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Steven Spielberg’s Micro-Budget 1st Feature Film: Firelight

The most complete version of Steven Spielberg’s 1964 first independent film. The full movie is 140 minutes in length but has never been seen by the public.

Firelight is a 1964 science fiction adventure film written and directed by Steven Spielberg at the age of 17. Made on a budget of $500, the film was, in a manner of speaking, Spielberg’s first commercial success, as it was shown at a local cinema and generated a profit of $1.

“I counted the receipts that night”,

Spielberg has recalled,

“And we charged a dollar a ticket. Five hundred people came to the movie and I think somebody probably paid two dollars, because we made one dollar profit that night, and that was it.”

Although Firelight is Spielberg’s first film made, it is not seen as his directorial debut. The film widely seen as his feature-length directorial debut is Duel (1971), although “L.A. 2017”, his long-form episode of The Name of the Game, precedes it. Wikipedia

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Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Short Film: Tramwaj

Tramway (Polish: Tramwaj) is a 1966 short silent film by Polish director Krzysztof Kieślowski, produced while he was a student at the Łódź Film School. The film is included as an extra feature on the American and Artificial Eye Region 2 DVD releases of Kieslowski’s A Short Film About Love.

The film shows a boy who sees a girl on a tram as it is leaving. He runs after the tram and finds himself on board alone with the girl. They exchange glances, then she falls asleep against the window. The boy gets off the tram and looks at her through the window, then decides to run after the tram again. – Wikipedia

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Mark & Jay Duplass’ $3 Sundance Short Film: This is John

Why is it that it can be the simplest things in life that eliminate your self-worth. That seven-minute short film, “This is John,” shows a man coming home and struggling to record the perfect voicemail message.

If you haven’t seen their $3 short film, This is John, that got into Sundance and launched their careers take a look:

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Lars Von Trier Short Film: Nocturne

Lars Von Trier’s 1980 student film shortNocturne‘ is an experimental piece that centers on a young woman awakened by shattered glass and terrified by sunlight.

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Park Chan-Wook’s Short Film: Simpan (Judgement)

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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Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead “Prequel” Short Film: Within the Woods

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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Stanley Kubrick’s Short Film: Day Of The Fight

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

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George Lucas’ Micro-Budget Short Film: Freiheit

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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Darren Aronofsky’s Micro-Budget Short Film: Fortune Cookie

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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Darren Aronofsky’s Micro-Budget Short Film: No Time

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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