story with all the same dignity and noir-like grandeur of an adult's and it felt like a breath of fresh air. It's the kind of movie I'd always wanted to see but had given up hope for, because I just assumed no one took teen girls' experiences seriously.