Columns
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Lady Vengeance: Interview with Sundance Filmmaker Eve Sussman
Although Sundance is predominantly known for indie dramas and social issue documentaries, the New Frontiers section provides a loving home for particularly odd ducks. Unlike many projects in New Frontiers, which are presented as installations or other new media formats, Eve Sussman’s whiteonwhite:algorithmicnoir was screened in a conventional theater. However, the film’s text, 300 bits of voiceover, 150 pieces of music, and 3,000 images are live-edited by an algorithmic computer dubbed the Serendipity Machine that creates a randomized sequence, meaning each screening is entirely unique. Not only does Sussman’s piece turn the idea of the mystery genre on its ear, […]
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The Blue Velvet Project, #72
Second #3384, 56:24 1. Sandy’s dream, recounted to Jeffrey: In the dream, there was our world, and the world was dark because there weren’t any robins. And the robins represented love. And for the longest time there was just this darkness, and all of a sudden thousands of robins were set free and they flew down and brought this blinding light of love. And it seemed like that love would be the only thing that would make any difference. And it did. 2. A few moments earlier, Jeffrey said to Sandy: Frank is a . . . a very dangerous […]
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The Blue Velvet Project, #71
Second #3337, 55:37 1. Jeffrey, struggling. Working through over and over again the evil equation that is Frank. 2. The sound of sound has come apart. Everything that matters is between his ears. 3. His ear; the fact of his non-severed ear. 4. The haircut to reveal the ear. 5. An actor, preparing to say his next line, or has he forgotten the presence of the camera? 6. The fullness of night, and its comfort. 7. To be drowned in the blackness of introspection. 8. A terrible thought: is Frank supernatural, beyond human agency, beyond human Law? 9. “Look out […]
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The Blue Velvet Project, #70
Second #3290, 54:50 Sandy’s reaction, as she listens to Jeffrey’s theory about the significance of the severed ear. “I think she [Dorothy] wants to die,” he says. “I think Frank cut the ear I found off her husband as a warning to stay alive.” That’s a key sentence, almost lost in the film’s narrative momentum. The severed ear isn’t intended simply to secure a ransom, as might be expected, but rather as a message to Dorothy not to die. As the object of Frank’s furious desire, Dorothy is just another one of his addictions, his fascinations. Sandy’s face, softly lit […]
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The Blue Velvet Project, #69
Second #3243, 54:03 “It’s a strange world, Sandy.” *** “Frank is a . . . a very dangerous man.” *** “You saw a lot in one night.” *** “It is a strange world.” These lines from around the moment of this frame collapse into one meaning, one meaning obvious to Sandy: that Jeffrey has fallen in love with Dorothy. Outside the church, Sandy is about to deliver her “robins” monologue, a monologue that securely nails Blue Velvet to the wall of sincerity. The shot itself is full of menace and beauty: the night, the soft illumination of the car’s interior, […]
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Scalene — A Hammer to Nail Review
(Scalene opens in New York City at the reRun Gastropub for a one-week run beginning Friday, January 20, 2012. Visit the official website of Along the Tracks Productions for more information about the film.) If you’ve seen Zack Parker’s Scalene, then you might understand why I feel weird describing the experience of watching it as “a pleasant surprise.” But it’s true. Even though this film is comprised of scenes and plot twists that are as disturbing as any that are likely to appear on screen this year, what struck me most loudly was the realization that I was in the […]
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The Blue Velvet Project, #68
Second #3196, 53:16 At the hardware store (in a scene that doesn’t appear in an earlier draft of the script) a moment of frontier humor staged so fundamentally close to truth as to approach the surreal. A customer (as if a future character from Twin Peaks who has slipped back in time four years) holds an axe up to Double Ed, who reads the number to the blind Double Ed: “New axe, 48721.” It’s a welcome bit of humor in light of the previous scenes in Dorothy’s apartment, right down to the awkward stance of the axe man (pipe in […]
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The Blue Velvet Project, #67
Second #3149, 52:29 1. After leaving Dorothy’s apartment, Jeffrey walks home in the dark, in one of Blue Velvet’s furiously abstracted montage sequences, where sound and image come together to convey a doomsday atmosphere so totalizing and intent on destruction (the destruction of innocence) that to try to convey it in anything less than one long sentence would be a betrayal, not only of the fact of black in this frame, but of the blackness of Jeffrey’s heart and his realization of this blackness in his face, in that askance look, as if he was the one ravaged instead of […]
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Listen as Your Story Talks to the Internet
Without a doubt, this is an amazing time to be a storyteller. We have moved beyond the simple democratization of storytelling and production tools. Funding, marketing and distribution solutions are commoditized, providing filmmakers numerous opportunities to bring their work to an audience. And now a new phase is arriving, one that merges technology with the creative process. Filmmakers will soon be able to take advantage of a world of connected objects in what has been termed the “Internet of things.” And in this environment, as always, there will be a need for good storytelling to provide a level of understanding, […]
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The Blue Velvet Project, #66
Second #3102, 51:42 The frame within the frame. Jeffrey, on his way out of Dorothy’s apartment, stops and retrieves from beneath the couch the framed black and white photo of Don and Donny that Dorothy had gazed at immediately after Frank’s call. A fury of angles and lines, rectangles within rectangles. The frozen image captures a moment in time, while what transpires on the screen (no matter how many years have passed since Blue Velvet was filmed) happens right now. Seymour Chatman, in Story and Discourse, writes about still time and moving time on the screen: The effect of pure […]
