What came first, the hen or the egg? It’s not like I ponder over this extremely annoying question everyday. But for me, there has always been something fascinating about beginnings. How does life evolve, how do people build up a business and how does an artist start a new painting? When it comes to film, it is always interesting to look back at a director’s first – often shaky – steps with a camera on her/his shoulders. In this feature, I will look back at a certain director’s first film every month.
Unlike last month’s featured director here on FTS (Stanley Kubrick), Martin Scorsese was not a self-made DIY kind of director. Instead of starting all by himself, Scorsese chose the academic path of film making and attended the New York University film school, starting in 1960. It would take 16 years more for him to rise to true fame with Taxi Driver – let’s take a look at his first two ventures into cinematic territory.
Three years into Scorsese’s education at NYU, he attended a special summer workshop and got to direct his (supposedly) first short film, What’s a Nice Girl Like You Doing in a Place Like This?. Let’s call it Nice Girl for convenience. IMDB does state that his first film was Vesuvius VI, however I could find not information whatsoever on this short. Nice Girl is the story of a writer who finds himself obsessed with a random picture. It eats up his whole life and career – he can’t write, he can’t eat, he can’t sleep. A party and a girl redirect his focus on ‘the real world’; the writer gets married and is able to overcome his writer’s block. Later, he finds another picture and a new obsession arises. The short is filled with surreal elements and hip techniques like on-screen characters repeating off-screen dialogue, the camera focussing on objects and actions in a Wes Anderson kind of way and freeze frames.
Scorsese himself says of his very first film that:
“It had no depth at all, but it was a lot of fun.”
The iconic director knows his work well; it is very fun to watch and it really does not have much depth to it. However, the interesting way that Scorsese tells his story, the decent acting and the humor of the little film elevate it from many other directors’ first films.
A year later than Nice Girl, which won him a scholarship, Scorsese completed his second short film: It’s Not Just You, Murray. The 15-minute short is reminiscent of many of the director’s famous later works. Scorsese himself said that it’s basically GoodFellas with a smaller budget, as it tells the story of two Little Italy crooks that dabble with bootlegging and later on casinos. The intro is pretty much an early draft of the beginning scene in The Wolf of Wall Street, the raunchy, chain-smoking female side characters are classic Scorsese, as are the somewhat cowardly male (main) characters. Rhythmic editing and spot-on voice-over narration make for a fun short with more depth than Nice Girl. The techniques that the latter played with are more restricted in Murray, underlining the narrative instead of defining it.
Both of these films are greasy with Scorsese’s fingerprints, proving that after only three years of film school, the man already had the talent and knowledge to think of concepts that he’d reuse in his most popular feature films. The shorts are wonderful stand alone films that make sense and entertain, while at the same time being interesting specimen for studying and understanding a great director’s career.
Watch What’s a Nice Girl Like You Doing in a Place Like This?
Watch It’s Not Just You, Murray
