Word: herba
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FRIENDS, which was written, produced, and directed by former M.I.T. student Filippe Herba, is well worth seeing because it says a great deal about the good and bad points of student films. Students who get into films come from primarily two backgrounds-drama and visual studies-and a student's experience frequently determines the approach he will use in his film. Friend's shows the director's clear talent as a photographer, but emphasizes the visual aspects of the film at the expense of its theatrical aspects. The weak script is almost used as an excuse for using the camera...
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...
...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...
...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...