The Big Shave
1967 · 5m · USA
Directed by Martin Scorsese
Genres: drama, experimental, horror
Tones: dark, provocative, surreal
A clean-cut young man enters a pristine white bathroom for a morning shave, but he keeps going past the point of finished, slicing his face and neck open until the white tile is drenched in blood. Released during the height of the Vietnam War (and alternately titled 'Viet '67'), it plays as a wordless allegory for American self-destruction.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Scorsese makes a five-minute film about a guy literally shaving himself to death and somehow it doesn't feel like a stunt—it's the kind of formally austere political provocation that makes consensus critics uncomfortable, which is exactly why it works.
The formal restraint here is remarkable: a single white room, a jaunty jazz score, and the inexorable logic of escalation creates a work that sits in dialogue with Buñuel and structural cinema, though its political directness distinguishes it from pure formalism.
That choice to score the self-annihilation with Bunny Berigan's bright, almost oblivious trumpet—the collision between the sound and image does all the work, turning what could be exploitation into something that actually lands as tragedy.
Reviews
A potent and disturbing allegory for the horrors of the Vietnam War... The Big Shave's less than subtle metaphor for America's self-destructiveness at war with Vietnam is indicative of the vitality of the New American Cinema's outlook.
Scorsese's pristine white bathroom becoming a site of crimson-stained shaving carnage serves as a powerful visual reinforcement of its allegorical meaning — a strictly personal vision of death.