Roman Polanski was a student when he filmed a series of short films as coursework for his school of cinema in Poland. It was 1957 and later. He was just 24, and his ideas were right there. I just watched these shorts from a DVD a friend lent me, together with his first feature film: Knife in the Water. I loved the movie, but I enjoyed the shorts even more. The beauty is they are *all* on YouTube! I love YouTube… Take his very first assignment (I can’t believe it, an assignment done by Polanski himself, and what an assignment!): A murderer. You need no time at all to tell a story, and as black as story as possible. Watch.
Now enjoy the irony in Teeth Smile, a very short story on a peeping tom who watches a beautiful girl from a window while she is in the bathroom. Then, somebody appears, so he has to withdraw. Thus, when able to come back to the window…
Last, one of my favorites of his surrealism. The Lamp, a Gothic story of dolls and a lamp.
All the shorts are without dialogue, for Polanski himself believes the “proper form” of a short film is dialogue-less.
