Underplayed Gems

What's a Nice Girl Like You Doing in a Place Like This? (1963)

What's a Nice Girl Like You Doing in a Place Like This? poster
Directed by
Martin Scorsese
Genre
comedy film
Country
United States
Runtime
9 min
Rating
6.1 of 10 from 77 voters
Elsewhere
IMDb
The 3D catalogue: film cases on wooden shelves, with the cat sitting at the counter next to its greeting.

The catalogue in 3D

The film shelves have a room of their own that you can walk around in. The cat behind the counter is the AI Catbot, and they pick real films from the same catalogue when you tell them what you feel like watching. Nothing is for sale, here or in there. Go in from here and this film is already out on the counter, with more like it waiting on the shelf next to it.

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How it feels

A writer becomes obsessed with a photo hanging on his wall. The short film follows his attempts to deal with this fixation using playful editing and animation techniques.

whimsicalexperimentalplayfulquirkyvisualoffbeatlightheartedsurreal

What happens

What's a Nice Girl like You Doing in a Place like This? is a 1963 American black-and-white short comedy-drama film created by Martin Scorsese while he studied at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. It is a story about a writer who becomes obsessed with a picture on his wall. The film stars Zeph Michaelis, Mimi Stark, Sarah Braveman, Fred Sica, and Robert Uricola. The work, shot using 16 mm film, features animations, montage, jump cuts, associative editing, and freeze-frame shots. Scorsese created it shortly after watching Federico Fellini's 1963 surrealist comedy-drama 8½. The negative was cut incorrectly by a student, so a professor asked Thelma Schoonmaker, who was also participating in the summer program, to help Scorsese. Commentators noted that the film has a connection to most of Scorsese's later projects, including Goodfellas (1990) and The Wolf of Wall Street (2013). The film received positive critical reviews, the majority of which complimented its direction and editing. It was released in 1992 on a VHS compilation tape in the United Kingdom and was re-released in May 2020 in 4K resolution format by The Criterion Collection. It was honored at the 1965 National Student Film Festival with another Scorsese short film It's Not Just You, Murray! (1964). (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

More like this

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