The Student Movie Makers

Blood seeped through the student's shirt as he lay writhing on a suburban street in Evanston, Ill.. Sirens screamed as an ambulance rushed to the scene, emergency bandages and tourniquets held at the ready. A policeman ran toward the accident--and then stopped in horror and anger. Glaring at the onlooker with the camera, who made no attempt to help the sufferer, he roared: "What do you think you're doing?" "Making a movie," came the mild reply. Suddenly aware that the blood looked suspiciously like ketchup, the cop sighed: "Everybody's making a movie."

Well, almost everybody. The incident happened a few blocks from Northwestern University; both the cameraman and his ketchup-doused victim were undergraduates at the school. But the scene could have been almost anywhere in the U.S. Students in college, high school--and now in some cases even grade school--are turning to films as a form of artistic self-expression as naturally as Eskimos turn to soapstone carving.

Hammy Classmates. Dozens of U.S. high schools now offer at least a rudimentary course in film appreciation, while more than 100 colleges and universities have moviemaking as an accepted part of their curriculums. Even where no classes are available, students by the hundreds are forming their own film clubs and making movies with handheld 8-mm. cameras, portable tape recorders, and the unpaid acting services of hammy fellow classmates or wary adults.

The reason for this celluloid explosion is the widespread conviction among young people that film is the most vital modern art form. Jean Cocteau believed that movies could never become a true art until the materials to make them were as inexpensive as pencil and paper. The era he predicted is rapidly arriving. Students can now make a short film for as little as $25, and a workable 16-mm. camera can be had for as little as $40. McLuhan-age educators, moreover, welcome this form of creative endeavor. Some foresee the day when film training will be an accepted and universal part of education. Says Father John Culkin, head of Fordham's Center for Communications: "Students ought to be learning the fundamentals in grade school--early high school at the latest--so that when they finally get to college, they have an opportunity to blossom out, without worrying about the mechanics."

Student film making approaches professional quality and quantity at the college level, where three big state universities clearly outstrip the rest: the University of Southern California, U.C.L.A., and New York University. All three have full-scale curriculums leading to bachelor's and master's degrees, professional-level studios, sophisticated faculty guidance. At U.S.C., for example, resident teachers of the school's 350 cinema majors include Hollywood Directors King Vidor and Norman Taurog, while Jerry Lewis is an "adjunct professor." U.C.L.A., which has an enrollment of over 300, is about to complete a $2,500,000 film-production center, including several tons of first-quality equipment purchased at an auction from the old Hal Roach Studios. Twenty-five hundred miles away, the N.Y.U. film school (enrollment: 250) lacks the advantages of California sunshine and nearby Hollywood expertise. But it does have a topflight staff of 27, headed by Robert Saudek, onetime producer of TV's Omnibus.

Plethora of Parodies. All three schools have been around long enough --U.S.C., the nation's oldest, was founded in 1929--to have developed more or less distinctive styles of their own. U.C.L.A. favors and encourages free-form experimentation. Moviemakers at rival U.S.C. try to put a high professional gloss on their products and are very Hollywood-conscious--so much so that one professor recently complained about the plethora of student parodies of Bonnie and Clyde. N.Y.U. students, by contrast, tend to turn out deliberately rough-hewn works with the grainy look of neorealistic, cinema-verite documentaries--a reflection, perhaps, of the fact that most of their films are shot on location in the streets of nearby Greenwich Village.

In some cities, children are learning to make movies at the same time that they are mastering the ABCs. In Lexington, Mass., for example, Yvonne Andersen, 36, runs an extracurricular workshop where children aged five to twelve are introduced to the rudiments of animated film. Their work shows a freedom, verve and humor that Disney might have admired. Their short subjects (four minutes maximum) range from settings of favorite nursery rhymes to imaginative moralistic fables like The Amazing Colossal Man, written and produced by a dozen workshoppers. In this no-nonsense parable, suspicious earthlings annihilate a peace envoy from outer space.

More typical--and more demanding --is the once-a-week film class at Northern Valley Regional High School in Demarest, N.J. Taught by English Teacher Rodney Sheratsky and Documentary Film Maker Eric Camiel, the course includes esthetic theory, film history, and exercises in cinematography, cutting and editing. Students, most of whom borrow their parents' 8-mm. equipment, are required to make one filmlet a week, which is subjected by Camiel to scathing professional criticism. He can be high in his praise for efforts that show both imagination and care--and many do. One of his students this year did a four-minute movie on the theme of pregnancy, using dense filtered colors, quick cuts and even a touch of Underground technique: he doctored the film stock with scratches to help create an abstract effect. The point is not that any of the students are embryonic Eisensteins, says Sheratsky, but that "these kids, all of them, are thinking film."

Erosbods. Students who think film best have at least one chance every year to display their wares to professional scrutiny at the annual National Student Film Festival. Jointly sponsored by the National Student Association, the Motion Picture Association of America and Manhattan's Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, the festival last month showed entries from 37 colleges, which were judged by a panel that included Directors Norman Jewison (In the Heat of the Night), Irving Kershner (The Flim Flam Man), and Producer Philip Leacock (Gun-smoke). The prizewinners in the contest's four major categories:

>DRAMA: THX 1138 4EB, by George Lucas, 23, of U.S.C., is a sci-fi chiller that looks at a cowardly new world where two varieties of humanoids, the "erosbods" and "clinicbods," wander through dark corridors and light-pierced concrete caverns in pursuit of the only truly human character, "THX" (pronounced with a lisp). A vision of 1984, it evoked in 15 minutes a future world in which man is enslaved by computers and TV monitors. Although portentous in theme, THX impressed the judges with its technical virtuosity: Lucas shot his future-oriented film entirely in present-day Los Angeles--much as Jean-Luc Godard, one of his cinematic heroes, shot the nightmare-future Alphaville, entirely in contemporary Paris.

>ANIMATION: Marcello, I'm So Bored by John Milius, 23, of U.S.C., begins with an epitaph from the late Erroll Flynn: "I believe I'm a very colorful character in a rather drab age." It then flashes through a quick-cutting kaleidoscope of mindless pleasure seekers--motorcyclists, teenyboppers, discotheque dancers--accompanied by a sound track of sighs and despairing screams. One judge saw in the eight-minute film a viable cinematic equivalent of pop art.

> DOCUMENTARY: In Kienholz on Exhibit, by June Steel, of U.C.L.A., the camera roams for a leisurely 21 minutes over an exhibit at the Los Angeles County Museum by Sculptor Edward Kienholz (TIME, April 8, 1966). Then an off-camera interviewer deftly questions a series of museumgoers, whose reactions are even more of a social comment than the artist's work. A pair of sclerotic city elders label the show disgusting; an appreciative young Negro in a golfing hat sizes up the exhibit as "it's, like, sad."

> EXPERIMENTAL: Cut, by Chris Parker, of the University of Iowa, is a difficult abstract work, with no apparent plot or sequence, which talks elliptically of Greek myths and their significance to film makers: "Film is like the snake, the worm Ourobouros, and like all continuous forms can be symbolic of evil." Montages of images cascade across the screen for 21 minutes while Narrator Parker reads the directions from the script ("Medium Shot: Wife on Ferris wheel, seat-five. Close up wife's frightened face . . .") in order to remind viewers that they are watching a film. The chaos is astonishingly well photographed and edited--and, far more than most of the other entries, displays a debt to the non-styles and nongoals of the cinematic Underground.

Aspiring Updikes. On the strength of his first prize in the current festival, U.C.L.A.'s Lucas has been given a contract to expand THX into a full-length film under the guidance of Warners-Seven Arts Producer Francis Ford Coppola (You're a Big Boy Now), who graduated from U.C.L.A. in 1967. That kind of instant success is the exception. The rule is instant obscurity. A case in point is Marty Scorsese, 25, an N.Y.U. film-school graduate whose It's Not Just You, Murray won a first prize at the 1965 student festival--and might just well be the best university movie ever made. A 14-minute comic synopsis of low-class urban life that is vaguely reminiscent of Fellini's work, Murray is the picaresque tale of a vulpine conman who rises from petty-ante rumrunner to gunsel for "the Mob."

The film had a brief Manhattan art-house booking, and Scorsese was able to raise $24,000 for a 95-minute feature titled I Call First. Evocative of Marty, it cuts off a slice of life about an Italian-American bank teller who falls in love with a girl he meets on the Staten Island ferry, deserts her when he discovers that she was once raped, and returns to the vulgar bachelor world of his street-corner cronies. Flawed and immature in plot and structure, First nonetheless has an exact sense of the Lower Manhattan milieu and some authentic and hard-edged dialogue--but almost no commercial possibilities. Scorsese, who put up $6,000 of his own savings to direct the movie, is now filming TV commercials in London.

Like the products of the Underground-film world, campus movies are something of an acquired taste--which is one good reason why they have a limited commercial future. More than that, the bulk of them are simply the exuberant and untalented posturings of youth, which have no more claim to lasting attention than the sophomore poems and short stories turned out every year by aspiring collegiate Salingers and Updikes. Occasionally, of course, a gifted student like Coppola will graduate to the ranks of Hollywood professionals. In the long run, though, the contemporary enthusiasm for student films is likely to turn out a far greater number of enlightened appreciators than new creators. That in itself could be a big boon to movies: whether cinema grows as an art form depends largely upon whether film-educated audiences demand better things of it.

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