Metamorphose: 1999 Documentary Reveals the Life & Work of Artist M.C. Escher

in Art, Film | October 2nd, 2012

Made in 1999 by Dutch direc­tor Jan Bos­driesz, the doc­u­men­tary Meta­mor­phose: M.C. Esch­er, 1898–1972 takes its title from one of Escher’s more well-known prints in which the word “meta­mor­phose” trans­forms itself into pat­terns of abstract shapes and ani­mals. It’s one of those col­lege-dorm prints one thinks of when one thinks of M.C. Esch­er, and it’s won­der­ful in its own way. But the doc­u­men­tary reveals oth­er sides of the artist—his art-school days, his sojourn in Italy—that pro­duced a very dif­fer­ent kind of work. Esch­er began as a stu­dent of archi­tec­ture, enrolled in the School for Archi­tec­ture and Dec­o­ra­tive arts in Haar­lem by his par­ents, who strug­gled to help him find his way after he failed his high school exams.

Once in Haar­lem, the lone­ly and some­what morose Esch­er finds him­self drawn to graph­ic art instead. One of his teach­ers, accom­plished Dutch artist Samuel Jes­su­run de Mesqui­ta, whose influ­ence is evi­dent in Escher’s work and life, sees some of Escher’s linocuts and likes them. In archival footage of an inter­view with Esch­er, the artist says that Jes­su­run de Mesqui­ta asked him, “Wouldn’t you rather be a graph­ic artist instead of an archi­tect?”

Esch­er admits, “I wasn’t all that inter­est­ed in archi­tec­ture.” It’s a lit­tle bit of a sur­pris­ing admis­sion giv­en Escher’s wild archi­tec­tur­al imag­i­na­tion, but per­haps what he meant was that he wasn’t inter­est­ed in the con­ven­tion­al, but rather in the archi­tec­ture of the fan­tas­tic, the impos­si­ble spaces he imag­ined in much of his work.

We learn oth­er things about Esch­er: One of his wood­cuts from this peri­od is titled “Nev­er Think before You Begin,” show­ing a lone­ly fig­ure on a dark and treach­er­ous path with only a tiny light to guide him, a rep­re­sen­ta­tion of Escher’s deci­sion to pur­sue graph­ic art. The nar­ra­tor informs us that “it took more than thir­ty years for him to earn enough from his work to live on.” Luck­i­ly, as with many artists who strug­gle for years, Esch­er had rich par­ents. We can thank them for their patron­age.  To give you some idea of Escher’s mor­bid char­ac­ter, we learn that he chose the top­ic “Dance of Death” for a three-hour lec­ture to his fel­low art stu­dents in Haar­lem. Esch­er told them, “The dance of death and life are two expres­sions with the same mean­ing. What else do we do oth­er than dance death into our souls?”

Meta­mor­phose is an impres­sive doc­u­men­tary, beau­ti­ful­ly shot and edit­ed, with a bal­ance of stock footage of the peri­od, inter­views with the artist him­self, and long, lin­ger­ing shots of his work. The film cov­ers Escher’s entire artis­tic life, end­ing with footage of the artist at work. These “last images” of Esch­er, the nar­ra­tor says, “are not gloomy. We see an artist in his stu­dio, doing the things he enjoys,” a man “proud of his suc­cess.” At the end of his life, he still hon­ored his teacher, de Mesqui­ta, and the South Ital­ian coast that shel­tered him dur­ing his for­ma­tive years.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Math­e­mat­ics Made Vis­i­ble: The Extra­or­di­nary Art of M.C. Esch­er

Inspi­ra­tions: A Short Film Cel­e­brat­ing the Math­e­mat­i­cal Art of M.C. Esch­er

Josh Jones is a doc­tor­al can­di­date in Eng­lish at Ford­ham Uni­ver­si­ty and a co-founder and for­mer man­ag­ing edi­tor of Guer­ni­ca / A Mag­a­zine of Arts and Pol­i­tics.

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Hundreds of Fans Collectively Remade Star Wars; Now They Remake The Empire Strikes Back

in Film | October 2nd, 2012

For­get grav­i­ty. For­get even irony. The uni­verse knows no greater force, as it were, than the col­lec­tive enthu­si­asm of Star Wars fans. 35 years after the first of them came out, the films’ pow­er to inspire remains unset­tling­ly imme­di­ate and wide­spread. Or at least that goes for the orig­i­nal tril­o­gy of Star Wars movies, the first of which, A New Hope, under­went a pop­u­lar fan-made remake in 2009. The result, Star Wars Uncut, did­n’t come as the project of a sin­gle enter­pris­ing afi­ciona­do plop­ping him­self into the George Lucas seat, but as a ful­ly “crowd-sourced” motion pic­ture assem­bled out of fif­teen-sec­ond clips shot by con­trib­u­tors called to action by one Casey Pugh. The hyp­not­ic result, whose final cut first screened ear­li­er this year and which you can watch above, offers Star Wars as patch­work quilt, the con­struc­tion of its squares rang­ing from delib­er­ate­ly lo-fi (not to men­tion non-delib­er­ate­ly lo-fi) to sur­pris­ing­ly cred­i­ble.

With one down, the next two of those beloved movies await. The Empire Strikes Back Uncut, whose trail­er appears just above, has now offi­cial­ly opened to con­trib­u­tors, who can claim a fif­teen-sec­ond seg­ment of their own to re-cre­ate. They get thir­ty days to sub­mit the fruit of their cin­e­mat­ic labors, and then the entire film re-opens to accept anoth­er round of sub­mis­sions. This might seem like the kind of irrev­er­ent homage that would irk the cre­ator of the orig­i­nal, but Lucas­film has actu­al­ly endorsed the project this time around. Will their involve­ment extin­guish the under­ground scrap­pi­ness of the ear­li­er effort? Will fans choke under the awe­some respon­si­bil­i­ty of rein­ter­pret­ing The Empire Strikes Back, that most respect­ed of all Star Wars prop­er­ties? They’re ques­tions of import to a true believ­er, though that believ­er might take solace in the top-vot­ed reac­tion in Star Wars Uncut’s YouTube com­ments: “Still bet­ter than The Phan­tom Men­ace.”

via MetaFil­ter

Relat­ed con­tent:

Star Wars as Silent Film

Star Wars is a Remix

Star Wars Retold with Paper Ani­ma­tion

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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Norman Mailer: Strong Writer, Weak Actor, Brutally Wrestles Actor Rip Torn

in Film, Literature | September 28th, 2012

“Gorg­ing on the man’s image and voice is a reminder of his strength as a writer that’s eas­i­est to over­look: an aware­ness of his own lim­i­ta­tions. This is a qual­i­ty that his act­ing lacks.” This Chris­tine Small­wood writes of the nov­el­ist Nor­man Mail­er after hav­ing watched the late-six­ties/ear­ly-sev­en­ties tril­o­gy of films he direct­ed and starred in: Wild 90, Beyond the Law, and Maid­stone. Her post on the New York­er’s blog Page-Turn­er con­sid­ers these pic­tures, recent­ly released as a box set in the Cri­te­ri­on Col­lec­tion’s Eclipse Series, ulti­mate­ly find­ing them huge­ly flawed but not unin­ter­est­ing­ly so. They have cin­e­matog­ra­phy by a young D.A. Pen­nebak­er, they fore­shad­ow real­i­ty tele­vi­sion in their own skewed way, and they cap­ture the spec­ta­cle of Nor­man Mail­er rev­el­ing in, essen­tial­ly, the role of him­self. Not that this counts as an act­ing tech­nique: “Mail­er lurch­es, lum­bers, rants, reels,” writes Small­wood. “He doesn’t both­er with a sto­ry that would drum up inter­est or fix atten­tion, because he knows, and you know, that you’re watch­ing because he’s Nor­man Mail­er.”

But a force fiercer than Mail­er’s will to impose his own real­i­ty rips into the very end of Maid­stone, and the result has become a pop­u­lar clip on the inter­net. That force’s name is Rip Torn. He plays the broth­er-in-law and would-be assas­sin of Mail­er’s char­ac­ter, an icon­o­clas­tic auteur run­ning for Pres­i­dent of the Unit­ed States. On cam­era, Torn sud­den­ly attacks Mail­er, and the two launch into what looks like an actu­al brawl, involv­ing tech­niques up to and includ­ing a ham­mer to the ear. “The intru­sion of bald ‘real life’ means that Mail­er has to reck­on with anoth­er per­son,” writes Small­wood. “This, I think, is what moti­vat­ed his inter­est in vio­lence more gen­er­al­ly: it inter­rupt­ed the con­stant pre­oc­cu­pa­tion of being Nor­man Mail­er, forc­ing him out of him­self. In his writ­ing, he could some­times dis­ci­pline him­self into achiev­ing those moments, as when he imag­ined the mind-set of a police­man in ‘Armies of the Night,’ but onscreen he need­ed to get hit.”

Relat­ed con­tent:

Nor­man Mail­er & Mar­tin Amis, No Strangers to Con­tro­ver­sy, Talk in 1991

Nor­man Mail­er & Mar­shall McLuhan Debate the Elec­tron­ic Age

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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Great Cinema Discussed Director By Director on The Auteurcast

in Film, Podcasts | September 27th, 2012

Few propo­si­tions in film schol­ar­ship inspire as much con­tro­ver­sy as the so-called “auteur the­o­ry,” which holds that a film’s direc­tor imbues the work with its strongest and most iden­ti­fi­able cre­ative influ­ence. Some con­sid­er this notion laugh­ably implau­si­ble; oth­ers con­sid­er it untouch­ably self-evi­dent. But even if you don’t ful­ly buy into this auteur-cen­trism — and it can’t hurt to throw down a fist­ful of salt before the entire edi­fice of film the­o­ry — you can still use it as a help­ful tool to nav­i­gate the realm of cin­e­ma, espe­cial­ly if most of it remains ter­ra incogin­ta to you. Say you hap­pen onto a movie you enjoy — Full Met­al Jack­et, for instance — and find out it was direct­ed by a cer­tain Stan­ley Kubrick. You could then do much worse for addi­tion­al view­ing mate­r­i­al than to watch every­thing else the man ever direct­ed.

As for accom­pa­ni­ment in this cul­tur­al jour­ney, you could do much worse than Rudie Obias and West Antho­ny, hosts of The Auteur­cast. Tak­ing one film­mak­er at a time, they watch and dis­cuss every movie that film­mak­er has made. Of course they’ve cov­ered Stan­ley Kubrick: you can lis­ten to their con­ver­sa­tion on Full Met­al Jack­et right above, and I myself joined them as a guest when they talked about A Clock­work Orange. Hav­ing put out 136 episodes so far, Obias and Antho­ny have recent­ly made their way to two auteurs as seem­ing­ly on the oppo­site ends of a spec­trum (though exact­ly what spec­trum, I can’t say for sure) as James Cameron, he of Titan­ic and Avatar, and Paul Thomas Ander­son, he of Mag­no­lia, There Will Be Blood, and (to be dis­cussed in an upcom­ing episode) The Mas­ter. To catch up on The Auteur­cast as you catch up on cin­e­ma itself, you can down­load all of their past episodes as a tor­rent, then sub­scribe via RSS or iTunes.

Relat­ed con­tent:

500 Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, etc.

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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Philosopher Slavoj Zizek Interprets Hitchcock’s Vertigo in The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (2006)

in Film, Philosophy | September 27th, 2012

Philoso­pher and psy­cho­an­a­lyst Slavoj Zizek is a polar­iz­ing fig­ure, in and out of the Acad­e­my. He has been accused of misog­y­ny and oppor­tunism, and a Guardian colum­nist once won­dered if he is “the Borat of phi­los­o­phy.” The lat­ter epi­thet might be as much a ref­er­ence to his occa­sion­al boor­ish­ness as to his Sloven­ian-accent­ed Eng­lish. Despite (or because of) these qual­i­ties, Zizek has become a fas­ci­nat­ing pub­lic intel­lec­tu­al, in part because all of his work is shot through with pop cul­ture ref­er­ences as dif­fuse as the most stud­ied of fan­boys. And even though Zizek, a stu­dent of the Freudi­an the­o­rist Jacques Lacan, can get deeply obscure with the best of his peers, his enthu­si­asm and rapid-fire free-asso­ci­a­tions mark him as a true fan of every­thing he sur­veys.

The Zizek I just described is ful­ly in evi­dence in the short clip above from the three-part doc­u­men­tary The Pervert’s Guide to Cin­e­ma. Direct­ed by Sophie Fiennes (sis­ter of Joseph and Ralph), The Pervert’s Guide places Zizek in orig­i­nal loca­tions and repli­ca sets of sev­er­al clas­sic films—David Lynch’s Blue Vel­vet, Stan­ley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, and Hitchcock’s Ver­ti­go, to name just a few. Zizek’s scenes of com­men­tary are edit­ed with scenes from the films to give the impres­sion that he is speak­ing from with­in the films them­selves. It’s a nov­el approach and works par­tic­u­lar­ly well in the video above, where Zizek gives us his take on Ver­ti­go. As he says of Hitchcock’s film—which could apply to the one he is in as well—“often things begin as a fake, inau­then­tic, arti­fi­cial, but you get caught in your own game.” View­ers of The Pervert’s Guide get caught in Zizek’s inter­pre­tive game; it’s a fas­ci­nat­ing, ridicu­lous, and unset­tling one.

In the clip, through a series of close analy­ses of plot points and cam­era angles, Zizek con­cludes that Ver­ti­go is the real­iza­tion of a male fan­ta­sy, which nec­es­sar­i­ly involves vio­lence and night­mar­ish trans­for­ma­tions. In the “male libid­i­nal econ­o­my,” he says, in the jargon‑y psy­cho­an­a­lyt­ic speak of his trade, women must be “mor­ti­fied” before they are accept­able sex­u­al part­ners. Slip­ping out of aca­d­e­m­ic argot, he clar­i­fies: “to para­phrase an old say­ing, the only good woman is a dead woman.” It’s this kind of blunt and utter­ly unsen­ti­men­tal way of speak­ing that rais­es the hack­les of some of Zizek’s crit­ics. But I’m not here to defend him. Watch­ing (and read­ing) him for me is a game of edge-of-your seat “what out­ra­geous or incom­pre­hen­si­ble thing is he going to say next?” and I’ll admit, I enjoy it. So I’ll leave you with a final Zizek-ism. Per­haps it will scare you off for good, or per­haps you’re game for a few more rounds of “per­ver­sion” with this ency­clo­pe­dic crit­ic of the self, the social, and the sex­u­al:

“A sub­ject,” says Zizek, “is a par­tial some­thing, a face, some­thing we see. Behind it, there is a void, a noth­ing­ness. And of course, we spon­ta­neous­ly tend to fill in that noth­ing­ness with our fan­tasies about the wealth of human per­son­al­i­ty and so on, and so on. To see what is lack­ing in real­i­ty, to see it as that, there you see sub­jec­tiv­i­ty. To con­front sub­jec­tiv­i­ty means to con­front fem­i­nin­i­ty. Woman is the sub­ject. Mas­culin­i­ty is a fake.”

You can watch the film in its entire­ty here.

via Bib­liok­lept

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Žižek!: 2005 Doc­u­men­tary Reveals the “Aca­d­e­m­ic Rock Star” and “Mon­ster” of a Man

Good Cap­i­tal­ist Kar­ma: Zizek Ani­mat­ed

Slavoj Žižek: How the Marx Broth­ers Embody Freud’s Id, Ego & Super-Ego

Josh Jones is a doc­tor­al can­di­date in Eng­lish at Ford­ham Uni­ver­si­ty and a co-founder and for­mer man­ag­ing edi­tor of Guer­ni­ca / A Mag­a­zine of Arts and Pol­i­tics.

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Johnny Cash: The Man, His World, His Music

in Film, Music | September 26th, 2012

John­ny Cash once called 1968 the hap­pi­est year of his life. It was the year his mas­ter­piece At Fol­som Prison came out, the year he was named the Coun­try Music Asso­ci­a­tion’s Enter­tain­er of the Year, and the year he mar­ried the love of his life, June Carter. So it was a for­tu­nate time for a young film­mak­er named Robert Elf­strom to meet up with Cash for the mak­ing of a doc­u­men­tary.

Elf­strom trav­eled with Cash for sev­er­al months in late 1968 and ear­ly 1969. The result­ing film, John­ny Cash: The Man, His World, His Music, is a reveal­ing look at Cash, his cre­ative process and his ties to fam­i­ly. Elf­strom fol­lowed along on a tour that took Cash and his group (includ­ing, at dif­fer­ent times, Chet Atkins and the Carter Fam­i­ly singers) to a wide range of places, includ­ing a prison, an Indi­an reser­va­tion and Cash’s own native soil in the Amer­i­can South. Cash and Carter vis­it his par­ents and oth­er fam­i­ly mem­bers, and in one mov­ing scene Cash returns to his aban­doned child­hood home in Dyess, Arkansas, a cot­ton farm­ing town that was cre­at­ed under Pres­i­dent Franklin D. Roo­sevelt’s New Deal pro­gram in the 1930s to give poor fam­i­lies a chance to start over.

The film gives some sense of the com­plex­i­ty of Cash’s per­son­al­i­ty. There is one scene near the begin­ning, for exam­ple, in which Cash goes hunt­ing and wounds a crow. He then cra­dles the injured bird in his hands and talks friend­ly to it. “That scene, to me, says a lot about who John­ny Cash is,” Elf­strom told PBS in a 2008 inter­view. “John was not always warm and fuzzy like a pan­da bear all the time. He’s like that part of the time, but he also has a sharp edge and stee­li­ness to him.” Elf­strom went on to describe the sit­u­a­tion:

One day, we were hang­ing out in his house, and he said, “I want to go hunt­ing.” He grabbed his shot­gun and was walk­ing through the land around his house when he spied a crow and whipped off a shot. John was a dead shot, so he wound­ed the crow, and the bird hit the ground. When he picked up the crow, you could feel that some­thing was going through John’s head; he’d almost killed some­thing that maybe he should­n’t have, and he felt bad­ly about it, but that instinct to hunt and wound was a part of him too. So John car­ried the crow and sat down in the shade, and I could see he was kind of pissed off at him­self. I kept some dis­tance from him, and the next thing I knew, he was writ­ing a song to the crow.

One of the most strik­ing things about Elf­strom’s film is the way it man­ages, despite the con­straints of the ciné­ma vérité form, to con­nect the events of Cash’s life to his music. For exam­ple, at one point Cash is walk­ing through the bar­ren vil­lage of Wound­ed Knee in South Dako­ta, lis­ten­ing to the sto­ry of the mas­sacre of 1890 from one of the descen­dants of the vic­tims, and in the next scene he is singing “Big Foot,” his song about the tragedy. The film shows Cash’s gen­eros­i­ty toward unknown musi­cians. It also offers a glimpse of his close friend­ship with the young Bob Dylan. When Cash and Dylan got togeth­er in Feb­ru­ary of 1969 for a record­ing ses­sion in Nashville, Elf­strom was there. He doc­u­ment­ed the scene as the two men record­ed Dylan’s “One Too Many Morn­ings.”  Elf­strom told PBS:

John and Bob had got­ten close at that point. John was say­ing, “Gee, I wish Bob would move down here to Ten­nessee. I’ve got a lot of land, and we could be neigh­bors!” So that was fas­ci­nat­ing. We record­ed the two of them very late at night, and they were doing a duet of one of Dylan’s songs. In the mid­dle of the song, both John and Bob for­got the lyrics. So the record­ing ses­sion stopped while peo­ple scam­pered around the Colum­bia Records build­ing try­ing to find the lyrics to a Bob Dylan song. When the lyrics were final­ly found, the two of them got togeth­er again and did some great record­ing. It was real­ly an amus­ing ses­sion because John and Bob were teas­ing each oth­er all the time.

The film was orig­i­nal­ly named Cash, and was slight­ly longer than the ver­sion above. In 2008 it was re-edit­ed and renamed John­ny Cash: The Man, His World, His Music for broad­cast on PBS. It’s a reveal­ing por­trait of the coun­try music leg­end, but Elf­strom allowed his sub­ject cer­tain areas of pri­va­cy. In par­tic­u­lar he avoid­ed doc­u­ment­ing Cash’s well-known addic­tion to drugs. “Even back then, the pow­ers-that-be want­ed me to empha­size the sub­stance abuse stuff, and I had to fight the entire time to stay clear of that,” said Elf­strom. “I did­n’t want that pol­lu­tion to con­fuse the mes­sage of what John was doing. I was total­ly will­ing to take John at face val­ue, and I think he him­self rec­og­nized that ear­ly on and trust­ed me. He was a man strug­gling through life like all of us, doing his best, try­ing to come out on top.”

John­ny Cash: The Man, His World, His Music will be added to our col­lec­tion of 500 Free Movies Online.

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Federico Fellini Introduces Himself to America in Experimental 1969 Documentary

in Film | September 26th, 2012

Today, if you want an intro­duc­tion to a film­mak­er like Fed­eri­co Felli­ni, you’ll most like­ly just look him up on Wikipedia. In 1969, you would­n’t have had quite so con­ve­nient an option, though were you an NBC-watch­ing Amer­i­can, you might have caught a broad­cast of Felli­ni: A Direc­tor’s Note­book. Direct­ed by Felli­ni him­self at the behest of NBC pro­duc­er Peter Gold­farb, the fifty-minute doc­u­men­tary (now added to our col­lec­tion of 500 Free Movies Online) fol­lows the Ital­ian auteur as he peri­patet­i­cal­ly seeks out inspi­ra­tion for his cur­rent and future projects. Among these, we hear about Satyri­con, one of his immor­tal works, and about The Voy­age of G. Mas­toma, which stalled before it even reached mor­tal­i­ty. Con­sort­ing with hip­pies in a field, tak­ing a spir­it medi­um down into the “cat­a­combs” of the Rome Metro, drop­ping in on favorite actor/counterpart Mar­cel­lo Mas­troian­ni, and receiv­ing a stream of vis­it­ing eccentrics in his office, Felli­ni nar­rates his own thoughts about his direc­to­r­i­al process. It seems to come down to search­ing for the right atmos­pheres — the obscure, the for­eign, the des­per­ate, the bizarre — and tak­ing them in.

Felli­ni: A Direc­tor’s Note­book pro­vides what Felli­ni called a “semi­hu­mor­ous intro­duc­tion” to the direc­tor, his work, and the envi­ron­ment of frown­ing absur­dism that seemed to encir­cle him wher­ev­er he went. But with its fre­quent lan­guage-shift­ing, its often dark and vague­ly trou­bling imagery, its air of simul­ta­ne­ous asex­u­al­i­ty and indis­crim­i­nate louch­ness, and its obvi­ous­ly delib­er­ate craft, the film would seem to fall into the ter­ri­to­ry between forms. But if it feels too elab­o­rate, arti­fi­cial, and stud­ded with half-glimpsed grotesques to count as a straight­for­ward por­trait of an artist, Fellini’s films set them­selves apart to this day with their thor­ough pos­ses­sion of those same qual­i­ties. Cul­tur­al his­to­ry has not record­ed in much detail how the aver­age Amer­i­can home view­er of 1969 han­dled this plunge into the vis­cous essence of Felli­ni. But I’ll bet every sin­gle one who enjoyed it imme­di­ate­ly marked their cal­en­dars, if sur­rep­ti­tious­ly, to go check out the man’s inter­pre­ta­tion of Petro­n­ius.

via @coudal

Relat­ed con­tent:

Fellini’s Fan­tas­tic TV Com­mer­cials

Felli­ni + Abrams = Super 8½

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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Watch Steven Spielberg’s Debut: Two Films He Directed as a Teenager

in Film | September 24th, 2012

When Steven Spiel­berg was six or sev­en years old his father took him to see Cecil B. DeMille’s The Great­est Show on Earth. When he arrived at the the­ater he felt cheat­ed, because he thought he was going to see a real cir­cus, with real-life clowns and ele­phants and lion tamers. But as the pic­tures moved across the screen the boy’s dis­ap­point­ment soon gave way to enchant­ment. One scene in particular–the film’s  spec­tac­u­lar train wreck–would alter the course of his life.

After see­ing the movie, Spiel­berg talked his dad into to buy­ing him an elec­tric train set. When he got a sec­ond train his boy­ish instinct was to re-cre­ate the crash scene from The Great­est Show on Earth. He rammed the two trains togeth­er at high speed, just for the joy of watch­ing the pieces fly apart. His father was not amused. After pay­ing a sec­ond time to have the trains repaired, he warned Steven that if he crashed them again, the train set would be tak­en away. When Spiel­berg was about 12 years old, he got an idea. As he lat­er recalled:

What­ev­er got into me, I need­ed to see those trains crash­ing. But I also did­n’t want to lose my train set. My dad had sit­ting around the house, which I had always tak­en for grant­ed, this lit­tle eight mil­lime­ter Kodak film movie cam­era with a tur­ret that had three lenses–kind of a wide, medi­um and close-up lens. I nev­er real­ly both­ered with the cam­era, but I thought: Well, I know what I can do. What if I filmed the trains crash­ing into each oth­er? I can just watch the film over and over and over again. And that’s how I made my first movie. All in the cam­era. I did­n’t have an edit­ing machine. I just put the cam­era low to the track, the way we as chil­dren like to put our eyes close to the toys we’re play­ing with, so the scale seems to be real­is­tic. I filmed one train going left to right. I cut the cam­era, turned it around and filmed the oth­er train com­ing right to left. And intu­itive­ly I fig­ured out that if I put my cam­era in the mid­dle and they met in the mid­dle, I’d have my train wreck. And that’s what I did. Luck­i­ly the trains did­n’t break. But I looked at that film over and over and over again, and then I thought: I won­der what else I could do with this cam­era?

Spiel­berg began mak­ing films obses­sive­ly. “I used to just crank them out, these lit­tle one-reel­ers, one after the oth­er,” he told an audi­ence at the Amer­i­can Film Insti­tute in the 1970s. “They were just lit­tle dra­mat­ic exer­cis­es. It was a hob­by and noth­ing more, although sub­con­scious­ly I was begin­ning to take it seri­ous­ly.” He began screen­ing his films for kids in the neigh­bor­hood. One of his sis­ters would make pop­corn and he would charge 25 cents for admis­sion as a way to make mon­ey to buy more film. As time went on Spiel­berg learned film gram­mar and began splic­ing dif­fer­ent pieces of film togeth­er. When he was 14 years old he enlist­ed a group of school friends to act in a 40-minute World War II movie called Escape to Nowhere. In the doc­u­men­tary clip above, Spiel­berg and his father, Arnold, remem­ber the mak­ing of the movie.

Escape to Nowhere (frag­ment):

Spiel­berg filmed Escape to Nowhere in 1962 near his fam­i­ly’s home in Phoenix, Ari­zona. The Sono­ran Desert scenery around Echo Canyon and Camel­back Moun­tain stood in for North Africa, and about 20 to 30 of Spiel­berg’s friends and class­mates played sol­diers on both sides of the bat­tle.

“He had a lim­it­ed sup­ply of Ger­man hel­mets,” writes Joseph McBride in Steven Spiel­berg: A Biog­ra­phy, “so he would have his sol­diers run past the cam­era and pass their hel­mets to oth­er kids, who then would dash around behind the cam­era and make their appear­ances.” None of the cast were old enough to dri­ve a jeep, so his par­ents played those roles. In one scene, accord­ing to McBride, Spiel­berg’s moth­er, Leah Adler, pulled a hel­met over her hair and played a Ger­man sol­dier.

“My spe­cial effects were great,” Spiel­berg said in 1980. “For shell explo­sions, I dug two holes in the ground and put a bal­anc­ing  board loaded with flour between them, then cov­ered it with a bush. When a ‘sol­dier’ ran over it, the flour made a per­fect geyser in the air. Mat­ter of fact, it works bet­ter than the gun­pow­der used in movies today.” For some neigh­bors the scene was a bit too real­is­tic. McBride quotes a for­mer cast mem­ber describ­ing the scene:

“The High­way Patrol came after us,” reports Haven Peters, who played one of the lead­ing roles. “We were out in the desert, and some peo­ple drove by and report­ed to the state police that all these guys were troop­ing around in Nazi hel­mets and guns. Two or three cars of troop­ers came out to inves­ti­gate. We thought, Are we all going to be arrest­ed for tres­pass­ing? Some­body told them we were mak­ing a movie, and I remem­ber Steve’s dad talk­ing to them and cool­ing them off. After that they were real­ly inter­est­ed, and they hung around to watch.”

For his next juve­nile epic, Spiel­berg ven­tured into the sci­ence fic­tion genre. The film, Fire­light, was in many ways a tri­al run for his 1977 block­buster, Close Encoun­ters of the Third Kind.

Fire­light (frag­ment):

Fire­light had its ori­gins in a Boy Scout camp­ing trip that Spiel­berg missed out on. It was the only overnight scout­ing trip he had missed in a year, accord­ing to McBride, and when he caught up with his friends he was dev­as­tat­ed when they told him they had seen some­thing amaz­ing and unex­plain­able at night while camp­ing: “a blood-red orb ris­ing up behind some sage­brush, shoot­ing off into space.” As for­mer patrol leader Bill Hoff­man told McBride, “It was­n’t true at all. As far as I can tell, it was a com­plete fab­ri­ca­tion.” Nev­er­the­less, Spiel­berg had the idea for his next film, and he was bet­ter equipped this time. Here again is McBride:

The mak­ing of Fire­light was made pos­si­ble by the prizes Steve had won for Escape to Nowhere in the state ama­teur film con­test. “He won a whole bunch of stuff,” his father recalls. “He won a 16mm Kodak movie cam­era. I said, ‘Steve, I can’t afford to spend mon­ey for film for 16mm. Let’s swap it for an 8mm, and we’ll get a good one.’ So we bought a real good Bolex-H8 Deluxe, the big cam­era that was built on a 16mm frame, but cut for 8mm, and so you could get 400-foot reels on it. It had tele­pho­to lens­es, sin­gle-frame motion, and slow-motion, so he could make all kinds of stuff with that. And he won a whole library of books rel­a­tive to film­mak­ing. he loved those books, but he said, ‘I’m going to donate them to the school library. I don’t need them. I have the feel for it.’ As a gift for being that gen­er­ous, I said, ‘OK, we’re going to up the ante.’ We bought a Bolex pro­jec­tor, and we also bought a sound sys­tem. It was the first sound sys­tem out for con­sumer use, a Bolex Sonoriz­er.”

The scenes in Fire­light were shot in 1963 in var­i­ous loca­tions around Phoenix, includ­ing the Spiel­berg home. The actors dubbed their lines after­ward. The movie is set in a fic­tion­al Ari­zona town, with a sto­ry that is in some ways sim­i­lar to Close Encoun­ters. It involves an unhap­pi­ly mar­ried man obsessed with UFOs who tries to get skep­tics to believe in him. As the sto­ry moves along, a squad of Nation­al Guards­men, a dog, and a lit­tle girl played by Spiel­berg’s sis­ter Nan­cy all get abduct­ed by aliens. For spe­cial effects Spiel­berg built a papi­er-mâché moun­tain and used the mul­ti­ple expo­sure fea­ture on his new cam­era to super­im­pose the glow­ing “space­ships” over scenes. McBride offers his assess­ment of the film:

Fire­light intro­duces the themes of super­nat­ur­al intrud­ers, sub­ur­ban alien­ation and escape, bro­ken fam­i­lies and abduct­ed chil­dren, sci­en­tif­ic adven­ture, and spir­i­tu­al renew­al that would become famil­iar in Spiel­berg’s mature work. The young cou­ple on the run in Fire­light also point toward the Richard Drey­fuss and Melin­da Dil­lon char­ac­ters in Close Encoun­ters, and the ear­li­er film’s UFO expert, Howard Richards, is an old­er, more fal­li­ble, less bliss­ful ver­sion of François Truf­faut’s Lacombe. But unlike Close Encoun­ters, which rad­i­cal­ly depart­ed from sci-fi movie tra­di­tion to depict its extrater­res­tri­als as benign rather than men­ac­ing, Fire­light derives in large part from the mood of anx­i­ety and para­noia that char­ac­ter­ized the genre in the 1950s, when Spiel­berg became hooked on sci-fi.

Spiel­berg pre­miered Fire­light to a packed house of fam­i­ly, friends and curi­ous local res­i­dents at the Phoenix Lit­tle The­atre on March 24, 1964, when he was 17 years old. The film made a prof­it of one dol­lar. “I count­ed the receipts that night,” Spiel­berg 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.”

The day after the screen­ing, Spiel­berg moved to Cal­i­for­nia with his father, who was split­ting up with his moth­er. A few years lat­er, when he was show­ing his film work around Hol­ly­wood, Spiel­berg left two of the orig­i­nal reels from Fire­light with a pro­duc­er as an exam­ple of his work. Alas, just a week or so lat­er the pro­duc­tion com­pa­ny went out of busi­ness and the pro­duc­er dis­ap­peared with Spiel­berg’s reels. All that remains of Fire­light are frag­ments, includ­ing the one above.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ter­ry Gilliam: The Dif­fer­ence Between Kubrick (Great Film­mak­er) and Spiel­berg (Less So)

Steven Spiel­berg on the Genius of Stan­ley Kubrick

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