Authors — Nicholas Rombes
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The Blue Velvet Project, #137
Second #6439, 107:19 Jeffrey is about to enter Dorothy’s apartment where he’ll find a hellish scene of Frank’s human butchery. The frame captures his vulnerability, his exposed back to the implied danger of the frame’s open space. The red light at the end of the hall, the sharp-edged shadow across the far door, the tar-pit black hallway floor, and the faint ringing noise on the soundtrack, like something deeply broken in the building itself, all conspire to create a feeling that verges on existential terror. In the pan and scan 1987 VHS version (the photo below is of the film […]
by Nicholas Rombes on Jul 11, 2012 -
The Blue Velvet Project, #136
Second #6392, 106:32 If you’re of a certain age, you first saw Blue Velvet on VHS (Karl-Lorimar Video) in 1987, in its over-saturated, pan and scan version, which eliminated nearly 40% of the framed image (below). This is Sandy in her father’s home office, on the phone to the police station, trying desperately to reach her father to safeguard Jeffrey, who is on his way to Dorothy’s apartment. “We don’t know his whereabouts at this time,” the voice tells her from the other end of the line. In the VHS version, Sandy is psychedelic, illuminating the screen with her desire. […]
by Nicholas Rombes on Jul 9, 2012 -
The Blue Velvet Project, #135
Second #6345, 105:45 Sandy, in her room, on the phone with Jeffrey after the naked, bruised, Dorothy has just revealed—in front of Jeffrey, Sandy, and Mrs. Williams—that Jeffrey “put his disease” in her. This frame comes from a shot that lasts just under one minute and that is so completely and dramatically sincere as to give lie to the notion that Blue Velvet is somehow a parody or an instance of postmodern Camp. Sandy’s question to herself when she gets off the phone with Jeffrey—“Where is my dream?”—offers a momentary gap in the film. For if most of the time […]
by Nicholas Rombes on Jul 6, 2012 -
The Blue Velvet Project, #134
Second #6298, 104:58 Another dissolve. 1. This one from a montage that’s as expressionistic and compressed as anything in any of Lynch’s films. Having been strapped into the gurney and loaded into the circa 1960s ambulance in all its hallucinatory, candy apple red, hearse-like terror, Dorothy struggles against her bindings, screaming, “Hold me! I’m falling! I’m falling.” The frame captures Dorothy’s dream-terror as it slowly dissolves into a shot of the ambulance siren, a moment that is both horrifying and deadpan, as the dull wail of the siren lends a sort of flat, matter-of-factness to sequence. 2. From Charles Musser, […]
by Nicholas Rombes on Jul 4, 2012 -
The Blue Velvet Project, #133
Second #6251, 104:11 Sounds 1. “He put his disease in me.” (Dorothy to Sandy, around three seconds before this frame.) 2. Blue Velvet’s sound designer was the late Alan Splet, who had worked with Lynch beginning with his short film The Grandmother, in 1970. 3. In the distance, growing louder, the wail of an ambulance siren, which will arrive immediately after this shot for Dorothy. 4. The sound of Sandy crying, gradually drowned out by the wail of the siren. 5. What if the siren is, secretly, Sandy’s red thoughts at this moment, an outward auditory expression of her inner […]
by Nicholas Rombes on Jul 2, 2012 -
The Blue Velvet Project, #132
Second #6204, 103:24 Fragments. Frames. Pieces of a puzzle: 1. “Sandy please. Sandy.” 2. Dorothy naked, but still wearing her wig. A performer. 3. Her performance before Sandy and Mrs. Williams. 4. The lamp in the corner. The trapped bird. 5. The flesh of Dorothy’s arm. 6. “Nothing can be achieved in the art of film until its form is understood to be the product of a completely unique complex: the exercise of an instrument which can function, simultaneously, both in terms of discovery and invention. . . . The camera provides the elements of the form, and, although it […]
by Nicholas Rombes on Jun 29, 2012 -
The Blue Velvet Project, #131
Second #6157, 102:37 “Mom . . . is Dad home?” Sandy asks. If Blue Velvet were a comedy (and it approaches one at moments like this) there might be canned laughter following this line. After all, Sandy has just entered the house with the local nightclub singer, naked, bruised, and clinging to Sandy’s new boyfriend Jeffrey. Jeffrey in the realm of women: Dorothy (the bad one), Sandy (the good one), and Mrs. Williams (the dutiful wife and mother). What we’re looking at here is pure, raw, sex, unrestrained by custom, duty, or conventional notions of morality. Sandy knows it; it […]
by Nicholas Rombes on Jun 27, 2012 -
The Blue Velvet Project, #130
Second #6110, 101:50 1. Jeffrey has his hands full. There is Mike (who, in one of Blue Velvet’s weird tonal shifts, has suddenly become apologetic and even Jeffrey’s ally), and there is Sandy helping the naked Dorothy into the backseat of Jeffrey’s car which will take them to Sandy’s house, where, stark naked in the living room, Dorothy will call Jeffrey “my secret lover” in front of Sandy and her mother, and where she will tell Sandy that Jeffrey “put his disease in me.” 2. The shot is so heavily coded with cinema’s past that it’s as if fragments of […]
by Nicholas Rombes on Jun 25, 2012 -
The Blue Velvet Project, #129
Second #6063, 101:03 Layered with unfolding narrative information, this frame depicts the brief confrontation with Mike, who threatens to kick Jeffrey’s ass “right in front of your own stupid house.” With the vintage cars, Mike’s friends looking on, the fight over the girl, and the classical-era wide framing, this could be a scene straight of Rebel Without a Cause. Except that there, having just emerged in the background and unnoticed by everyone at this point, is the completely naked and bruised Dorothy, who appears on Jeffrey’s porch just behind Mike’s friends. In a few seconds Mike will be the first […]
by Nicholas Rombes on Jun 22, 2012 -
The Blue Velvet Project, #’s 126, 127, 128
Second #5922, 98:42 Second # 5969, 99:29 Second # 6016, 100:16 In honor of Andrew Sarris, who passed away yesterday, three frames from Blue Velvet. Although Sarris’s essay “Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962” (which appeared in the Winter 1962-63 issue of Film Culture) is best-known for its argument that “over a group of films, a director must exhibit certain recurring characteristics of style, which serve as his signature,” the essay also grapples with a more difficult, elusive, less discussed aspect of the auteur theory, what Sarris called a film’s “interior meaning”: The third and ultimate premise of the […]
by Nicholas Rombes on Jun 21, 2012
