A frame-by-frame analysis of David Lynch's unsettling masterpiece
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| A still from David Lynch's Blue Velvet (1986) |
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| A still from David Lynch's Blue Velvet (1986) |
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| A still from David Lynch's Blue Velvet (1986) |
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| A still from David Lynch's Blue Velvet (1986) |
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| A still from David Lynch's Blue Velvet (1986) |
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| A still from David Lynch's Blue Velvet (1986) |
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| A still from David Lynch's Blue Velvet (1986) |
There's a moment in David Lynch's 1986 film,
Blue Velvet, where its protagonist, Jeffrey Beaumont, divulges: 'I'm in the middle of a mystery and it's all secret'. As the narrative unfolds, Jeffrey's obsession with clues leads him deeper into the dark and troubling heart of America's sunny suburbia.
In some strange way, I wonder whether Nicholas Rombes, author of
The Blue Velvet Project, might have a thing or two in common with Lynch's curious hero. The project is a testament to both obsession and voyeurism, seizing a frame of Lynch's film every 47 seconds for description and analysis. Now completed, its website includes 149 shots from the film, all posted between 8 August 2011 and 10 August 2012. But in the same way that viewers of Lynch's film are implicated in Jeffrey's voyeurism, it's hard not to get sucked into Rombes' online archive of comments and associations.
What is most interesting to me about
The Blue Velvet Project is the sheer volume of references that have been pulled or inferred from virtually every shot.
Blue Velvet is, famously, a film that peels away the layers of suburban life, and Rombes manages to find evidence of this almost everywhere he looks. Whether he's examining the film in the context of 1980s politics, American cinema, or critical and theoretical responses to Lynch's work, his observations are often sharp and insightful.
The real achievement of the project is to bring out many of the subtleties of Lynch's masterpiece, whilst retaining our sense of its mysterious and secretive nature. It's a strange world. [
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