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Erosbods. Students who think film best have at least one chance every year to display their wares to professional scrutiny at the annual National Student Film Festival. Jointly sponsored by the National Student Association, the Motion Picture Association of America and Manhattan's Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, the festival last month showed entries from 37 colleges, which were judged by a panel that included Directors Norman Jewison (In the Heat of the Night), Irving Kershner (The Flim Flam Man), and Producer Philip Leacock (Gun-smoke). The prizewinners in the contest's four major categories:
>DRAMA: THX 1138 4EB, by George Lucas, 23, of U.S.C., is a sci-fi chiller that looks at a cowardly new world where two varieties of humanoids, the "erosbods" and "clinicbods," wander through dark corridors and light-pierced concrete caverns in pursuit of the only truly human character, "THX" (pronounced with a lisp). A vision of 1984, it evoked in 15 minutes a future world in which man is enslaved by computers and TV monitors. Although portentous in theme, THX impressed the judges with its technical virtuosity: Lucas shot his future-oriented film entirely in present-day Los Angeles—much as Jean-Luc Godard, one of his cinematic heroes, shot the nightmare-future Alphaville, entirely in contemporary Paris.
>ANIMATION: Marcello, I'm So Bored by John Milius, 23, of U.S.C., begins with an epitaph from the late Erroll Flynn: "I believe I'm a very colorful character in a rather drab age." It then flashes through a quick-cutting kaleidoscope of mindless pleasure seekers—motorcyclists, teenyboppers, discothèque dancers—accompanied by a sound track of sighs and despairing screams. One judge saw in the eight-minute film a viable cinematic equivalent of pop art.
> DOCUMENTARY: In Kienholz on Exhibit, by June Steel, of U.C.L.A., the camera roams for a leisurely 21 minutes over an exhibit at the Los Angeles County Museum by Sculptor Edward Kienholz (TIME, April 8, 1966). Then an off-camera interviewer deftly questions a series of museumgoers, whose reactions are even more of a social comment than the artist's work. A pair of sclerotic city elders label the show disgusting; an appreciative young Negro in a golfing hat sizes up the exhibit as "it's, like, sad."
> EXPERIMENTAL: Cut, by Chris Parker, of the University of Iowa, is a difficult abstract work, with no apparent plot or sequence, which talks elliptically of Greek myths and their significance to film makers: "Film is like the snake, the worm Ourobouros, and like all continuous forms can be symbolic of evil." Montages of images cascade across the screen for 21 minutes while Narrator Parker reads the directions from the script ("Medium Shot: Wife on Ferris wheel, seat-five. Close up wife's frightened face . . .") in order to remind viewers that they are watching a film. The chaos is astonishingly well photographed and edited—and, far more than most of the other entries, displays a debt to the non-styles and nongoals of the cinematic Underground.