Short Films, Great Directors

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Steven Allan Spielberg (born December 18, 1946) is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, video game designer, and studio entrepreneur. In a career of more than four decades, Spielberg's films have covered many themes and genres. Spielberg's early science-fiction and adventure films were seen as an archetype of modern Hollywood blockbuster filmmaking. In later years, his films began addressing such issues as the Holocaust, slavery, war and terrorism. He is considered one of the most popular and influential filmmakers in the history of cinema.[5] He is also one of the co-founders of the DreamWorks movie studio. Spielberg won the Academy Award for Best Director for Schindler's List (1993) and Saving Private Ryan (1998). Three of Spielberg's films—Jaws (1975), E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), and Jurassic Park (1993)—achieved box office records, each becoming the highest-grossing film made at the time. To date, the unadjusted gross of all Spielberg-directed films exceeds $8.5 billion worldwide. Forbes puts Spielberg's wealth at $3.0 billion.

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Amblin' is a short film released in 1968. It is the first completed film shot by Steven Spielberg on 35mm. The film is a short love story set during the hippie era of the late '60s, about a young couple making their way through the desert to a paradisical beach. The film is silent but is accompanied by an acoustic guitar-led soundtrack from beginning to end.

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A young guy, carrying a closely guarded guitar case, hooks up with a free spirited girl when hitchhiking across the desert in southern California en route to the Pacific coast. Along the way, the man engaged the girl in an olive spitting contest and the girl initiates the guy into the joys of cannabis smoking and sex in a sleeping bag. Following the scene alluding to sexual intercourse, the young man is seen walking on the median of a road, which is perhaps symbolic. As the pair reach the beach, the guy frolics in the surf and the girl checks out the contents of his guitar case: a suit and tie, toothpaste, mouthwash, a roll of toilet paper and a copy of Arthur C. Clarke's The City and the Stars. The girl smiles in bemusement, perhaps sensing all along that her companion was not the quintessential hippie that he appeared to be. She then proceeds to stand up and leave the beach, leaving the man behind.

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In 1977, 22-year-old James Cameron was a truck driver who wrote science fiction and painted small models. He saw Star Wars and was upset that someone else created a film that he felt he should have made. He studied how the effects in Star Wars were done and practiced dolly shots in his living room. He also went to the library at University of South Carolina to study special effects. Cameron convinced several local dentists to provide an investment of $20,000, and he wrote a screenplay for a short film with a friend. He produced a 12-minute short that featured a stop-motion fight scene between a woman in an exoskeleton suit and an extraterrestrial robot, which he had built himself. Cameron hoped to present the short to studios to make a feature film, but he was unsuccessful. The effort did land Cameron a job building miniature starships for Roger Corman's film Battle Beyond the Stars, and he eventually became one of Corman's visual effects specialists.

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Xenogenesis is a 1978 science fiction short film directed by Canadian director James Cameron. A woman and an engineered man are sent in a gigantic sentient starship to search space for a place to start a new life cycle. Raj decides to take a look around the ship. He comes across a gigantic robotic cleaner. Combat ensues.

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George Orson Welles (May 6, 1915 – October 10, 1985), best known as Orson Welles, was an American film director, actor, theatre director, screenwriter, and producer, who worked extensively in film, theatre, television after starting his career in radio drama. Orson Welles is noted for his innovative dramatic productions as well as his distinctive voice and personality. He was always an outsider to the studio system, and directed only 13 full-length film in his career, although his first feature film, Citizen Kane, is widely considered a seminal movie classic. While he struggled for creative control in the face of studios, many of his films were heavily edited and others left unreleased. His distinctive directorial style featured layered, nonlinear narrative forms, innovative uses of lighting such as chiaroscuro, unique camera angles, sound techniques borrowed from radio, deep focus shots, and long takes. He has been praised as a major creative force and as "the ultimate auteur."

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The Hearts of Age is the first film made by Orson Welles. The film is an eight-minute short, which he co-directed with William Vance in 1934. The film stars Welles' first wife, Virginia Nicholson, as well as Welles himself. He made the film while attending the Todd School for Boys, in Woodstock, Illinois, at the age of 19. The plot is a series of images loosely tied together, and is arguably influenced by surrealism. This once-rare film is easily seen today thanks to DVD extras and sites such as YouTube. Many point to it as an important precursor to Welles' first Hollywood film, Citizen Kane. Welles and Vance were college friends. The latter's only other film on record is another student short - an adaptation of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in 1932.

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David Keith Lynch (born January 20, 1946) is an American filmmaker, television director, visual artist, musician and occasional actor. Known for his surrealist films, he has developed his own unique cinematic style, which has been dubbed "Lynchian", and which is characterized by its dream imagery and meticulous sound design. The surreal, and in many cases violent, elements to his films have earned them the reputation that they "disturb, offend or mystify" their audiences.

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1966 Six Figures Getting Sick (Six Times) Originally untitled, "Six Men Getting Sick" is a one-minute color animated film that consists of a continuous loop shown on a sculptured screen of three human shaped figures (based on casts of Lynch's own head as done by Jack Fisk) that intentionally distorted the film. Lynch's animation depicted six people getting sick: their stomachs grew and their heads would catch fire. Lynch made this film during his second year at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art. The school held an experimental painting and sculpture exhibit every year and Lynch entered his work in the Spring of 1966. The animated film was shown on "an Erector-set rig on top of the projector so that it would take the finished film through the projector, way up to the ceiling and then back down, so the film would keep going continuously in a loop. And then I hung the sculptured screen and moved the projector back till just what I wanted was on the screen and the rest fell back far enough to disappear" (Chris Rodley, editor, Lynch on Lynch). Lynch showed the whole thing with the sound of a siren as accompaniment. The film cost $200 and was not intended to have any successors. It was merely an experiment on Lynch's part because he wanted to see his paintings move. (1 minute animation loop repeated 6 times)

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Christopher Jonathan James Nolan (born July 30, 1970) is a British-American film director, screenwriter and producer. He received serious notice after his second feature Memento (2000), which he wrote and directed based on a story idea by his brother, Jonathan Nolan. Jonathan went to co-write later scripts with him, including the Batman series and The Prestige. He also first collaborated with Wally Pfister, who would photograph all his subsequent films. After directing Insomnia (2002), Nolan pitched an idea for a reboot of the Batman film franchise to Warner Brothers, eventually making a successful trilogy. Inception (2010) was an original screenplay by Nolan, a heist film set in the world of "shared dreaming." Nolan co-founded Syncopy Films with his wife, Emma Thomas, and they have produced all his films since The Prestige (2006). Nolan has also worked with screenwriter David S. Goyer, film editor Lee Smith, composers David Julyan and Hans Zimmer, special effects coordinator Chris Corbould, and actors Christian Bale, Cillian Murphy, Jeremy Theobald, Tom Hardy, Ken Watanabe, and Michael Caine. Nolan spent his childhood in the United States and England, and later studied English literature at University College, London, which he chose specifically for its film-making facilities. There he made a series of shorts in the college film society, and met the friends with whom he would later make Following (1998), his independent début feature.

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Doodlebug (1997) is a three minute film about a man chasing an insect with a shoe around a grotty flat, only to discover on killing it that it is a miniature of himself: seconds after he himself is crushed by a larger version of himself. Nolan wrote, directed, co-produced, photographed, and edited the film. Jeremy Theobald was listed as "the men" in the credits; he would later play the protagonist in Following (1998), Nolan's first feature.

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Sir Charles Spencer "Charlie" Chaplin, KBE (16 April 1889 – 25 December 1977) was an English comic actor, film director and composer best known for his work during the silent film era. He became the most famous film star in the world before the end of World War I. Chaplin used mime, slapstick and other visual comedy routines, and continued well into the era of the talkies, though his films decreased in frequency from the end of the 1920s. His most famous role was that of The Tramp, which he first played in the Keystone comedy Kid Auto Races at Venice in 1914. From the April 1914 one-reeler Twenty Minutes of Love onwards he was writing and directing most of his films, by 1916 he was also producing them, and from 1918 he was even composing the music for them. With Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and D. W. Griffith, he co-founded United Artists in 1919. Chaplin was one of the most creative and influential personalities of the silent-film era. He was influenced by his predecessor, the French silent film comedian Max Linder, to whom he dedicated one of his films. His working life in entertainment spanned over 75 years, from the Victorian stage and the music hall in the United Kingdom as a child performer, until close to his death at the age of 88. His high-profile public and private life encompassed both adulation and controversy. Chaplin's identification with the left ultimately forced him to resettle in Europe during the McCarthy era in the early 1950s.

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The Rink, a silent film from 1916, was Charlie Chaplin's eighth film for Mutual Films. It co-starred Edna Purviance, Eric Campbell, Henry Bergman and Albert Austin. It is best known for showcasing Chaplin's roller skating skills.

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George Walton Lucas, Jr. (born May 14, 1944) is an American film producer, screenwriter, director, and entrepreneur. He is the founder, chairman and chief executive of Lucasfilm. He is best known as the creator of the space opera franchise Star Wars and the archaeologist-adventurer character Indiana Jones. Lucas is one of the American film industry's most financially successful directors/producers, with an estimated net worth of $3.2 billion as of 2011.

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Electronic Labyrinth: THX-1138 4EB is a 1967 short film directed by George Lucas while he attended the University of Southern California. The movie exists in 16mm reference print, on videocassette with a run time of 15 minutes, and on the special edition DVD of THX 1138, Lucas' 1971 theatrical feature-length version of the short. In 2010, this film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". The protagonist, whose name is "THX 1138 4EB", is shown running through several passageways. It is soon discovered that THX is escaping his community. The government uses computers and cameras to track down THX and attempt to stop him; however, they fail. THX 1138 4EB escapes through a door and runs off into the sunset. The government sends their condolences to YYO, THX's mate, as THX is now pronounced dead.
The film utilized subterranean accessways and parking garages at Los Angeles International Airport to depict an underground city in a dystopian future.
The USC program guide that accompanied the premiere said the film was a "nightmare impression of a world in which a man is trying to escape a computerized world which constantly tracks his movements".[citation needed]
The film won the United States National Student Film Festival in 1968, in the Drama category.

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Timothy William "Tim" Burton(born August 25, 1958) is an American film director, film producer, writer and artist. He is famous for dark, quirky-themed movies such as Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands, The Nightmare Before Christmas, Ed Wood, Sleepy Hollow, Corpse Bride and Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, and for blockbusters such as Pee-wee's Big Adventure, Batman, Batman Returns, Planet of the Apes, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, 9 and Alice in Wonderland, his most recent film, that was the second highest-grossing film of 2010 as well as the ninth highest-grossing film of all time. Among Burton's many collaborators are Johnny Depp, who became a close friend since their first film together, musician Danny Elfman (who has composed for all but five of the films Burton has directed and/or produced) and domestic partner Helena Bonham Carter. He also wrote and illustrated the poetry book The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy & Other Stories, published in 1997, and a compilation of his drawings, entitled The Art of Tim Burton, was released in 2009. Burton has directed 14 films as of 2010, and has produced 10 as of 2009. His next films are an adaptation of the soap opera Dark Shadows, scheduled to be released on May 11, 2012, and a remake of his 1984 short, Frankenweenie, scheduled to be released on October 5, 2012.

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Vincent is a 1982 stop-motion short film written, designed and directed by Tim Burton and Rick Heinrichs. At approximately six minutes in length, there is currently no individual release of the film. It can be found on the 2008 Special Edition and Collector's Edition DVDs of The Nightmare Before Christmas as a bonus feature and on the Cinema16 DVD American Short Films. The film is narrated by actor Vincent Price, a lifelong idol and inspiration for Burton. From this relationship, Price would go on to appear in Burton's Edward Scissorhands. Vincent Price later said that the film was "the most gratifying thing that ever happened. It was immortality—better than a star on Hollywood Boulevard."
Vincent is the story of a young boy, Vincent Malloy, who pretends to be like the actor Vincent Price (who narrates the film). He is obsessed with the tales of Edgar Allan Poe, and it is his detachment from reality when reading them that leads to his delusions that he is in fact a tortured artist, deprived of the woman he loves, mirroring certain parts of Poe's "The Raven". The film ends with Vincent feeling terrified of being tortured by the going-ons of his make-believe world, quoting "The Raven" as he falls to the floor in frailty, believing himself to be dead.

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Martin Charles Scorsese is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, actor, and film historian. In 1990 he founded The Film Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to film preservation, and in 2007 he founded the World Cinema Foundation. He is a recipient of the AFI Life Achievement Award for his contributions to the cinema, and has won Oscars, Emmys, Golden Globes, BAFTAs, and DGA Awards. Scorsese's body of work addresses such themes as Italian American identity, Roman Catholic concepts of guilt and redemption, machismo, modern crime and violence. Scorsese is hailed as one of the most significant and influential American filmmakers of all time, directing landmark films such as Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and Goodfellas – all of which he collaborated on with actor and close friend Robert De Niro. He won the Academy Award for Best Director for The Departed, having been nominated a previous five times.

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The Big Shave is a 1967 six-minute short film directed by Martin Scorsese. It is also known as Viet '67. Peter Bernuth stars as the recipient of the title shave, repeatedly shaving away hair, then skin, in an increasingly bloody and graphic bathroom scene. Many film critics have interpreted the young man's process of self-mutilation as a metaphor for the self-destructive involvement of the United States in the Vietnam War, prompted by the film's alternative title. The music accompanying the film is Bunny Berigan's "I Can't Get Started", recorded in 1939. The film was produced at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts for a film production class called Sight & Sound Film.

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Stanley Kubrick (July 26, 1928 – March 7, 1999) was an American film director, writer, producer, and photographer who lived in England during most of the last four decades of his career. Kubrick was noted for the scrupulous care with which he chose his subjects, his slow method of working, the variety of genres he worked in, his technical perfectionism, his reluctance to talk about his films, and his reclusiveness. He maintained almost complete artistic control, making movies according to his own whims and time constraints, but with the rare advantage of big-studio financial support for all his endeavors. Kubrick's films are characterized by a formal visual style and meticulous attention to detail. His later films often have elements of surrealism and expressionism and often lack structured linear narrative. His films are frequently described as slow and methodical, and are often perceived as a reflection of his obsessive and perfectionist nature. He worked in a wide variety of genres: science-fiction, horror, period piece and war film. However, there are recurring themes in all his works, notably man's inhumanity to man. While often viewed as expressing an ironic pessimism, some critics feel his films contain a cautious optimism when viewed more carefully. The film that first brought him attention from many critics was Paths of Glory, the first of three films of his about the dehumanizing effects of war. Many of Kubrick's movies initially met with lukewarm reception, only to be acclaimed years later as masterpieces that had a seminal influence on later generations of filmmakers. Considered groundbreaking was 2001: A Space Odyssey, noted for being one of the most scientifically realistic and visually innovative science-fiction films ever made while also maintaining an enigmatic non-linear storyline. He voluntarily withdrew his film A Clockwork Orange from Great Britain, after it was accused of inspiring copycat crimes which in turn resulted in threats against Kubrick's family. Authors Anthony Burgess (eventually) and Stephen King (immediately) were unhappy with Kubrick's adaptations of their novels A Clockwork Orange and The Shining respectively; both authors became involved with subsequent stage or TV adaptations. His films were largely successful at the box office, although Barry Lyndon performed poorly in the United States. All of Kubrick's films from the mid-1950s onward, except The Shining, were nominated for Oscars, Golden Globes, or BAFTAs. Although he was nominated for an Academy Award as a screenwriter and director on several occasions, his only personal win was for the special effects in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Even though all his films, apart from the first two, were adapted from novels or short stories, his works have been described by Jason Ankeny and others as "original and visionary". Although some critics, notably Andrew Sarris and Pauline Kael, frequently disparaged Kubrick's work, Ankeny describes Kubrick as one of the most "universally acclaimed and influential directors of the postwar era" with a "standing unique among the filmmakers of his day."

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Day of the Fight is a 1951 American short subject documentary film shot in black-and-white and also the first picture directed by Stanley Kubrick. Kubrick financed the film himself, and it is based on an earlier photo feature he had done as a photographer for Look magazine in 1949.
Day Of The Fight shows Irish-American middleweight boxer Walter Cartier during the height of his career, on the day of a fight with black middleweight Bobby James, which took place on April 17, 1950.
The film opens with a short section on boxing's history, and then follows Cartier through his day, as he prepares for the 10 P.M. bout that night. He eats breakfast in his West 12th Street apartment in Greenwich Village, then goes to early mass and eats lunch at his favorite restaurant. At 4 P.M., he starts preparations for the fight. By 8 P.M., he is waiting in his dressing room at Laurel Gardens in Newark, New Jersey for the fight to begin.
We then see the fight itself, where he comes out victorious in a short match.