Prepare yourself for a little bit of gore, but make sure you don’t miss this one. Clocking in at under six minutes long, Martin Scorsese’s 1967 experimental short, The Big Shave is an amazing little film. Set to the sentimental jazz notes of Bunny Berigan’s 1937 rendition of “I Can’t Get Started” (a Ziegfeld Follies number with Gershwin lyrics), a young man enters the bathroom for a shave, only to nonchalantly gouge at his skin with progressively violent strokes of the razor. The resulting imagery is hypnotic.

Scorsese wrote the piece in the depths of a depression when he had difficulty shaving himself, and while it’s a simple enough concept, it was written as a fairly explicit political statement. Alternately titled Viet ‘67, the film was produced as a metaphorical protest against the Vietnam War—part of a weeklong production, “The Angry Arts Against the War.” 

The subversive metaphor and captivating depiction of self-mutilation won The Big Shave Le Prix de L’Age d’Or at the 1968 Festival of Experimental Cinema in Belgium.
 

 
Via Network Awesome