Boy & Bicycle (1962) by Ridley Scott

Boy and Bicycle is the first film made by Ridley Scott. The black and white short was made on 16mm film while Scott was a photography student at the Royal College of Art in London in 1962. It was made initially on a budget of £65 using a Bolex 16mm cine-camera, and completed with the help of a grant provided by the BFI's Experimental Film Fund.















UK 1962 Dir Ridley Scott
Produced by Ridley Scott
Production company: the BFI Experimental Film Fund
Starring Tony Scott
c. 27 mins. Black and white

The film follows a boy as he plays truant from school and visits various locations around the seaside town on his bicycle. We hear his thoughts in a stream of consciousness voice-over partly inspired by James Joyce's 1922 novel Ulysses.

Although a very early work - Scott would not direct his first feature for another 15 years - the film is significant in that it features a number of visual elements that would be become motifs of Scott's work. The film features the cooling towers of the Imperial Chemical Industries works at Billingham, foreshadowing images in Alien, Blade Runner and Black Rain. The central element of the Boy and the Bicycle is re-used in Scott's advert for Hovis of the early 1970s. The film features Scott's younger brother Tony as the boy.
Scott secured finance from the British Film Institute to complete the editing and sound in 1965 including a track by John Barry called "Onward Christian Spacemen" which originally appeared as the "b" side of the theme to the television series The Human Jungle . Scott wanted to use the existing recording by Barry, but the composer was so impressed by the young film maker he agreed to produce a new recording for the film at limited cost.
This film has been released digitally as an extra on the DVD for Scott's first feature The Duellists.
"Courtesy of the British Film Institute (BFI) under the terms of the Creative Archive Licence at http://www.bfi.org.uk/creative".

References: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boy_and_Bicycle

YOU CAN WATCH THE FULL FILM HERE:
http://www.indiemoviesonline.com/watch-movies/boy-and-bicycle-0

or watch the short clip below:

La Jetée (1962) by Chris Marker

La jetée (English: The Jetty or The Pier) (1962) is a 28-minute black and white science fiction film by Chris Marker. Constructed almost entirely from still photos, it tells the story of a post-nuclear war experiment in time travel. The film won the Prix Jean Vigo for short film. Terry Gilliam's Twelve Monkeys (1995) was inspired by, and takes several concepts directly from, La jetée.

PLOT (Includes Spoilers): The survivors of a destroyed, post-apocalyptic Paris in the aftermath of the Third World War live underground in the Palais de Chaillot galleries. They research time travel, hoping to send test subjects to different time periods "to call past and future to the rescue of the present". They have difficulty finding subjects who can mentally withstand the shock of time travel, but eventually settle upon a male prisoner whose vague but obsessive childhood memory of witnessing a woman (Hélène Chatelain) during a violent incident on the boarding platform ("The Jetty") at Orly Airport is the key to his journey back in time.

He is thrown back to the past again and again to a time before the war, when he had been a child. He repeatedly meets and speaks to the woman from his memory, who was present at the terminal. After his successful passages to the past, the experimenters attempt to send him into the far future. In a brief meeting with the technologically advanced people of the future, he is given a power unit sufficient to regenerate his own destroyed society. Upon his return, with his mission accomplished, he discerns that he is to be executed by his jailers. He is contacted by the people of the future, who offer to help him escape to their time, but he asks to be instead returned to the pre-war time of his childhood, hoping to again find the woman. He is returned and does find her, but an agent of his jailers has followed. The man finds that the violent incident he partially witnessed as a child was his own death as an adult at the hands of the agent.

References: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Jet%C3%A9e

La Jetee (in French with Spanish subtitles:






A Documentary about Chris Marker: