Park Chan-wook draws on a disaster that took place in South Korea to ironically criticize the greed of rampant capitalism. In 1995, in Seoul, a huge shopping center, the Sampung department Store collapsed, killing about 500 people and injuring many others.
This tragedy was caused by human negligence. Half a million dollars were offered in indemnity to the victims’ relatives, and this triggered merciless looting made by unscrupulous people.
In a morgue where the lifeless body of a girl lies, waiting to be identified, a man and a woman, who introduce themselves as the parents of the victim, are distraught over the loss of the young girl. However, after a moment’s hesitation, a morgue employee claims the body of the girl. The grotesque controversy about who is the real “owner” of the corpse and the legitimate beneficiary of the money starts here.
Between the turn of events and paradoxical punishments of fate, the ending leads to a tragic and ironic conclusion. In black and white, the whole story is set in the cold morgue, where the characters’ absurd and pathetic dialogues take place, like a journalist and a police detective who keep on squabbling. – Wikipedia
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Within the Woods is a 1978 horror short film written, directed, and produced by Sam Raimi. Raimi drew inspiration from his earlier short film Clockwork, deciding to produce a proof of concept horror film to help build the interest of potential investors. Raimi cast his friends Bruce Campbell and Ellen Sandweiss as the two protagonists and produced the film for $1,600. Shot on location in a remote cabin in the woods, production was a difficult process because of the low budget.
Several of the special effects presented in the film were done in a severely low budget manner, some of which were improvised on set. The film centers around demonic possession and mysterious forces originating from the woods.
Raimi convinced a local theater manager to screen the film alongside The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which sparked minor interest. Initially a meager success, the film screened well to test audiences and inspired a larger budget remake directed by Raimi, called The Evil Dead (1981).
The film was the first in the Evil Dead franchise and launched the careers of both Campbell and Raimi. Several of the aesthetic qualities found Within the Woods later defined Raimi’s films. – Wikipedia
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Day of the Fight shows Irish-American middleweight boxer Walter Cartier during the height of his career, on April 17, 1950, the day of a fight with middleweight Bobby James and was directed by Stanely Kubrick. Kubrick and Alexander Singer used daylight-loading Eyemo cameras that take 100-foot spools of 35mm black-and-white film to shoot the fight, with Kubrick shooting hand-held (often from below) and Singer’s camera on a tripod. The 100-foot reels required constant reloading, and Kubrick did not catch the knock-out punch which ended the bout because he was reloading. Singer did, however.
Day of the Fight is the first credit on composer Gerald Fried’s resume. Kubrick did not pay him for his work on the film. “He thought the very fact that my doing the music” for the film “got me into the profession was enough payment”, Fried told The Guardian in 2018 conceding that Kubrick’s point was accurate. Fried, a childhood friend of Kubrick, later wrote the score for the director’s Paths of Glory (1957) and three other films.
Although the originally planned buyer of the picture went out of business, Kubrick was able to sell Day of the Fight to RKO Pictures for $4,000, making a small benefit of $100 above the $3,900 cost of making the film.
The film opens with a short section on boxing’s history and then follows Cartier through his day as he prepares for the 10 P.M. bout. Cartier eats breakfast in his West 12th Street apartment in Greenwich Village, goes to early mass, and eats lunch at his favorite restaurant. At 4 P.M., he starts preparations for the fight. By 8 P.M., he is waiting in his dressing room at Laurel Gardens in Newark, New Jersey, for the fight to begin.
We then see the fight itself, which he wins in a short match – Wikipedia
Below you’ll find a list of almost every film in Martin Scorsese’s filmography and the screenplay associated with that film. Take a watch of Martin Scorsese discussing his process below. The screenplays below are the only ones that are available online. If you find any of his missing screenplays please leave the link in the comment section.
The Coen Brothers (Joel Coen and Ethan Coen) are two of the most unique voices on the cinema’s stage today. Their career has been going strong for over 30 years. When you read a Coen Brothers screenplay you know that your world will be turned upside down.
Freiheit (German for “freedom”) is a 1966 short film by George Lucas, made while he was a student at the University of Southern California’s film school. His third film, it was the first to contain a narrative.
The film follows a student’s attempt to escape to freedom. This student (Randal Kleiser) tries to run across the Berlin border from East to West Germany, but ends up being shot in the chest and side gut and is mortally wounded. While he dies, he thinks about dying for freedom. – Wikipedia
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After Aronofsky’s graduation from Harvard in 1991, he moved to Los Angeles to obtain his MFA in directing from the prestigious American Film Institute. The two-year program resulted in the creation of two short films, the first of which is 1991’s FORTUNE COOKIE— an absurdist comedy inspired by the Hubert Selby Jr story of the same name. Thankfully, an old VHS dub of the film has been made available in its entirety online, giving us our earliest glimpse at Aronofsky’s artistic development.
Written by Aronofsky and produced by Jody Teora, FORTUNE COOKIE concerns a middle-aged salesman who comes to believe his recent string of successes are the result of the good luck contained with an old fortune cookie he keeps in his pocket. The short follows his highs and lows, forcing him to contend with the pushy aggressions of a rival salesman intent on figuring out his secrets, and a strange pervert who follows him around and makes unwanted romantic overtures from the cabin of his gigantic Cadillac.
Aronofsky’s broadly humorous approach strikes a curious tone, exemplified by literal fart jokes and purposely weird performances that would be almost Lynchian if they weren’t so over the top. To his credit, Aronofsky casts the film entirely with middle-aged actors or older– a notable aspect in the world of student filmmaking, where the casts are typically comprised of the director’s friends or fellow students.
A distinct, albeit half-hearted, midcentury aesthetic defines the production design, with the characters dressed in baggy suits from the 1950s and affecting a rapid-fire Transatlantic vernacular to match. Aronofsky even sprinkles a vintage car or two in the background, but beyond that, he makes no effort to hide the trappings of contemporary life.
Nevertheless, a degree of deliberate design choice evidences itself in the locations, which juxtapose sleepy, pastel-colored suburban environs with crumbling, graffiti-riddled industrial areas (perhaps as a comment on the breakdown of the American Dream myth, or something similarly heavy-handed in an appropriately film-school way).
Working with the credited director of photography Usa Stoll, Aronofsky captures FORTUNE COOKIE in the square frame of analog video, which no doubt was less of an artistic choice than it was a mandate from his first-year directing professor at AFI. His approach to coverage mostly eschews conventional over-the-shoulder compositions and reverse shots, in favor of having his actors continually break the 4th wall by addressing the camera directly.
A recurring visual motif finds Aronofsky framing his protagonist in a wide, flat composition and moving from one side of the frame to the other. He repeats the action with the same framing in the subsequent shot, albeit a few yards down the street. Most filmmakers would cover this same action as a continued dolly shot, but Aronofsky chops it up and fragments the line of movement as another way to convey that his protagonist is moving in circles without actually going anywhere.
The effect is like watching an old-school side-scrolling video game that doesn’t actually scroll when the hero reaches the edge of the screen. A soundtrack comprised primarily of street performance-style percussion only vaguely foreshadows the urban character of Aronofsky’s future work, but a series of activity-based insert shots (presented in extreme closeup up and edited together in rapid-fire succession to a soundtrack of exaggerated audio effects) immediately call to mind the signature stylistic technique he’d perfect in PI and its follow-up, REQUIEM FOR A DREAM (2000).
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Film noir is a term in filmmaking that’s used predominantly to refer to classy Hollywood crime dramas, mainly the ones that emphasize sexual motivations and cynical attitudes. The Hollywood classic film noir era was said to have extended from the early 1940s to the late 50s.
During this period, Film Noir was associated with a discreet, Black and White graphic style that has roots in the German Expressionist film making techniques.
It is also a French term which means, “black film,” or film of the night, which was inspired by the Series Noir; a brand of cheap paperbacks that transformed hard-boiled American crime fiction authors, and discovered a modern audience in France.
If you’re confused and believe that every black and white movie that you’ve seen is Film Noir, the following features would clarify it for you;
• It’s a film which at no particular time misleads its audience into believing that there’s going to be a happy ending.
• They usually use locations that reek of the night or have shadows everywhere, show lots of alleys, apartment buildings with high turnover rates, and bartenders and taxi drivers that have seen it all.
• The women in it would just as soon kill you as they’d love you, and vice versa.
• Almost everyone in Noir films is always smoking; as if they’re trying to convey the message to the audience that says, “Added to everything else I’m supposed to do, I’ve been consigned to finish three packs of cigarette today.” ‘Out of the Past’ was deemed the greatest smoking movie of all time, in which Robert Mitchum and Kirk Douglas were seen smoking furiously at each other.
• For women, the following were the order of the day; wearing floppy hats, mascara, lipsticks, high heels, red dresses, elbow-length gloves, showing low necklines. Calling doormen by their first names, having gangster boyfriends, mixing drinks, developing soft spots for alcoholic private detectives, and last but not the least, sprawling dead on the ground with every hair in place and all the limbs meticulously arranged.
• And for the men, the following were the order of the day; wearing suits and ties, fedoras, staying in shabby residential hotels with neon signs blinking through the window, having cars with running boards.
Going to all-night diners, being on first-name basis with almost all the homicide detectives in the city, protecting kids from the bad guys, knowing a lot of people with job descriptions that end in “ies,” like cabbies, junkies, bookies, alkies, jockeys, and Newsies.
• The relationships usually depicted in these movies portray love as only the final flop in the poker game of death.
During the World War II era and afterward, audiences responded to this adult-oriented kind of film simply because it was vivid and fresh. Shortly after this, a lot of writers, directors, actors, and cameramen joined the trend because they were eager to a more mature and world-view to Hollywood.
This situation was fueled by the artistic and financial success of Double Indemnity; Billy Wilder’s adaptation of James M. Cain’s Novella of the same name. Following the success of the movie, several studios started pumping out murder dramas and crime thrillers with a uniquely dark and poisonous view of existence.
Very few of the artists that created movies that fit the description of a Noir film ever called it such at that time. But in later years this theme of film-making proved to be hugely influential, both among industry peers and future generations of literary and cinematic storytelling.
Film Noir managed to portray issues like; vivid co-mingling of lost innocence, desperate desire, hard-edged cynicism, shadowy sexuality, and doomed romanticism among other things.
Until this day there’s still a raging debate on whether Noir is a distinct film genre, defined by its contents, or a brand of storytelling recognized by its visual attributes. And since there is no right or wrong answer for this debate, the genre is always kept alive and fresh for subsequent generations of film lovers.
A lot of individuals dislike watching Black and White movies and prefer the colored ones; forgetting the fact that a lot of the most famous movies are in black and white. Also, these types of movies can not only do just as much as the colored ones but could even appear better.
Film Noir is the best place to prove this point. This style of filmmaking continues to influence modern cinematography everywhere, including Breaking Bad. In some cases, comic strips are the real embodiment of this cinematic theme.
The dynamic range of shading in black and white films makes for a more interesting composition of shots. And it also depicts how this particular color can make for an interesting look with higher contrast.
The simplicity of black and white means that the eye can absorb more key features in a shot without getting distracted by other images. While color is great, sometimes simple is better.
In the era of color, film-makers trying to depict that Noir feel to their movies have two options; the first is to mimic noir but in colors. They can blast the screen with bright, vibrant colors to give it the same level of contrast and aesthetics as black and white movies.
Or the second option which is, filming in colors, but then making it so monochromatic that it almost looks black and white.
Black and White filming accentuate contrast, so it can be used to emphasize visual storytelling. A lot of colored films these days subtly make use of the Noir style. Some scenes in the Breaking Bad can be mistaken for some old Film Noir flicks.
And a lot of its gorgeous cinematography owes itself to the techniques that shine strongest in black and white movies. You can even find several film noir lightening everywhere in the series, starting from the blinds, the good side and the bad side, high contrast, and smoking. Smoke looks incredibly gorgeous in Black and White films.
The movie, ‘The Big Combo,’ shows all the beauty of black and white in a specific scene where silhouettes, smokes and high contrasts were depicted in the shot.
They Live by Night
This astonishingly self-confident, poetic debut of Nicholas Ray’s film opens with lush illustrations of a guy and girl in blissful mutual absorption. These characters were never introduced properly to the world. All we see is their shocked faces turned toward the camera when a loud horn suddenly goes off, obliterating every other sound. Shortly after that, the title appears: They Live by Night.
Kiss Me Deadly
This movie which is a black-hearted apotheosis of Noir is an essential film of the 50s, which embodies the most profound anxieties of Eisenhower’s America. Its ending depicts the detonation of a nuclear bomb on Malibu Beach, which then presumably leads to the end of the world. The moral universe created by Robert Aldrich is so violently out of balance that even the opening credit scene is shown upside down. While the protagonist of the movie, Mike Hammer is an amoral, proto-fascist bedroom investigator, and scumbag, the villains are a hundred times worse than him. Hammer is a cynic who’s aware of everything concerning human weakness, but nothing regarding the frame he’s in, at the end of the movie.
Blood Simple
This film is perhaps the most straightforward film of the Coen brothers; even though it’s ironically not that simple at all. It takes its atmospheric title coined from a line in the novel Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett. The film can be referred to as a sort of preparation for their breakout work, Fargo, which similarly features a plot where an evil plan goes sideways. It also marked the first use of literary genre elements in the “real” world. Quentin Tarantino eventually refined this formula. And just like in most noir films, the basis of the story is a case of Cherchez la femme.
Lift to the Scaffold
This action film by Louis Malle was based Noel Calef’s 1956 novel. While it heralds the imminent arrival of the French new wave, it still qualifies as film noir for its appropriation of US postwar cinema in its portrayal of lovers gone corrupt.
The Third Man
The legendary Steven Soderbergh once wrote about this movie, and I quote, “One of the remarkable things about the film is that it’s a great story regardless of what people say about it.” And he was right; The Third Man is one of the greatest, wittiest, steadfastly compassionate, and elegantly shot thriller in time. The movie is about more than its plot. Betrayal, disillusion and misdirected sexual longing are a few of my favorite things, and The Third Man blends them all impeccably with an unquestionable plot and a location that blurs the line between decay and beauty.
Aronofsky’s fourth short from this era– 1994’s NO TIME — appears to have been made after his graduation from AFI, and adopts the brazen Generation X attitude that marked pop culture in the 90’s. At first glance, the film appears to be a slacker riff on improv comedy shows, anchored by a quartet of young actors playing various characters across several vignettes.
Shot by Matthew Libatique on color 16mm film, NO TIME resembles the style of FORTUNE COOKIE with its super-broad humor and moronic fart jokes that seem at odds with the darkly cerebral character of Aronofsky’s future professional work. The visual style plays fast and loose with the rules of composition, frequently opting for close-ups that are almost claustrophobic in their nature. It’s unclear exactly what Aronofsky was trying to achieve with NO TIME unless he was trying to get this particular style of filmmaking out of his system early on.
Any director’s student films have a strong chance of bearing no resemblance to their professional counterparts. After all, that’s the nature of film school– to experiment, to feel out, to play in the pursuit of establishing one’s particular voice. Aronofsky’s professional style is so distinct and singularly his, however, that this quartet of early shorts really does leave one surprised as to how little they predict the unique artistic voice we’ve since come to cherish and anticipate.
Nevertheless, these first efforts constitute a crucial training ground for Aronofsky, and their creation within the confines of the formalized film education system provides him with vital resources and collaborators that would carry him towards professional success in the long-term. In the short-term, these same resources would give him the confidence necessary to take that first step: the creation of a feature-length effort that would establish his voice as that of an uncompromising indie maverick.
Written by Cameron Beyl
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Electronic Labyrinth: THX-1138 4EB is a 1967 social science-fiction short film written and directed by George Lucas while he attended the University of Southern California’s film school. The short was reworked as the 1971 theatrical feature THX 1138.
Lucas had had an idea for a long time “based on the concept that we live in the future and that you could make a futuristic film using existing stuff”. Fellow USC students Matthew Robbins and Walter Murch had a similar idea which Robbins developed into a short treatment, but Robbins and Murch lost interest in the idea, whereas Lucas was keen to persist.
One of Lucas’ USC instructors suggested an opportunity for Lucas to make the short film that he had in mind: since the 1940s, the USC film school had had a working arrangement with the US Navy, whereby Navy filmmakers attended USC for additional study. Teaching the class was not popular amongst USC staff, as the Navy filmmakers often had rigid, preconceived ideas about filmmaking, and sometimes misbehaved in class. But the Navy paid for unlimited color film, and lab processing costs, for their students. Lucas offered to teach the class and was allowed the opportunity.
The Navy men formed the crew of the film, and some appeared in the cast. Because of the Navy connection, Lucas was able to access filming locations that would not otherwise have been available to him: the USC computer center, a parking lot at UCLA, the Los Angeles International Airport, and the Van Nuys Airport. Much of the filming was done at night, with some at weekends.
The film was completed in 12 weeks, with Lucas editing it on the Moviola at the home of Verna Fields, where he was working during the day editing United States Information Agency films under Fields’ supervision – Wikipedia
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