David Lynch
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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 […]
by Nicholas Rombes on Aug 19, 2011 -
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 […]
by Nicholas Rombes on Aug 17, 2011 -
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, […]
by Nicholas Rombes on Aug 15, 2011 -
GREGG ARAKI, “KABOOM”
One of the key figures in the New Queer Cinema and ever youthful at 51 years of age, Gregg Araki is a director who is increasingly hard to pigeonhole. After the critical success of 2004’s Mysterious Skin, the film which confirmed that Joseph Gordon-Levitt was a movie-star and that Mr. Araki could direct delicate drama as well as exploitation and cult cinema, it seemed that the director of such indie LGBT classics as The Living End (1992) and The Doom Generation (1995) was moving on to a new, more conventionally respectable, middle-aged portion of his career. Now Mr. Araki is […]
by Brandon Harris on Jan 28, 2011 -
The Microbudget Conversation: Blake Eckard Has Questions Without Answers
This week we hear from the Micro-Budget Filmmaker Blake Eckard. After I had put my first feature up on the web for free downloading, Blake contacted me and we began a three-year conversation on the highs and lows of micro-budget filmmaking. I think Blake’s take on the subject is one of importance and it needs to be shared. “Orson Welles, by his own admission, didn’t believe in artists so much as “works.” He also hated (or liked people to believe he hated) talking about himself and his films. Although it may be fashionable to say it, I don’t think there’s […]
by John Yost on Jan 11, 2011 -
The Perfect Swan
(Editor’s Note: This essay contains spoilers.) In literature or in oratory, where rhetoric arose from, it’s somewhat difficult to separate the argument’s mode of persuasion from its substance. In order to make an entirely skilled rhetorical point, the writer or speaker will have to present a series of assumptions and assertions, facts and hypotheses, in such a way that makes the argument’s substance apparent. That’s why literature lends itself to the intellectual: it’s founded upon a progression of ideas. Cinema is often referred to as a different kind of linguistic medium (the “language of film”), but a linguistic one nevertheless, […]
by Zachary Wigon on Dec 10, 2010 -
Angela Ismailos, Great Directors
A curious celebration of cinema and the mix of craft, history and ideology that goes into its making, Angela Ismailos’ Great Directors provides a chance to travel into the minds of ten of the world’s most celebrated film directors. In conversations with Bernardo Bertolucci, David Lynch, Stephen Frears, Agnes Varda, Ken Loach, Liliana Cavani, Todd Haynes, Catherine Breillat, Richard Linklater and John Sayles, Ismailos probes these directors for the secrets of their success while recounting much of the history of post-War world cinema via archival footage, occasionally ponderous black-and-white B-roll of the filmmakers, and mostly insightful voice over commentary. Detailed and […]
by Brandon Harris on Jun 30, 2010 -
Nacho Vigalondo, Timecrimes
THE “PINK MUMMY” IN DIRECTOR NACHO VIGALONDO’S TIMECRIMES. COURTESY MAGNOLIA PICTURES. Nacho Vigalondo is part of an exciting new generation of Spanish filmmakers who are reinvigorating genre filmmaking with their creativity and invention. Born and raised in the insular town of Cabezón de la Sal, he grew up on 80s studio movies before discovering the work of cult directors like David Lynch and Peter Jackson, whose idiosyncratic visions inspired the teenage Vigalondo to eventually become a director himself. He studied Visual Communication at the University of the Basque Country, where he began making a series of playful and distinctive shorts […]
by Nick Dawson on Dec 12, 2008 -
“LYNCH”
The director known as blackANDwhite gives a rare and revealing glimpse into the mind and working habits of David Lynch. Sometimes funny, sometimes bizarre but always entertaining, the film is as experimental and abstract as the filmmaker it covers. For those who are disappointed never to really get a sense of how Lynch works from the limited extras in his DVD releases, Lynch goes beyond the trademark chain smoking and weird hairdo to show an outgoing, pleasant human being with an insatiable creative drive and a love for Bastille Day. (It will make sense when you see it.) Shot in […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Sep 9, 2008 -
Michael Haneke, Funny Games U.S.
NAOMI WATTS AND TIM ROTH WITH UNWELCOME VISITORS MICHAEL PITT AND BRADY CORBETT IN DIRECTOR MICHAEL HANEKE’S FUNNY GAMES U.S. COURTESY WARNER INDEPENDENT PICTURES. Michael Haneke is a director who makes films strictly on his terms, and — as his new movie demonstrates — writes his own rules if he doesn’t like the existing ones. The son of an actor-director father and an actress mother, Haneke was born in Munich, Germany, and grew up just outside the Austrian capital, Vienna. He attended the University of Vienna, where he studied philosophy, psychology and theater. Over the course of the 70s and […]
by Nick Dawson on Mar 14, 2008
