The Winter Hell of Student Filmmaking
IT TURNED OUT THE WEATHER DIDN’T COOPERATE.
Close up of a man in bare feet and sandals, walking over snow wearing just a bed sheet. It’s supposed to be a toga, and he’s Jesus Christ walking across the water, get it? Actually he’s a hippie pretending to be Jesus, to get the redneck farmer to smoke hash with Him — to turn on, tune in and drop out. The hippie friend in my student movie got nothing out of it except pneumonia, while I got lucky in some film festivals. Stephen managed to get a job as a corrections officer in the Kingston Penn, while just as ironically perhaps, I wound up teaching film.
My 1970 student effort was my last fictional narrative, and I started making other films; most of my students, though, wanted to tell dramatic stories. Despite showing them a wide variety of films, the majority defaulted to Hollywood. Some preferred the stylish narratives of European cinema, with their weighty themes and symbolism. Student versions could sometimes be pretentious. The Hollywood mini-features, on the other hand, belied the fact their directors usually needed budgets a thousand times larger.
Take, for example, Brandon. He and his partner, Ryan, were fascinated with an actual mob hit outside Montreal, where some guy had been chased through the woods and whacked. The students had concocted a narrative, but all I remember was the pursuit. They were consumed with laying down tracks in a snowy forest for the camera dolly, in order to follow whacker and whackee seamlessly. I admired their enthusiasm, but suggested letting ten pounds of air out of the tires, wedging the camera in the window with foam, and taking advantage of their car’s suspension. Just find a road running alongside nearby woods, I advised, and you’ll save equipment rental costs and snow problems. Nope — not possible. They’d already chosen a spot in a secluded forest miles north. It turned out the weather didn’t cooperate, the snow was three feet deep, and the camera froze. The dolly shot took days. It was supposed to be a portion of screen time, but took most of the film’s budget. The story suffered, and even though they had a memorable chase scene, I felt my teaching had failed.
Film students hated winter. Fall was spent learning the basics, but the major 16 mm project had to be shot in the New Year. Some had success with exteriors, but others, like Melissa and her partners, Jessica and Jennifer, wanted winter as the main setting. She had a distant relative who had survived the Eastern Front in World War 2, and prompted by her boyfriend’s access to explosives, wanted to recreate the Battle of Stalingrad — or part of it. They would get ten friends to act, rent authentic WW 2 uniforms, and collect rifles. The actors were to run across a snowy field, trying to avoid her boyfriend’s pyrotechnics, while dropping occasionally to shoot.
I assumed they’d find a safe space on the city’s outskirts, near somewhere to get food, warm up, and use the facilities. Wrong. They had a location, but it was up north in the middle of nowhere. Apparently, it not only had to look authentic, but be authentic. I reminded Melissa they were making a film — that it’s okay to trick the audience — but she and her boyfriend stuck to their guns. When her partners finally bolted, Melissa had to join another group, one that wasn’t interested in shrapnel wounds. But why wasn’t I getting through to these people? Again I questioned what I was doing.
Then there was Octavio. He had recently emigrated from Spain and was living with his older sister and husband. Since he didn’t know anybody, they offered to act in his film. A fan of Luis Bunuel’s symbolic cinema, Octavio scripted a dream sequence in which a man has to carry a cross. He decided to get this scene out of the way first, before shooting his interiors. In it, his brother-in-law can be seen struggling with an enormous cross on his back, up a hill, through waist-deep snow. It bordered on slapstick. Octavio’s sister sat in the car and complained, while her husband froze outside. The irritable pair quit soon after, leaving poor Octavio with rushes that made no sense. I convinced him it was serendipity — he could work it into something else. He produced a meta-narrative on the hell of winter student filmmaking, as obscure as Bunuel’s surrealism. Though the audience sat dumfounded, Octavio overcame great odds. He didn’t give up, and as for teaching, neither did I.
© February 2022 by Richard Hancox
