BSA 106 (Screen Arts) Semester 2 Week 3 : The Short Films of George Lucas
This week we looked at some short films that George Lucas made during his time in film school. The first, and shortest, is Freiheit.
Freiheit is a three minute short film in which we follow a student's attempt to escape over the Berlin border. Mostly the film is just him running around; this is boring. Then he is shot. As he lays dying we get a voice over about freedom. It's a
very simple and shallow film that I did not enjoy. Lucas uses some frantic cutting and still images, but these are short lived and not particularly effective.
His second short film is Electronic Labyrinth THX 1138: 4EB, a fifteen minute short film in which a guy tries to escape a scientific institution, he achieves this goal. In my opinion it's fifteen minutes wasted, there is no real dialogue and any plot was very hard for me to grasp. The dialogue that is present is very hard to discern and constant. The worst part about this film for me was the sound design, which was mainly beeps, boops and other electronic sounds, combined with distorted human voices. The only thing that I took away from this film was that they put a lot of effort into the costumes, props and locations. The film has a consistent aesthetic and sense of scale not often seen in student films. Somehow someone saw this and thought it should be a feature length film, so we also watched the trailer for that - now simply called THX 1138.
The trailer looks like the movie is a huge improvement over the short, the cinematography and production design are both and improvement, you can actually hear the dialogue, it looks like there is a solid story and the awful sounds from before seem to be thing of the past.
It still doesn't look like something I ever want to see, but maybe that's personal preference.
Freiheit is a three minute short film in which we follow a student's attempt to escape over the Berlin border. Mostly the film is just him running around; this is boring. Then he is shot. As he lays dying we get a voice over about freedom. It's a
very simple and shallow film that I did not enjoy. Lucas uses some frantic cutting and still images, but these are short lived and not particularly effective.
Still from Freiheit (1966)
BTS of George Lucas on the set of THX 1138: 4EB (1967)
The trailer looks like the movie is a huge improvement over the short, the cinematography and production design are both and improvement, you can actually hear the dialogue, it looks like there is a solid story and the awful sounds from before seem to be thing of the past.
It still doesn't look like something I ever want to see, but maybe that's personal preference.
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