70 Years Ago Today: Coney Island Triggers the French New Wave

travsd

Sep 2

September 2, 1953 is a day of special significance to some of us. It's the day Little Fugitive premiered at the Venice Film Festival.

The title of this wonderful movie could apply to itself as much as the story it tells. Made on the tiniest of budgets by the smallest of teams (all the more extraordinary given the fact that it was produced during the era of Hollywood studio dominance) Little Fugitive also remains obscure in spite of its outsized importance. It was made by the trio of Morris Engel, Ruth Orkin, and Ray Ashley (Raymond Abrashkin). The latter wrote children's books, the other two were still photographers. What's revolutionary about Little Fugitive is that the entire movie was shot with hand-held cameras, with a harness serving as a sort of crude prototypical stead-cam. That, and there is NO sync sound. Effects, occasional voices and music were dubbed. It's cast almost entirely with non-actors, many of them children. (One of the few recognizable people in the movie is Will Lee, Mr. Hooper from Sesame Street). And, best of all, it was shot entirely in Brooklyn -- mostly in Coney Island. So, among its countless virtues, the film contains a terrific documentary record of Coney in the years between the better documented periods of the early part of the 20th century and the late 20th century. Apart from home movies, there's not a lot of film I've ever seen of the Coney Island amusement area from the time.

The plot also holds personal significance. It's about a very small boy who runs away from home. I did the same thing when I was about five years old -- had the experience of blithely wandering around a dangerous world for a few hours, only dimly aware of standing at the edge of a precipice. Talk about tension! Now that is a situation that will keep an audience on the edge of it seat.

Little Fugitive was one of the inspirations for Francois Truffaut's The 400 Blows (1959). He as much as said that the French New Wave wouldn't have happened without it. Certainly the Italian Neo-Realists had made stripped-down movies, but even they had used tri-pods, tracking shots, and sync sound! But what Little Fugitive demonstrated was how much you could strip away and still have a coherent, engaging, completing watchable feature film. It was like a thunderbolt. It was like returning to the earliest days of silents, while rectifying the entire process in the bargain. Everyone should see it.