Second #2256, 37:36 When not to look? A fragment: Dorothy’s arm, reaching into the closet where Jeffrey hides, to fetch the blue velvet gown in preparation for Frank’s arrival. A confession: I’ve never watched—completely watched—this upcoming section of the film, out of sheer fear of what I can hear unfolding on the screen. Or if I have watched it, I have done so using the Travis Bickle method. What is it that we need to protect ourselves from in the most brutal moments of Blue Velvet? In an interview with the writer Ben Marcus, Brian Evenson said that to render […]
As we wind down “Season One” of the conversation we take a look back and discuss what might have been overlooked. When I first started this column my hope was that filmmakers and tastemakers would use this forum as a way to debate, raise questions, and challenge one another. For the most part I’ve been happy with the subjects raised by this column and the subsequent conversation that has started in the comments section of some of the posts. However, as we push forward in the new year I would like if we didn’t just talk at you, but with […]
Second #2209, 36:49 The seconds tick down. Dorothy crawls, in anguish across the floor, coming dangerously close to the closet that hides Jeffrey. She is abject, and also strangely free, the sort of freedom that comes from knowing that the worst is yet to happen, yet again. The sharp expectation of pain that gives life meaning, but that can also carve out what was best in you and wound and warp it forever. It is like a scene from a silent movie, as Dorothy’s body conveys a meaning beyond words. Isabella Rossellini is the star of a hidden drama within […]
After the Thanksgiving recess, Congress is expected to vote on two bills that will influence the future of online Intellectual Property (IP). The Senate bill (S. 968) is dubbed the “PROTECT IP Act” (PIPA) which stands for the “Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act”; it was adopted by the Judiciary Committee in May. The House bill (H.R.3261) is the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and is currently being deliberated. The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), the music industry and a handful of digital rights holders, including games companies Sony and Nintendo, are […]
Second #2162, 36:02 “Frank? Frank! What’s the matter with him?” Dorothy pleads on the phone about her kidnapped husband and son, Don and “little Donny.” There are facts, and there are facts of the frame: 1. This shot of Dorothy completely breaks with Jeffrey’s implied point-of view from the closet. 2. Dorothy is a woman in trouble. 3. This is the first instance of Frank in the film, invisible over the phone line, somewhere else, an implied presence and absence at the same time. 4. Dorothy’s maternal vulnerability, the fact of it, and the way that Jeffrey will sense and […]
Second #2115, 35:15 Jeffrey, startled by Dorothy’s return, hides in the closet. She undresses, and comes toward the closet and, just as Jeffrey is about to be discovered, the phone rings. It has not rung yet at the moment of this frame, which captures Jeffrey’s fantasy-dream at its edges: what are the chances that the woman of his dreams would strip to her underwear and approach him? The angle of vision is not directly from Jeffrey’s point of view, slightly dissociating us from his gaze. But that phone ring, as if dialed in from the stock sounds of classic Hollywood […]
Second #2068, 34:28 “I hope you’re careful, Jeffrey,” Sandy whispers to herself, gazing up at Dorothy’s apartment, where Jeffrey has just not-heard her car horn warning because—and there is a strange, haunted reference to Psycho somewhere in this scene—he is in Dorothy’s bathroom and has just flushed the toilet. Laura Dern’s face is made-up in a way that hearkens back to her role in 1982’s Ladies and Gentlemen the Fabulous Stains, a film which teetered so delicately between the sweet danger of punk and the even sweeter danger of new wave pop that it practically imploded. Lines upon lines could […]
Second #2021, 33:41 The tension in this sequence—as Jeffrey sneaks around alone in Dorothy’s apartment while half-listening for Sandy’s warning car horn—is sustained by carefully modulated shifts in what we as the audience know in comparison to what Jeffrey knows. While our knowledge of what is happening sometimes equals Jeffrey’s (those moments when we know nothing more or less than he does), at other times we are suddenly thrust ahead of his limited omniscience. In the previous scene, as Jeffrey explores the darkness of Dorothy’s apartment, we know what he knows, and nothing more. But once the film cuts to […]
Earlier this month I had the opportunity to take a master class with Ted Hope and Christine Vachon. Now out of respect to them I will not reveal all that was discussed, but what I can tell you is that my perspective of things has been altered quite a bit. I first started this blog with the intention of showcasing microbudget work as the passionate filmmaking it is…and fuck the rules. (The whole series of manifestos is evidence of that.) We were making cinema fast and cheap, and we needed to completely re-write the rules; a message that can be […]
Loaded with recognizable tropes just begging to be tampered with, genre film is fertile spoof material, as can be evidence by obvious examples like the pointless Scary Movie franchise, or even within the same film as in those slasher film that knowingly straddle the line between terror and comedy, or B-Movies so tongue-in-cheek campy they function both as a good-humored critique of the genres the are playing against as well as a standalone narratives in their own right. Francois Truffaut’s sometimes goofy, sometimes chilling 1969 film The Bride Wore Black is genre lampoonery in the hands of a French auteur, […]