Columns
-
“Blue Velvet Project” Creator Nicholas Rombes
One year ago, Nicholas Rombes proposed “The Blue Velvet Project” to me at Filmmaker. For 12 months, three times a week, he would scrutinize a single frame from David Lynch’s modern classic, looking both inside and outside of its aspect ratio for correspondences, allusions and meanings. For Rombes, it would be another in his “time-based” critical film essays — appropriately so, for it was because of another of these columns, 10/40/70 at The Rumpus, that I discovered his writing in the first place. (In fact, I interviewed him previously about this other fascinating project.) Nick had contributed to Filmmaker before […]
-
Beloved — A Hammer to Nail Review
(Beloved world premiered at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival and was picked up for distribution by IFC Films. It opens theatrically on August 17, 2012. Visit the film’s website to learn more.) Beloved, the latest film from French writer/director Christophe Honoré, uses the history of the late 20th century as a framework for exploring the difficult love affairs of a mother, Madeleine (played as a young woman by Ludivine Sagnier and as an older woman by Catherine Deneuve) and her daughter, Vera (Chiarra Mastroianni). Like much of Honoré’s work, the movie is rich with allusions not only to literary and theatrical forms, but […]
-
The Blue Velvet Project, #151
Second #7097, 118:17 (Note: the final post in the project goes up Friday.) A confession, of a different sort, about how a movie saved a young man. Can a scene from a movie detour your life, turn you in a new direction? I think it can, in the same way that a book read and just the right age can, or a band can by the sheer force of its ideas turned sonic. (One of the self-imposed rules for this project was to avoid the personal, the anecdotal, but figuring this is the second-to-last post . . .) Blue Velvet […]
-
Shooting With John: Lest We Forget
Perhaps it was no coincidence, then, that on the morning of my return flight from LGA, my stomach peppered on too little bagel and too much coffee, I came across the tidbit of news that traffic would be jammed due to an animal convoy truck that had crashed wide open, spilling several cows to run rampant across Dallas-Fort Worth. Several had been killed in the wreckage, a few had laid down to rest, and yet an even bigger number had mustered their courage to brave the zig-zagging pattern of screeching 18-wheelers and high tail it to the fields that must […]
-
The Blue Velvet Project, #150
Second #7050, #117:30 It’s as if the movie has gone back in time; Jeffrey and Sandy look so young. “I don’t see how they could do that,” Aunt Barbara (Frances Bay) says, looking at the robin on the windowsill with the live bug (perhaps one of the black beetles from the beginning of the film) in its beak, “I could never eat a bug.” She speaks these words just before inserting something black into her mouth. In The Plague of Fantasies, Slavoj Žižek suggests that fantasy does not simply realize a desire in a hallucinatory way: rather, its function is […]
-
The Blue Velvet Project, #149
Second #7003, 116:43 The camera pulls back, low like in the beginning when it entered the lawn grass, to reveal Jeffrey, lounging, Sandy just having told him that “lunch is ready.” A concrete angel looks over him as he suns himself in his black pants and heavy black shoes. Order has been restored, but something has changed, something is different. You can feel it in the framing of the shot, in the oddly canted way that Sandy and the house bend inward, towards the center. In his recent book In the Dust of This Planet, Eugene Thacker questions the assumption […]
-
2 Days in New York — A Hammer to Nail Review
(2 Days in New York world premiered at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival and was picked up for distribution by Magnolia Pictures. It is available through various VOD outlets—Amazon, iTunes, etc.—on July 6, 2012, and opens theatrically on August 10, 2012. Visit the film’s official website to learn more.) I’ve been known to knock the French, toodling around on bicycles with their phallic baguettes, vin rouge, and perennial boredom with all things Americain. But is there any way to withstand the Julie Delpy charm offensive? She had me at bonjour in this witty comedy, a sequel to her earlier film 2 Days in Paris. Delpy (who wrote and directed the film) […]
-
The Blue Velvet Project, #148
Second #6909, 115:09 (Note: there are six posts remaining in the project, which will conclude with #154 on August 24.) 1. The seconds preceding this frame show Sandy and Jeffrey in the hallway outside Dorothy’s apartment, embracing, kissing, the shot slowly blowing out to blinding white before fading back into this shot, a close-up of Jeffrey’s ear as he lays dozing (dreaming?) on a lounge chair in his parents’ back yard. 2. The black frame, from earlier, as balance. 3. Is Jeffrey emerging from the dream that has been the film? When Jeffrey awakes in his lawn chair in his […]
-
The Blue Velvet Project, #147
Second #6909, 115:09 Detective Williams arrives, too late. Everyone dead is dead. Jeffrey is alive, but not because of the Law. Sandy, behind her father, behind the gun, swoons, electrified and ready to be taken by Jeffrey. This post is as good a post as any to suggest that, just beneath its surface, Blue Velvet is a “trash” film. It’s so overloaded with references to Hollywood’s traditions that always threatens to implode in on itself, perhaps nowhere else more poignantly than in this frame, which evokes everything from noir to the “woman’s picture” to the classic crime film. In Avant-Garde […]
-
The Blue Velvet Project, #146
Second #6862, 114:22 In an unnervingly comic touch Frank approaches the closet where Jeffrey hides loaded up with his props, which include Dorothy’s blue velvet gown and his gas mask. He is the exterminator now, inhaling his chemicals, approaching Jeffrey and, ominously, the camera. For Frank has seen us, now. The invisible camera has been called out, hailed, interpolated. Frank stares back at us, returning our gaze, just as the bandit, gun in hand, did in Edwin S. Porter’s 1903 film The Great Train Robbery: Out of the shadows he comes, Dorothy’s tortured, neck and wrist bound husband at his […]
