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The Blue Velvet Project
Blue Velvet, 47 seconds at a time by Nicholas Rombes
The Blue Velvet Project, #83 (Part 1)
Second #3901, 65:01
1. Jeffrey: “I’m seeing something that was always hidden.”
2. J. G. Ballard, from Concrete Island, 1974:
When he reached the embankment and searched for the message he had scrawled on the white flank of the caisson, he found that all the letters had been obliterated.
3. André Breton, from “Manifesto of Surrealism,” 1924:
Under the pretense of civilization an progress, we have managed to banish from the mind everything that may rightly or wrongly be termed superstition, or fancy . . . It was, apparently, by pure chance that a part of our mental world which we pretended not to be concerned with any longer . . . has been brought back to light. For this we must give thanks to the discoveries of Sigmund Freud. On the basis of these discoveries a current of opinion is finally forming by means of which the human explorer will be able to carry his investigations much further, authorized as he will henceforth be not to confine himself to the summary realities.
4. Jeffrey: “I’m involved in a mystery. I’m in the middle of a mystery, and it’s all secret.”
5. Robert Ray’s first sentence to his book The Avant-Garde Finds Andy Hardy, 1995: “This book proposes using the avant-garde arts as models for new ways of writing and thinking about the movies.”
6. Julia Kristeva, from Powers of Horror, 1980:
Is it the quiet shore of contemplation that I set aside for myself, as I lay bare, under the cunning, orderly surface of civilizations, the nurturing horror that they attend to pushing aside by purifying, systematizing, and thinking; the horror that they seize on the build themselves up and function?
7. Sandy: “You like mysteries that much?”
Over the period of one full year — three days per week — The Blue Velvet Project will seize a frame every 47 seconds of David Lynch’s classic to explore. These posts will run until second 7,200 in August 2012. For a complete archive of the project, click here. And here is the introduction to the project.
