Columns
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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 […]
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The Blue Velvet Project, #6
Second # 282 An establishing shot of downtown Lumberton/Wilmington, showing the courthouse (from the back) in the mid foreground. In the previous shot, we have just seen Jeffrey for the first time as he walks through the field, wearing black. He stops, picks up a stone, and throws it as some junk. He then keeps walking, his back to the camera. At this point, we don’t know who he is or where he’s going. That shot is followed by this, at second #282, a static shot that lasts three seconds. When I began this project I wondered how frequently frames […]
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Hell and Back Again — A Hammer and Nail Review
(Hell and Back Again premiered at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival. Its official theatrical run begins at the Film Forum on Wednesday, October 5th. As a selection in the DocuWeeks 2011 program, it opens theatrically in New York City at the IFC Center on Friday, August 19th, and in Los Angeles at Laemmle’s Sunset 5 on Friday, Sept. 2nd. Visit the film’s official website to learn more.) In recent years American war docs have largely moved away from exposés on corruption and bad government policy. Instead, the focus has shifted to small, largely apolitical stories about life in the military and the human cost of war. Hell and Back […]
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The Blue Velvet Project, #5
Second #235 What is this? Where are we? In a weird, dreamlike echo of the Amity Island billboard (defaced with the black shark fin) from Jaws, the Welcome to Lumberton billboard is a nest of contradictions. Instead of a shark fin, there should be a monster lurking in the background pine trees. The woman looks to be freeze-dried straight out of the Cold War, and brings to mind Shelley Winters as Charlotte Haze in Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita (1962). Could the awkward wave of her hand be any more artificial or uninviting? For a moment, we seem to have gone back […]
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The Microbudget Conversation: The No-Budget Way
I am overwhelmed and excited by the response from our last post…this truly is the conversation in action, and the reason I wanted to start this column. We also just got the word that our panel for SXSW is up on their site and ready to vote for. If you want to see us bring the conversation to SXSW then vote here! Many thanks in advance! In keeping with the idea of necessity and budget constraints from Nicole’s piece, I present to you with Mark Stolaroff. Mark is the fella behind the No-Budget Film School in L.A. and he’s here […]
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The Blue Velvet Project, #4
Second #188 Jeffrey’s father has just suffered a stroke while watering his front yard, and has fallen to his back, writhing in pain, the hose that he still holds—in a sad and funny and helpless way—spraying water all around. That shot is followed by this one, as the camera pans slowly down, the background a blur, capturing the water in mid-air as Bobby Vinton sings “Blue Velvet,” which he had released in 1963, several months before the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The song, written by Bernie Wayne and Lee Morris, dates back to 1950. Wayne was a prolific composer, […]
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Lady Vengeance: Interview with Guillermo Del Toro
Guillermo del Toro, best known for directing aesthetically impressive, intellectually thoughtful horror films like Mimic and Pan’s Labyrinth, steps into a slightly different role this summer by presenting Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark, a remake of one of his favorite films as a child. I spoke to del Toro about his decades-long dream of bringing this film to life, the connection between horror and spirituality, and what makes a dark basement so damn scary. Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark opens in theaters on August 26th. Filmmaker: I wanted to start by asking how you began working on the […]
