Two Student Films

SEVERAL months ago, Felipe Herba was speculating grimly about the fate of his then-uncompleted I'm A Stranger Here Myself: it seemed the actors hated him and Herba couldn't locate them to finish shooting. More recently, the lovely and admirable star of Lady Jane Talks to the Director, Jane Manopoli, told me that her experience in film-making had been nerve-wracking--she didn't know what she was doing and director Peter Coonradt kept changing his mind.

Would-be actors resent finding themselves employed as objects, and the only consolation I can offer is that they have nonetheless played a major part in an intensely personal, equally harrowing, romance between the film-maker and what his mind projects through a camera onto a screen. Both films employ the simplest dramatic premises as foundation for an exploration into the diverse often-abstract preoccupations of their auteurs. Both Lady Jane and Stranger are as much about their creators as their subjects. They prove if nothing else, that the films of people whose cameras are too small for anyone but themselves to run intimately mirror the force of that director-cameraman-cutter.

Both Herba and Coonradt have avoided the central pitfall of director's cinema, that of self-indulgence. Lady Jane, while maintaining a tenuous balance between two realities, one conventional and one dreamlike, remains always rigorously disciplined with careful attention paid to continuity and (truly superb) rhythm in its editing. Coonradt instantly establishes the premise, Jane's struggle to maintain a diffuse personality against her singularly insensitive room-mate and the other girls in her dorm, with an opening shot of Jane outside which surprisingly pulls back to reveal the other girls inside. Equally powerful in its economy is Jane's first assertion: the girls run en masse upstairs and Jane follows trailing a flight behind them; we think she is following them but she turns right to her room instead of following the girls left.

COONRADT here is both defining the personality of his character and attempting to undermine the audience's tendency to accept an all-too-conventional reality. Even the beautifully photographed, frequently superimposed dream sequences are at first expressionistic, as we expect film-dreams to be, then increasingly mechanical and artificial, Coonradt demonstrating that Jane's reality is imposed by the camera and the way the director moves it. The last sequence, a magnificent three-minute series of near-identical close-ups of Jane, serves as a direct confrontation of actress-character and director-alter ego. Coonradt projects himself through Jane and dares the audience to watch it: both director and actress are triumphant and, simultaneously, supremely vulnerable.

On a different tack, Herba's I'm A Stranger Here Myself describes a boy's unmotivated need for an unspecified amount of money, and more properly investigates the relationship between actors, film, color, and light. Constantly in motion from interiors to exteriors in single hand-held takes, Herba's film makes an intense observation of how a given light setting will appear different under different conditions: the boy is walking down an overexposed street, he ducks into his car, the camera ducking with him, and is suddenly in perfect exposure.

Herba's central purpose is best defined by shots where the boy alters the light conditions of a room by playing meditatively with the settings on a three-way bulb. Herba makes difficult things look easy; Stranger, for its effortless appearance, is remarkably stylized, proving an entirely successful blend of hand-held and static movement, zoom and fixed-focal-length photography, day-and-night and interior-and-exterior footage--a true synthesis which creates a film reality of its own.

These two excellent films are of as much value to us as they are to their makers, in their ability to teach how their directors see the world; they represent by far the most honest student film-making in America today.