May 28 The Blue Velvet Project will resume with post #119 on May 30th. In the meantime, this is a re-post of the April 23 confession, with a new confessional update at the bottom of the post. ————————- As author of The Blue Velvet Project—which owes a moral debt to the Dogme 95 movement, whose practice of constraint was an inspiration—I feel obligated to make this public statement of confessions regarding the rigors of the project. This is done in the spirit of Thomas Vinterberg’s confession regarding his film The Celebration. Despite the fact that I promised Mr. Macaulay, Filmmaker […]
Although I’ve been recently reminded of the fact repeatedly, it always shocks me anew to hear that Battle Royale, Kinji Fukasaku’s stunning, blood-soaked film adaptation of the novel by Koushun Takami, has never officially had U.S. distribution. After a spate of festival bookings, a 3D release of the film in honor of its 10-year anniversary, and a DVD and Blu-ray release from Anchor Bay, Battle Royale, original flavor, is starting to see theatrical premieres in the U.S., like the one at the Cinefamily Theater in Los Angeles in December 2011, and the New York premiere starting at the IFC Center […]
Second #5546, 92:26 1. Seconds after this shot, Sandy’s father, Detective Williams, will ask Jeffrey: “Is Sandy part of this?” It’s more along the lines of a warning than a question. Sandy, in the diagonally split screen, longs so deeply not just for Jeffrey but for the knowledge/power suggested by the office of her father. 2. Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint. And it induces regular effects of power. Each society has its regime of truth, its “general politics” of truth: that is, the types of discourse which […]
(Oslo, August 31st is being distributed by Strand Releasing. It opens Friday in NYC at the IFC Center.) Joachim Trier’s follow-up to his much-loved 2006 debut, Reprise, begins with an audio montage of voices sharing their memories of the titular city: “I remember taking the first dip in the Oslo fjord on the first of May.” “I don’t remember Oslo as such, its people I remember.” “We moved to the city. We felt extremely mature.’” On the screen, stationary shots of empty city streets are followed by home movies—children at play, friends enjoying each other’s company—then back to the streets […]
Second #5499, 91:39 This look—this sharp, suspicious, and accusatory look—is passed between Detective Williams and Jeffrey just moments after Jeffrey describes Frank as “a sick and dangerous man.” In the temporal flow of the film, the moment of this gaze passes very quickly, as the narrative draws our attention to what Jeffrey (who has brought along his black and white surveillance photographs) tells Detective Williams about Frank and his dark goings-on. And yet, when the film is frozen and this frame from second #5499 is de-linked from linear chronology, the Detective’s look takes on a new shade of meaning, one […]
Second #5452, 90:52 In Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, Roland Barthes wrote about the studium (the cultural and political meanings of a photograph) and the punctum (the piercing of the photograph into the realm of personal meaning): Now, confronting millions of photographs . . . I sense no blind field: everything which happens within the frame dies absolutely once this frame is passed beyond. When we define the Photograph as a motionless image, this does not mean only that the figures it represents do not move; it means they do not emerge, do not leave: they are anesthetized and fastened […]
Second #5405, 90:05 Detective Gordon (aka The Yellow Man, or The Man in Yellow, played by Fred Pickler) sits at his desk at police headquarters, where Jeffrey has gone to see Detective Williams. He spots Gordon in his office and, startled that this is the same man he’d seen earlier with Frank, takes a moment at a drinking fountain across from Gordon’s office to get a better look, which constitutes this shot. Gordon is a terrifying presence for reasons that are impossible to sort out. The fact is he shouldn’t be terrifying, sitting there in his yellow (yellow!) jacket, working […]
(Distributed by Cinema Conservancy and Factory 25, The Color Wheel opens theatrically in NYC at BAM on Friday, May 18, 2012. It world premiered at the 2011 Sarasota Film Festival and co-shared the Best Narrative award at the Chicago Underground Film Festival before screening at BAMcinemaFest and many, many more festivals throughout the world. Visit the film’s official website to learn more. NOTE: This review was first published on June 22, 2011.) Full disclosure: I first met Alex Ross Perry in the autumn of 2010. We had attended a screening with a mutual friend and he mentioned to me that he was finishing a new film and offered me a look. As a […]
Second #5358, 89:18 When Blue Velvet is funny, it is very funny. This shot opens with Jeffrey’s mother and his Aunt Barbara (the late, great, Frances Bay) looking up from the breakfast table at something, aghast. However, in a sharp instance of delayed decoding, we don’t see what they see for several seconds. For all we know, they could be looking in frozen horror at an intruder, or a monster (perhaps the entity behind the Winkie’s dumpster from Mulholland Drive), or something visible only to them. It is only at this moment that we see what they see: Jeffrey, whose […]
Second #5311, 88:31 1. This frame is from around twelve seconds into a thirteen-second shot, just before the screen goes black. Jeffrey sobs. The unflinching, unmoving camera eye does not look away. There is no soundtrack. There is nothing ironic or postmodern about this moment. 2. Paul Virilio, from his book Open Sky: ‘If anyone thinks I paint too fast, they are watching me too fast,’ Van Gogh wrote. Already, the classic photograph is no more than a freeze frame. With the decline in volumes and in the expanse of landscapes, reality becomes sequential and cinematic unfolding finally gets the […]