Columns
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The Microbudget Conversation: SXSW #1
2,637. That’s the number of days it has been since I was in Austin, TX. My wife and I moved there right after working a full season at the Maine Workshops, and the moment we arrived we realized we absolutely loved the place…and there was no way we could stay. At the time (and until I’m dead it seems) I owed an incredible amount of money in school loans and 2004 seemed to be the year everyone decided to stay, or move to Austin…I considered working at Jamba Juice after two months without a job…I said “considered.” We were flat […]
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Attenberg — A Hammer to Nail Review
(Attenberg world premiered at the 2010 Venice Film Festival and is being distributed in America by Strand Releasing. It opens on Friday, March 9, 2012, at the IFC Center in NYC. Visit the film’s official page at the Strand website to learn more.) The world would be a much less grating place if certain cinematic sub-genres were to be banned from the table immediately. Reading a description of Athina Rachel Tsangari’s Attenberg, one might worry that she has committed the double-sin of embracing two of the more increasingly overused and deplorable ones: 1) the “stunted-to-the-point-of-retarded adult-child;” and 2) the “quirky […]
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The Blue Velvet Project, #87
Second #4089, 68:09 1. Dorothy to Jeffrey: “Do you want to do bad things? / Anything . . . anything. / I want you to hurt me.” 2. Ralph Waldo Emerson, from Experience (1844): It is very unhappy, but too late to be helped, the discovery we have made that we exist. . . . Ever afterwards we suspect our instruments. We have learned that we do not see directly, but mediately, and that we have no means of correcting these colored and distorting lenses which we are, or of computing the amount of their errors. Perhaps these subject-lenses have […]
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The Blue Velvet Project, #86
Second #4042, 67:22 In a 1964 interview Orson Welles talked about the relationship between the visual and the spoken word in film. He said that I couldn’t arrive at [the visual] without the solidity of the word taken as a basic for constructing the images. What happens is that when the visual components are shot the words are obscured. The most classical example is Lady from Shanghai. The scene in the aquarium was so gripping visually that no one heard what was being said. And what was said was, for all that, the marrow of the film. Could Lady from […]
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The Blue Velvet Project, #85
Second #3995, 66:35 1. Jeffrey, just after the kiss with Sandy, is on his way up the dark, industrially-vibed staircase to Dorothy’s apartment. He has had his chaste kiss; new he wants more. He is hungry for Dorothy, who dispenses with shy-girl playfulness and gives Jeffrey the Real Thing. 2. The blackness of the frame. The amount of screen space dedicated to the experience of no visible light. There is light, of course–just enough–but Jeffrey travels in these moments mostly through the dark. 3. In He Died with His Eyes Open, the first of Derek Raymond’s British crime noir Factory […]
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This Is Not A Film — A Hammer to Nail Review
(This Is Not A Film begins a two-week engagement at Film Forum today, courtesy of Palisades Tartan. The movie will then open in other U.S. locations, starting with Los Angeles in early March. Go to the film’s website for details.) For those unfamiliar with the backstory: Jafar Panahi, one of Iran’s most acclaimed directors (The White Balloon, The Circle, Crimson Gold, Offside), was arrested in 2009. A known supporter of the opposition movement, Panahi was charged with “activity against national security and propaganda activities against the regime.” Despite domestic and international outpourings of support, he was sentenced in 2010 to […]
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The Blue Velvet Project, #84
Second #3948, 65:48 “Can a photograph be lonely?” is a question asked in Don DeLillo’s novel Libra. Another version of the question might go, “Can a photograph make a person lonely?” How about a movie frame? How deep can loneliness get, at 24 frames per second? What follows, below, is a visual descent into loneliness, just under two seconds in movie time. It happens so quickly in movies, moments like this. We remember them not frame-by-frame, but decompressed, stretching out and out, a kiss that lasts forever. A kiss that, in our memory, takes up more film time than it […]
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The Blue Velvet Project, #83 (Part 2)
Second #3901, 65:01 (pt. 2) And so, for the first time in this project, two posts on the same frame. Why? Most of all, it’s because of the brown, paneled wall to Sandy’s left. A wall where you think a window ought to be. Why do you think this? What gives rise to the suspicion that a wall artificially covers (hides) a window? Probably because it’s linked to the first time Sandy and Jeffrey were together at Arlene’s (covered in post #25). Even though it’s possible that they are simply at a different booth, one framed by a wall and […]
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The Blue Velvet Project, #83 (Part 1)
Second #3901, 65:01 1. Jeffrey: “I’m seeing something that was always hidden.” 2. J. G. Ballard, from Concrete Island, 1974: When he reached the embankment and searched for the message he had scrawled on the white flank of the caisson, he found that all the letters had been obliterated. 3. André Breton, from “Manifesto of Surrealism,” 1924: Under the pretense of civilization an progress, we have managed to banish from the mind everything that may rightly or wrongly be termed superstition, or fancy . . . It was, apparently, by pure chance that a part of our mental world which […]
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The Forgiveness of Blood — A Hammer to Nail Review
(The Forgiveness of Blood is being distributed by Sundance Selects and comes to theaters on February 24, 2012. It world premiered at the 2011 Berlin International Film Festival. NOTE: This review was first posted at Hammer to Nail in conjunction with its screening at the 2011 Toronto International Film Festival.) The future of American independent filmmaking may not lie in America at all. In recent years, a number of filmmakers have turned their eyes away from the complexities of 21st century American life and toward the world beyond our national borders. The decision to engage another culture through filmmaking, to […]
