What's A Nice Girl Like You Doing In A Place Like This? - Martin Scorsese & Short Film

'What's A Nice Girl Like You Doing In A Place Like This?' is a short film made by Martin Scorsese as a student in 1963. Short film has always been seen as a brilliant and effective way of gaining appreciation as a director, and attracting the awareness of major studios who would be prepared to through you a big budget and move you on to more feature length films. Many directors such as Scorsese, Spike Lee, Quentin Tarantino, and Steven Spielberg would make short films during their time as a student and from that create a platform for greater things.

Martin Scorsese made a few short films as a student and this one isn't his most famous, however it's my personal favourite.



From the very start you're immediately greeted with narration and thrown into quick edits and rapid transitions. The narration itself is interesting, as this style of narrating, one that has the main protagonist talking and then the film itself becoming a visual aid to what they're describing, can be seen in Scorsese latter and much, much more popular films, such as 'Taxi Driver' which launched the career of Robert DeNiro.



The audience is just about given enough time to take in each shot, many of them beautifully framed, before the narrator moves on to the next part of his dialogue. The visuals correspond very literally with what he's saying, which subtly adds comedy value and gives the audience the feeling that this short film is maybe being presented to them on a very informal level. The style in fact is incredibly New Wave, with frequent jump cuts and no real concept of relative time. For me personally in reminds me of French New Wave feature lengths such as 'Breathless' and 'Jules et Jim' which unsurprisingly were made around the same time.



The Big Shave (1967) is a more popular short film made by the now incredibly successful director as a student. The film depicts a young man shaving himself to the point of incessant bleeding with seemingly no intention to stop. The six minute long film is completely in contrast with Scorsese's previously mentioned earlier work, with obvious and hard hitting drama and a solid amount of political intent. Many believe that the short is in fact a metaphor for the choices that the American government made in regards to the Vietnamese war and is still to this today popular, with internet video sites such as Youtube flooded with amateur remakes.