Columns
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The Blue Velvet Project, #12
Second #564, 9:24 Jeffrey comes down the stairs of his home. It’s night, and his mother (played by Priscilla Pointer, the real-life mother of Amy Irving) and Aunt Barbara (Frances Bay) sit on the sofa watching a black-and-white crime drama on the television. Positioned on opposite ends, the space between them opens up like some sort of haunted void where someone (or something) else should be. In Lynch’s films, sofas—which seem like the most harmless piece of furniture possible—become uncanny objects, spooky places that are so familiar that they become unfamiliar. There is one more point of general application which […]
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Slacker — A Hammer to Nail Review
(Richard Linklater’s seminal indie feature was released 20 years ago this summer. In celebration, 24 Austin-based filmmakers have crafted Slacker 2011, a collage/montage/homage, which premiered on August 31 at the Austin Film Society. For our part, we’re posting Nelson Kim’s essay on the film, which originally ran at Hammer To Nail on January 5, 2009. Buy the Criterion edition on DVD, or watch it at Amazon Instant.) A young man (the then-31-year-old writer, director, and producer) gets off a bus in Austin, hails a cab, and tells the driver about his theory that every choice we make in life creates […]
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MEDIA CURRENT: NEWS AND ANALYSIS FOR INDIE MAKERS
The world of indie filmmaking is forever colliding with the larger worlds of technology and giant media conglomerates, regulatory and legal developments, non-profit groups and a fickle consumer who loves indie film and other indie media. Indie-Current is a monthly heads-up tracking these developments. It’s a big — and forever getting bigger – world out there, so readers are encouraged to e-mail me stories I’ve missed or something you believe is important for others in the indie community. I can be reached at drosennyc AT verizon.net. Remembering 9/11 September 11, 2011, will commemorate the tenth anniversary of a day that […]
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The Microbudget Conversation: The Art Behind Sacrifice
Picking up right where we left off; Anna Rebek says nuts to embracing limitations; start sacrificing everything to make all the details important. One great thing about being micro is that no one but ourselves are breathing down our own necks, asking for results, and pushing the timeline. You often have as much time as you allow to problem-solve any limitations that you give yourself, so why would you cut corners and allow your film to be anything but what you realized at the script stage? Perhaps the best time to know how far you can push it is […]
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The Blue Velvet Project, #11
Second #517, 8:37 Peter Carew, who plays the coroner and who appears onscreen for just under twenty seconds, delivers perhaps the most tilted line in the movie: “We’ll check the morgue records but I don’t recall anything coming in minus an ear.” This either could be the punch line to the whole sordid blood-drenched twentieth century, or else a few words tossed off by a bald man who refuses to look at the characters on screen with him, as if he speaks to (into?) the ear and the ear alone. Blue Velvet was Carew’s first movie in twenty years. Previously, […]
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The Blue Velvet Project, #10
Second #470, 7:50 1. Detective Williams greets Jeffrey, who has come bearing an ear in a bag. He stands face to face with the archetypal detective, who wears his holster and gun in the office. He is either a man who has repressed a lot, or a man who is completely open and comfortable with the fact of evil in the world. His eyes are sad and knowing and also suspicious. Actually, Jeffrey is the detective, and he might as well be saying, “I found the ear. This is my case. Stay far away.” 2. Lynch has said that “clues […]
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The Blue Velvet Project, #9
Second #423 / 7:03 FOUR ASIDES 1. Holding the brown paper bag with the human ear in his hand, Jeffrey enters the Lumberton Police Station and asks, “Do you have a Detective Williams still working here?” There is a small-town familiarity to this shot, but also a hard-to-define, wavering menace, something you can feel but can’t quite detect. Some of this is generated from the stern, accusatory looks those in power give Jeffrey, as in this scene where the police officer behind the counter stares—his face unmoving—at him as he turns to go to Detective Williams. The same sort of […]
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Secret Sunshine — A Hammer to Nail Review
(Secret Sunshine is available on DVD and Blu-ray through The Criterion Collection.) The history of Lee Chang-dong’s extraordinary Secret Sunshine is a textbook case of both the problems and the miracles at play in the current marketplace for international cinema here in the United States. The film, which premiered at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival (winning the Best Actress award for Jeon Do-yeon’s devastating performance), was featured in the U.S. that same autumn at The New York Film Festival. But despite critical accolades (the film won indieWIRE’s 2007 Best Undistributed Film poll in a landslide), Secret Sunshine remained in limbo […]
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The Blue Velvet Project, #8
Second # 376 (6:16) In his 1932 essay “A Course in Treatment,” Sergei Eisenstein wrote that “only the sound-film is capable of reconstructing all phases of the course of thought” in the mind of a character. In many ways, Blue Velvet’s most radical experiments are in the realm of sound. In this frame, Jeffrey, having just discovered the severed ear, absorbs this fact, the fact of sound. And so: *During the 5:50s, as Jeffrey walks home through the field after visiting his ailing father, the noise is diagetic: the sound of Jeffrey walking, the birds, the insects—all these sounds seem […]
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The Blue Velvet Project, #7
Second #329 Jeffrey’s father is in the hospital, from a scene whose unstable tone is a microcosm of the movie itself. On one level, this moment is almost painfully tender. Jeffrey’s father struggles to speak with him as Jeffrey looks on, helpless. Yet on another level, the scene feels almost like a parody of an As The World Turns hospital scene*, with the overdetermined nurse and doctor, who ushers Jeffrey into the room by the elbow. It’s as if Lynch stuffed every hospital-like contraption into the frame; Jeffrey’s father seems beset by many illnesses. Lynch holds the shot of the […]
