Columns
-
The Blue Velvet Project, #19
Second #893, 14:53 In the early days of silent cinema, text and image coexisted, as intertitles directed viewers how to read a film, literally. In the best of these films, intertitles not only conveyed narrative information, but suggested possibilities of reading that allowed for the viewer to construct her own meaning from the relationship between text and image. In Blue Velvet, the LINCOLN street sign, which functions almost like an insert shot, is its own form of postmodern intertitle. [Christian Metz: “When approaching cinema from the linguistic point of view, it is difficult to avoid shuttling back and forth between […]
-
The Blue Velvet Project, #18
Second #846, 14:06 They have walked together in the night for several minutes now, delicately circling the topic of evil, as if talking in code. Finally, Jeffrey takes a gamble: “I, uh, guess you gotta get back home pretty soon, huh?” he asks Sandy. Her reply, as usual, takes the form of another question: “Not really—why?” And then she offers to show him Dorothy Vallens’s apartment, whose weak gravity has been slowly pulling them closer. This is a fiercely political stretch of the film, given the context of Ronald Reagan and his elevation of family to mythic status. In his […]
-
Nostalgia For The Light — A Hammer to Nail Review
(Nostalgia For The Light is now available on DVD and Blu-ray thanks to Icarus Films. It opened theatrically in New York City on March 18, 2011. Visit the film’s official page at the distributor’s site to learn more.) Writing about masterpieces is always difficult, yet in the case of Patricio Guzman’s Nostalgia For The Light, it’s almost crippling. On the one hand, there is enough information and emotion contained within this film’s 90 minutes to justify several thick, glowing texts of appreciation. It’s not merely that Guzman guides us on a journey that tackles just about every grand issue known […]
-
The Blue Velvet Project, #17
Second #799, 13:19 “Jeffrey can connect different worlds,” David Lynch has said. “He can look into Sandy’s world, he can look into Dorothy’s world, he can get into Frank’s world.” The secret subtext to this scene is Life Begins for Andy Hardy (1941), starring Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland, number 11 in the movie series, where Andy learns that adult life is dark and impure and trip-wired with temptation and so struggles mightily to gear-shift his life into reverse. Andy, in New York, away from his future wife Betsy Booth (Judy Garland), is tempted by the “wolfess” Jennifer Hicks (Patricia […]
-
The Microbudget Conversation: Unpaid Crew Vs. Under-Paid Crew
In our last post Anna Rebek briefly touched on one very important aspect of sacrifice when it comes to making microbudget films…crew. I think we often have to get past the feeling of incredible guilt in pre-production when asking friends and family to come along on yet another microbudget adventure. However, we learn to compensate with understanding, attention and compassion, making micro budget a unique testing ground for new methods. No matter what happens after these films are made, we are left with lessons that some big-budget filmmakers have never had to learn. Perhaps instead of wondering when to give […]
-
The Blue Velvet Project, #16
Second #752, 12:52 1. Jeffrey has just left the Williams’s, when their daughter Sandy appears slowly out of the shadows, to the swelling of music and the sound of wind moving through the tree branches, in one of the most remarkable entrances in cinema history, asking him, “Are you the one that found the ear?” 2. “How did you know?” Jeffrey says. “I just know. That’s all,” Sandy replies, in her pink dress, with no bra. The frame is overheated with information about light, and Sandy’s face, the way it is turned to Jeffrey, it’s as if she wants him […]
-
The Blue Velvet Project, #15
Second #705, 11:45 And so here you are, lost in a movie. “It must be great,” the young man says to the older man, referring to his job as a detective. The older man replies, “It’s horrible too.” And you think: this is how life is. Great. And horrible. The detective is at work eradicating evil all the time, even at home where he has not changed out of his detective outfit, because evil does not sleep. You think about the seriousness with which Blue Velvet treats evil in a secular age, and how the most that the detective can […]
-
Rebirth — A Hammer to Nail Review
(Rebirth is now available on DVD through Oscilloscope Pictures. Visit the official Project Rebirth website for theatrical screening dates and to learn more, and go here to watch a startling video detailing the time-lapse project.) On the occasion of the tenth anniversary of 9/11, frankly, at the moment, I’m finding it hard not to feel more hopeless than hopeful about things. It’s bad enough that it’s still frighteningly easy to recall the visceral shock of that fateful morning, watching the twin towers crumble to the ground on television before rushing to my Washington Heights fire escape to confirm that they […]
-
The Blue Velvet Project, #14
Minute #658, 7:58 1. Jeffrey, entering the Williams’s home, crossing a threshold that is a doorway. This is Sandy’s castle, guarded by her father the detective, who wears his gun holstered, even at home. Or is Jeffrey the detective? Or—more radically—is Sandy? 2. “Leaving the burning theater behind one begins to ease into a new perspective. The stairway leads to a doorway, the doorway to an alleyway, the alleyway to another door, more stairs, another amber room where one can forget again” 3. “He hacks desperately at the brambles and, as the hedge closes round him like the grasping flesh-raking […]
-
The Blue Velvet Project, #13
Second # 611, 10:11 This gliding shot, showing the underside of trees as Jeffrey walks the nighttime streets of his neighborhood, loomed large in my imagination after seeing the film for the first time in 1987. I wouldn’t see Blue Velvet again for many years, and in that time these few seconds of footage assumed meaning and feeling wildly disproportionate to their importance in the film. I can’t really account for this and, to be honest, when I set out to do this project I did it with the intention of not writing very much about my own personal stake […]
