Boy and Bicycle

Boy and Bicycle is an early Ridley Scott (Blade Runner, Black Hawk Down) short film, which he directed in 1965.

The basic plot is pretty simple, a teenage boy decides to skip out on school and rides around the city on his bicycle, and later when it rains he hides in someones shanty house. What makes this film interesting, besides its dollys and other cinematographic tricks, is how the dialogue works. Technically very little of the dialogue we hear is actually spoken, most of it is composed of the thoughts running through the boys head a la stream-of-conscientiousness. The story is all in the boy’s head as he images himself as the only person in the world. There are some really choice lines he thinks up like “You think how great it would be to walk in that wind.” and “I wonder why people are afraid of going into fish shops.” which are meant to mimic the silly things most people tend to think about each day, little useless things that have no context with what is actually happening around a person.

What this short film is actually about however, is the transition of growing up; as the boy says at the start he is now 16 and is suppose to be “adult” and such now. However the concept of being adult is very arbitrarily constructed. At the age of 18 you can get shot at in the military but in America you still cannot legally have alcohol. Nor can you rent a car until you are about 25. You do not wake up one day and suddenly become and adult, it is more one day you wake up and you have bills to pay and “adult” things to do like grocery shopping and going to work. Time however is not arbitrary, the time of childhood slips away so slow that no one releases that it has been dripping away until it is gone. Now you do not have to grow up per say, there are loads of people the never “grow up”, but you are still expected to at least be functional in the adult world. And that can be a very scarey thing for a teenager to face, hence the boy’s running away from school; running away from the world; running away from getting older. But you can never run away so everyone just has to make the best use of their time possible.

The start of this short film can be watched below:

Before Dawn

Before Dawn is a short Hungarian film about illegal immigration and refuges. It was direct by Balint Kenyeres in 2005. It was nominated for a Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 2005.

This short film is powerful more so because of what it does not do rather than what it does do. It leaves out all dialogue, has no soundtrack leaving the noises to be only natural (birds) or necessary (the truck horn) ones, it also laves out any real sense of a main character or figure. This detachment is to let the audience be more objective about their point of view on illegal immigration, if the film established a main character on either side of the issue than it would be making more of an argument via the intended emotional attachments it would have made the audience feel to a particular character or cause, where as not having a main character lets the audience see both sides (that these people give up near everything for a chance to go somewhere else) and the governmental side (which is that there are rules that have to be followed in order to leave, and these rules are meant for everyone’s protection). This short film is also shot in just one long take which furthers the detachment stance as it leaves the audience to decide which bits to focus more on rather than being told by the cinematographer.

However at the end there is one man who is left in the grass after everyone else is removed from the area. It is unknown if he somehow missed the truck and lost his family, or if he he was a mole that alerted the authorities to this location and is just dressed to blend in. The ambiguity of this person also lets the audience decide which side was right, since if he was an immigrant is shows they still have another chance to go on, and if he was a mole it shows that this problem is being closed down.

The Cinema 16 trailer clip for this short film can be seen below:

Doodlebug

Doodlebug is a black and white short film which was directed by Christopher Nolan in 1997. Doodlebug is his third short film after Tarantella (1989) and Larceny (1996). This short film actually reminded me of Citizen Kane, or at least the bit with all the mirrors. It is also a bit like the Seuss book Horton Hears a Who as it involves much smaller things being endangered by much larger things.

The perspective of this is from what appears to me a regular man, and then there is the smaller man he squishes and the larger man that squishes him. So the audience can never really be sure of where they are in the placement of the scale in terms of size, because the audience is made to think the first man is the human-sized one, but the other two look exactly like him so one cannot be sure.

This short film in that regard it like colonization, the countries that think they are so much larger and better than the others go and squish the littler countries – but empires never last. Which goes back to the size of the character, empires start out small, and then get much larger, but then one tiny thing can drive the whole of the empire apart again. They just get replaced by new powers it is a cycle that is also like the cycle of life, people start out small get bigger and think they can do whatever they want but there is always someone bigger and better than can come along and derail / squish you. As such this is also about karma and Buddhism, as when you harm something that harm will come back to you later on as the life value of all things is considered equal.