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The Blue Velvet Project: A Pause
The project is on pause today, and will return on Wednesday with post #123 with a frame from second 5781. In the meantime, here is a peephole look into the frame: And here are some key words that will govern Wednesday’s post: night glass creaking collective unconscious rhizome Laura Mulvey escape Patricia Norris false selves Over the period of one full year — three days per week — The Blue Velvet Project will seize a frame every 47 seconds of David Lynch’s classic to explore. These posts will run until second 7,200 in August 2012. For a complete archive of […]
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The Blue Velvet Project, #122
Second #5734, 95:34 There is a look of pity on Detective Williams’s face as he delivers his warning to Jeffrey not to “blow it.” At this point, it’s not entirely clear whose side the Detective is on; is his Hollywood stock detective outfit for real, or is he—like the “well-dressed man”—wearing a disguise? His warning to Jeffrey, as he takes him by the arms and looks into his eyes, is like a secret communication, a signal to Jeffrey not to rush things, not dig too deeply because what he might find at the terrible, rotten core of things is not […]
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The Oregonian — A Hammer to Nail Review
(The Oregonian world premiered at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival. It is being distributed by Cinemad Presents and opens theatrically in NYC at the reRun Gastropub on Friday, June 8, 2012. Factory 25 is releasing the DVD (and currently taking pre-orders for the Limited Edition DVD). It is also currently available for streaming on Netflix and Hulu. If you are not able to see it in the theater, just make sure you play it loud at home!) Calvin Lee Reeder’s The Oregonian is a horrifying film, if not what is commonly perceived as a “horror” film. It is deeply and fundamentally […]
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The Blue Velvet Project: Detour Into a Dissolve
A frame from between posts 120 and 121. By the 1830s, he [Henry Langdon Childe] had developed and perfected the [magic lantern] technique of ‘dissolving views,’ in which one picture faded out as the next one faded in. The images were aligned on the screen and the light remained a constant intensity, creating a smooth, gradual transition. This permitted a wide variety of effects that had not previously been possible. (From The Emergence of Cinema, by Charles Musser, University of California Press, 1990.) A dissolve is the superimposition of a fade-out onto a fade-in, achieved by reversing and them re-filming […]
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The Blue Velvet Project, #121
Second #5687, 94:47 Jeffrey approaches Sandy’s house, to pick her up for a date. He wears a black shirt and a white tie. Neither he nor the audience, at this point, know the meaning of the police car. The lens flare cuts the screen in half horizontally. In the fantasy, science fiction dimension of the film, the blue light is a laser beam, aimed at Jeffrey. The car is Detective Gordon’s, the Man in Yellow. He will enter the house, and will spook Jeffrey. In response, Detective Williams will take him by the shoulders and tell him: “Easy does it, […]
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The Blue Velvet Project, #120
Second #5640, 94:00 The space behind Detective Williams — his accusatory gaze upon Sandy moments after Jeffrey has left — is unexplored in the film. He stands with his back to the darkness, his hand against the wall. There is the possibility of a fist. In a 2003 interview, filmmaker Chris Marker said that DVD technology is obviously superb, but it isn’t always cinema. Godard nailed it once and for all: at the cinema, you raise your eyes to the screen; in front of the television, you lower them. Then there is the role of the shutter. Out of the […]
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The Blue Velvet Project, #119
Second #5593, 93:13 Blue Velvet nears its final act, and still the relationship between Jeffrey and Sandy remains obscured in mystery. “Is Friday still on?” he asks her, loudly enough for her father to hear, in an effort to keep up the façade that their relationship is as innocent as something out of the Andy Hardy films. There are the facts of Sandy, and the beauty of her hands and fingers and knuckles, and her exposed ear (“I hear things…”), and the force of her father Detective Williams invisible for now, but present in the off-screen space implied on this […]
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The Blue Velvet Project: Confession Redux
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 […]
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Lady Vengeance: Hungering for the Release of Battle Royale
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 […]
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The Blue Velvet Project, #118
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 […]
