Early Films: Robert Rodriguez

POSTED BY Wesley Scoggins, 17 August 2008

This is a new feature that i'm going to start doing for the blog. I am going to track down Early Examples of a famous Filmmakers work, and showcase it here for you guys to see. I think this is going to be a very educational regular feature for many of you burdgeoning filmmakers out there to see how many of the Masters started their own careers.

To be able to see how many of our favorite filmmakers started out, and how their aesthetic choices had developed at so early in the career, and what they carried over and developed into their own films I think could be a very enlightening experience about how filmmakers development, and help us look at our own development as filmmakers a little better. So sit back, enjoy, and hopefully learn something useful.  

For our first entry into the world of the first films of some of our favorite directors is Bedhead, a 16mm, 8 minute short that Robert Rodriguez filmed in 1991 as a Student Filmmaker while attending the University of Texas at Austin. It not only won him early acclaim and many awards, but the money he won from some of the festivals helped him finance his feature length film "El Mariachi", which went on to start his career once it was noticed by Hollywood.

It's plot features smart children in strange situations, with interesting abilites as the primary characters, a theme he would go on to repeat in his later children's movies "Spy Kids" and "The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl". It is shot rather simply, in a style that takes advantage of the lack of sync-sound, allowing the story to be told completely in narration and out-of-shot voices. It's an excellent example of his philosophy of taking advantage of your surroundings, what you're shooting with, and what you have access to, a belief that I share with Rodriguez.

Stylistically, it has a lot of really interesting, very simple special effects, he obviously planned out his shots meticulously, when he wrote the script and had how he was going to do them in mind everytime. Everything from the stop motion animated hose shots, to the dummy being dragged, to the undercranked convulsing shots whenever the main chracter is grabbed by the Psychic powers. It all comes together great, and creates a convincing usage of her powers that obviously took into account what he knew he could accomplish with what he had.

One thing about the film that works so well isn't that every element about it is great, because really, every element isn't, the picture has lost a lot of resolution and gradiation from the transfer of the 16mm to Video Tape, and the sound is undersampled and crunchy and not of an extraordinarily high quality, but what makes us really overlook all of these elements individual shotfalls is in the CONVERGANCE of the elements. The sound and the image, while on their own aren't fantastic, work together amazingly well. He synced up and edited the sound and the image together to create a convincing reality for his characters to inhabit that comes out stunningly well. 

The style is cartoonish and highly stylized, he creates great cinematic images that look very artificial and cartoonish by his use of very cinematic lighting, the outlandishness of the characters  the scenario and the special effects, which works fantastically for what he was working for in the film. All the way from the animated opening with the up-tempo piano music that wouldn't sound out of place in a Nintendo game, to the cute ending that wraps up all the loose ends, Rodriguez creates a stylistically unified piece of comedy that works wonderfully as a live action cartoon.

A few funny little artistic touches that he added that don't appear on the surface to mean much, but make a lot of sense upon examination are the Cereal Boxes and the Bicycle Bell. The Cereal boxes look like they were painted white and hand illustrated by Rodriguez, creating this wild cartoonish box that automatically helps add character to the world that these characters inhabit, but also serves the perfectly logically need of keeping brand named products out of his short, keeping any tricky legal entanglements away from his film that he might want to make money off of. Then the Bicycle bell that you only see for a second, but that I love so much that he did, the fact that he removed the bells face so you could actually SEE the bell working and have something visual to sync up the "DING-DING" noise to works so well and makes the image far more interesting to look at, than simply a bell that you otherwise wouldn't see move, you now see all of the internal little mechanics working with the sound, creating a much better overall shot, once against showing us how the smallest detail can matter so much to how a film feels.

 Rodriguez effectively blends together the low budget grittiness and creative filmmaking of experimental classics such as Tetsuo: The Iron Man, and Eraserhead, with the comedic timing and artistic sensibilities of a Tex Avery short, and for how weird that combination sounds, it works amazingly well, and I definitely think that it's something that all Filmmakers can really appreciate, both for its simplicity of form, but also for it's efficient storytelling and use of screen time. Rodriguez definitely worked within his reach, making it so much stronger because he isn't working beyond his bounds, showing itself to be a well edited, well organized film. Rodriguez is definitely an example of a man that can do a lot with a little, something that really shows itself to be true with this short, and an example we can all take to heart as filmmakers. 

 

video, student film, early films, independent film, masters, 1991, 16mm, rodriguez, bedhead, career