A Look at a 47-Year-Old Student Film
In 1976, a group of film school kids in New York got together to shoot a short film on their little Super 8 camera, presumably as a class project. They named the film after its lead actor, Larry Smith.
The film opens with a series of establishing shots of New York City before we are introduced to our star. We find him sitting in a wheelchair, visibly in pain.
We then flash back to how he ended up a cripple. He was running down the street in an attempt to escape a slow-moving figure with a big stick. In his panic, Larry pays no mind to the crosswalk and is struck by an oncoming car.
Flash forward, and we see Larry rolling down the sidewalk in his wheelchair, being pursued by the same ominous figure who we see tossing aside his big stick. He won't need it this time.
The stalker follows Larry to his apartment and attempts to break in, but Larry escapes through the window and crawls up the fire escape. The stalker busts down the door, and then we see Larry struggling to climb onto the roof, as the stalker slowly ascends the stairs after him.
Larry is cornered on the roof, frozen with fear as the stalker slowly approaches him. We finally see his face, revealing himself to be a doppelganger of Larry, who reaches into his pocket and pulls out… a stick of gum.
In the final shot, we see Larry back in his apartment, as he slowly rises from his wheelchair and walks towards the camera, chewing the gum.
I suppose this could be a spiritual allegory, showing how our fear, our need to maintain control over our lives, is only hurting us. The doppelganger is Larry’s higher self trying to lead him to a better life, but his ego interprets it as a threat and tries to retreat, only to cripple himself in the process. Or maybe I’m reading too deeply into it, and the filmmaker was just being quirky, although I doubt it.
The director’s name is Rik Little. He shot the film on 8MM with no sound. There’s no dialogue, but there’s music. For the soundtrack, Rik decided to go with his favourite record in his collection, Pink Floyd’s 1971 concept album Meddle. He scores the film with segments of One of These Days and Echoes which he repeats in order to fill the 10-minute runtime. Rik demonstrates his knack for editing here, syncing the music with the film’s action fairly well. It acts as a music video, before MTV was a glimmer in the Freemasons' eyes.
He shows a jittery shot of a telephone, and in place of a ringing sound, he uses the stuttering synth breakdown in One of These Days. Then, Larry picks up the phone, and we see the caller threatening him on the other end. We see a close-up of the caller's mouth, miming a profane tirade, as we hear the song verbalize his threat…
"One of these days, I'm going to chop you into little pieces!"
Rik Little had filmmaking aspirations, but went mostly unknown to the public until 1993, when he began his own program on the local public access station, the newly established Manhattan Neighborhood Network (MNN). He would film himself all around the city, expressing his thoughts via wild streams of consciousness, assisted by a classic rock soundtrack and chaotic montage editing. He ingeniously titled the program The Church of Shooting Yourself, but that is a story for another time.
The only place you can find his student film Larry Smith is as a segment in an episode of his public access show uploaded to YouTube, hence why you see the MNN watermark. When I discovered the film, it didn't have an IMDb page, although I soon rectified that. The database wouldn't accept the stills I submitted because they were too low quality.
What can you expect, though? What you’re seeing is a film being projected onto a screen, which is being taped with a video camera. That tape was then broadcast on TV, and then recorded and saved on someone’s DVR. Then, that someone recorded his or her TV screen, downloaded the footage to his or her computer, and uploaded the file to YouTube. And now, here I am, taking screenshots with my phone and uploading them on my blog. Ain’t technology grand?
